Whenever a business opens or closes its doors, typically one of the biggest noted factors of success, or failure for that matter, is usually three key words: Location, Location, Location.

It is a pretty safe bet to say that opening up a brick and mortar store in a city center has a higher likelihood of attaining foot traffic and visibility than one opened on the outskirts of town.  With that in mind, would you believe that certain cities across the country are also better suited to launching a new business? You should.Forbes recently released a list of the top 50 best places to launch a new business. The top 10 was led by two cities that wouldn’t immediately jump out as high-growth business areas: Oklahoma City and Pittsburgh. Rounding out the list (in order of numerical rank) were Raleigh, Houston, Hartford, the District of Columbia, Charlotte, Austin, New York City and Baltimore. Click here to see the entire list and statistical data.

While the list itself is interesting to the small business community, Forbes also interviewed small business owners in these locales to see why they moved into the area to offer additional insight into the markets.

Craig Shimasaki, who launched InterGenetics, offers some great insight as to why Oklahoma City took the top slot on this list, and proved that sometimes you can’t always judge a book by its cover.

Before I moved to Oklahoma City from San Francisco 20 years ago, I had the cowboys-and-Indians stereotype in the back of my mind. Then when I got here, I was very pleasantly surprised. And I realized that they had the same impressions of someone from San Francisco: They thought I had a surfboard in my garage.

The biggest, most impactful realization was the spirit of the people in Oklahoma City. Once you provide them with a vision and some opportunities, you find that people get behind it.

His story also goes into some of the struggles that the company faced prior to becoming InterGenetics as well as how Oklahoma City’s helped the company afloat with its abundance of resources.

Has your location helped launch a successful business? Did your city make the list?