Provo is lauded for business 'incubator'

PROVO — The missionary program of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is among the reasons BusinessWeek magazine is featuring Provo this week in a special online report on five cities that, for myriad reasons, seem to nurture upstart businesses.

In an article titled "Mormons, Mountains, Startups" on www.businessweek.com, Provo is offered as an example of a city with its own business incubator — Brigham Young University — which acts as both a selling point for businesses moving to the area and a nursery for new companies that "start within the university's gates."

Those companies include WordPerfect, which was launched as a BYU student/professor collaboration in the 1970s, and 1-800-CONTACTS, winner of BYU's student business plan competition in 1995.

The two-year proselyting missions many BYU students serve for the LDS Church give the young men and women a hard-won confidence that helps them in the business world, Don Livingstone, director of BYU's Marriott School of Management's Center for Entrepreneurship, told the magazine.

"Because students have gone on (LDS) missions, they're not afraid to go out on their own," Livingstone said.

One student, Brian Beutler, came up with an idea for a business while serving a mission in Chile. He noticed the limited telecommunication systems in some Latin American areas and, upon his return to the United States, launched Alianza, a company that provides Internet phone service (Voice of Internet Protocol or VoIP) to Mexican companies that pay 5 cents a minute to call the United States instead of the 30 cents to 50 cents charged by Mexican phone companies.

Beutler won this year's BYU business-plan competition in the spring and recently announced he had raised $2 million in financing from investors.

Last year's BYU business-plan winner, Property Solutions — which created computer software for management of apartment complexes — also won Fortune Small Business Magazine's "MBA Showdown," worth $50,000, and finished second in the National Institute for Entrepreneurship's Venture Bowl, pocketing $250,000.

Property Solutions founder, David Bateman, cited several other reasons for Provo's frequent inclusion in rankings like BusinessWeek's.

"I know a company in Southern California that has to pay $100,000 for a programmer you can hire here for $60,000," he said. "There is some cost-savings to starting a business in this area, and there is a lot of talent in this area."

Bateman said he also has benefited from the mentoring of BYU faculty, the camaraderie of fellow entrepreneurs at other local technology startups, relatively excellent transportation systems and a glut of commercial office space.