Giving City Leaders an Edge: The impact of local data

The health of a city is indistinguishable from the health of its small businesses. As business needs grow evermore complex, city leaders diligently work to ensure their small businesses - whether high-growth start ups or legacy businesses with generations of leaders - have what they need to thrive. 

That work becomes most important exactly when resources are most limited. Budget tension, economic uncertainty and an ever-changing policy playbook leave city workers looking for a leg up. 

How do you help those businesses thrive if you don’t know who or where they are? In many American cities, our understanding of our businesses is like a map with missing streets. For years in Birmingham, Alabama, there was unclear data about the number of Black-owned businesses. When leaders wanted to understand how their work was impacting growth, the data just wasn’t there.

Data isn’t just a collection of spreadsheets; it is a map for policy. When that map is incomplete, millions in potential investment, program development, and infrastructure support miss the very businesses that serve as the community’s heartbeat.

Where is the Data?

The tools we’ve relied on in the past to understand our economies are dulling. Over the last decade, federal business survey sample sizes have plummeted by 57% (Dovali & Nevins, 2023). The steepest declines have occurred among small, minority-owned firms.

This isn’t just a technical glitch; it’s a trust gap. Traditional data collection often relies on institutions that haven’t always served these communities equitably. Consequently, many of a city’s most resilient entrepreneurs—home-based, informal, or micro-businesses—operate in an “invisible” economy. They are missing from licensing systems and, therefore, missing from the conversation.

Lessons from the Birmingham Black Business Census

At Quire Consulting, we set out to prove that high-distrust environments aren’t a dead end—they are a call for a different methodology. The Birmingham Black Business Census was an effort to replace “top-down” surveying with a community-based research model. We hired a team of local community ambassadors who already had rapport in their districts - think neighborhood association leaders, experienced census collectors, trusted business owners and partners. These community ambassadors visited businesses in person every week during the collection period to connect with owners and complete the survey questions with them.

By treating entrepreneurs as partners rather than subjects, we secured over 1,200 responses from business owners—the largest effort of its kind in the region. The data did more than add missing streets to our map; it added vivid detail to the landscape through specific insights: 

• The Gender Hiring Gap: Identifying discrepancies in how male vs. female-owned businesses grow and scale.

• Capital Deserts: Pinpointing specific neighborhoods where traditional lending was low or non-existent.

• The Resource Mismatch: Highlighting where existing programs were failing to meet the actual needs of real business owners.

Building Your Municipal Data Strategy

For city leaders, the lesson is clear: if you want to drive high-impact investment in your business ecosystem, you need a more detail rich map. Whether your focus is a single district or the city at large, a human-centered local data project will give you the edge you need.

Dovali, M., & Nevins, A. B. (2023, April). Flying Blind on Small Business. Nowak Lab Publications, Drexel University. Retrieved from https://drexel.edu/nowak-lab/publications/newsletters/2023/flying-blind-on-small-business/