Who could have known that Rhode Island executives, as staff writer Bill Hamilton says, were a “glass-is-half-full bunch after all?”
The evidence is striking, coming in our third PBN Business Survey, conducted this summer, in which we asked the state’s private, for-profit enterprises about the health of their business as well as their take on where the state was headed.
What stands out to me is that nearly 48 percent of the respondents said that they expect the Rhode Island economy to improve in 2010 (that figure represents a combination of the “improve significantly” and “improve slightly” responses). That number compares with 18 percent in December, when executives were asked about the economy’s course in 2009. At the same time, the number of respondents who said that the economy would worsen (slightly and significantly, combined) went from 63 percent in December to 30 percent this summer.
For those of us who cover the business community, that sense of optimism is not really surprising. As the president of Taylor Box, Daniel Shedd, told PBN, “There’s no room in small business for pessimism. You need to lead with a positive attitude and get people to believe in the future.”
Still, business owners can’t just stick their heads in the clouds and expect everything to work out, so a positive attitude must be tempered by a hard dose of reality. For that, you can turn to the centerpieces of this section, the Top Lists of the Top Private Companies and the Fastest-Growing Private Companies. Looking at those lists should give you a sense that Rhode Island is full of dynamic and successful entrepreneurs, a place that despite all the challenges we know quite well (also reported in the PBN Business Survey), is a good place to start and grow a business. •
