by E. Zachary Knight on March 31, 2009 (photo by riptheskull, available under a CC license)

Best Cities, Business, Careers, Forbes, Lawton, Oklahoma, Oklahoma City, Tulsa

When you think of Oklahoma, you may not think of it as anything spectacular when it comes to business. I know I didn’t. But I was proved wrong yesterday when Forbes released their Best Places for Business and Careers.

To start off at the best, Oklahoma City was ranked #12 in the top large cities. As part of the listing we have two billionaires that call Oklahoma City home, David Green of Hobby Lobby fame and Harold Hamm of Continental Resources. Oklahoma City is also home to Devon Energy and OGE Energy as well as the Forbes Best Small Business of LSB Industries. Statistic wise Oklahoma City ranked high on the list for Income Growth and Cost of Doing Business. Oklahoma City also earned respectable rankings in Projected Job Growth and Cost of Living.

Trailing behind Oklahoma City but not out of the top 50 is Tulsa ranking at #47. Tulsa is also home to two billionaires of its own, George Kaiser of Kaiser-Francis Oil and part owner of Bank of Oklahoma and Lynn Schusterman owner of both Samson Resources and Samson Investments. Along with these two billionaires Tulsa is home to several of Forbes Best Big Businesses, such as BOK Financial and Oneok,  and one best small business, Aaon. As for Tulsa’s statistics, it did quite well in Projected Job Growth and Income growth and gained a respectable ranking in Cost of Living.

Oklahoma didn’t just stop there. We also had one city make it on the list of Best Small Places for Business and Careers. Lawton ranked a humble #102 on that list. While Lawton is not home to any known Billionaires or best large or small businesses it did make quite a bit of headway in the statistics. This city earned high rankings in both cost of living and income growth. Also setting them apart was their relatively low unemployment rate.

While these positions are nothing spectacular, it does show that Oklahoma is perched to grow substantially in the coming years. With rankings like these, Oklahoma doesn’t have to work too hard to make itself attractive to new businesses or existing businesses looking to relocate. One would hope that our Legislatures will look at this and work to improve the rankings of all three of these cities as well as the many others that did not make the list.

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