Life 2.0: Have you found the ‘where’ of your happiness?
By Bill Settlemyer
Executive Publisher
Have you found the “where” of your happiness? Of course you have, because you’re living right here in the Lowcountry. Never mind that a new book about finding that special place takes some pot shots at Charleston.
The book is Life 2.0 by Forbes magazine publisher Rich Karlgaard, who was in Charleston earlier this month as keynote speaker for the Charleston Regional Development Alliance annual luncheon.
Even though I didn’t like reading the unfavorable comments about our region, I really liked Karlgaard’s book. It’s a readable mix of personal experiences, persuasive anecdotes and solid advice on regional economic development.
Karlgaard, who lives in California, became a licensed pilot a few years ago and started hop-scotching across the country in search of people who had bailed out of the urban rat race to find smaller and cheaper places to live, work and raise a family. He tells their stories through an appealing narrative and well-chosen quotes.
Charleston got a dishonorable mention in the story of “Rick,” who founded a company to incubate medical device start-up companies and sell them to larger companies. Rick moved from New Jersey to Wilmington, N.C. to pursue his dream of achieving the right balance between work and life (he also summers with his family in Lake Placid, N.Y.).
The book says Rick looked at Charleston, “but concluded it was too ‘Old South,’ too ‘Old Money.’ The [Wilmington real estate] agent told Rick, ‘If you like Charleston without the pretense, you’ll like Wilmington.’”
Ouch! I had the chance to meet with Karlgaard before the alliance luncheon and he assured me there was no intent to slight Charleston. From what he said, it’s possible that Rick’s choice was largely based on the advice of that enterprising real estate agent rather than an in-depth comparison of the two areas.
In any event, I’ve been to Wilmington and have absolutely nothing bad to say about the town—nice people, nice place. On the other hand, for a guy like Rick in the medical device business, you might think that having the Medical University of South Carolina and its extensive medical research programs nearby wouldn’t have done any harm.
As for the “Old South, Old Money” comment, I’m not sure we’re any more “Old South” than Wilmington, and the “Old Money” is rapidly being eclipsed by “New Money” from places like…brace yourself, Rick…New Jersey! Not to mention California, New York, Connecticut, Atlanta, Chicago, Boston and a lot of other places where housing prices, traffic congestion and the cost of keeping up with the Joneses far outstrip the same metrics in our region.
Life 2.0 lists 150 cities to look at for people whose professional or entrepreneurial talents are portable enough to be moved from a major urban center to a smaller region like ours.
Charleston didn’t make the 150-city cut. Karlgaard is thinking about a follow-up compendium to place a continuing focus on best places to move. He was surprised when I told him that our region’s population is over 570,000. It would probably be a good idea to let him know more about local companies like Blackbaud, a software provider on Daniel Island with over 700 employees, or Automated Trading Desk, a company that trades about 5% of NASDAQ’s total volume out of Mount Pleasant. Not bad for the Old South!
Putting my civic booster hat aside for a moment, I should also mention Karlgaard’s views on the key attributes of the smaller cities that are suitable destinations for smart, entrepreneurial people who want to escape the costs and hassles of big city life and still make a good living:
– Stellar K-12 education
– Capital for experimentation (R&D)
– Capital for business risk (venture capital, angel investors)
– Celebration of human diversity
– Lower taxes and less regulation
– The “right” kind of civic leadership
– The ability to pass the Entrepreneurial Cocktail Party Test (if you throw a party to announce you’re quitting your job to start a company, will people burst into applause or check their watches and head for the exits?)
Sure, we have shortcomings in all these areas, but we’re working on them and we’re actually making some progress. And as Karlgaard pointed out in our interview, not every city that succeeds in attracting wealth-building people from the big city will be strong in all these dimensions.
For Karlgaard, a region with the right kind of civic leaders avoids chasing “moon shot successes,” not making the mistake of throwing money and resources at efforts to become the next Silicon Valley or biotech haven.
“What cities can do,” says Karlgaard, “is create the conditions for success. I always advise cities to forget million-dollar bets on a single industry and instead make a thousand $1,000 bets on bright entrepreneurs who need cheap rent. Why not Wi-Fi up downtown so that entrepreneurs can sit in coffee shops and surf the Net? Why not lighten the regulatory load for start-ups? Why not run business plan contests, open to everybody in town, regardless of age or pedigree, with $5,000 prizes?”
Karlgaard’s views are a corollary to what I’ve been telling local business leaders for a few years now: In terms of regional economic development marketing, we’ll do better if we spend less time “buffalo hunting” in the national and international site selection markets and spend much more time marketing to entrepreneurs in and around bigger cities.
In other words, we should be courting entrepreneurs who could bring their start-up ventures to our region and grow them into successful companies. It’s like the concept of a mutual fund—placing a lot of small bets on a lot of potential successes instead of putting all the effort into landing a few larger businesses being courted by many other regions along with ours.
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