Newly formed companies in Tarrant County created 25,137 jobs in 2018, and more than 25,000 every year from 2013 to 2018, or a total 155,307, according to research funded by The University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth.
The findings on jobs created by firms up to one year old, released Tuesday and timed with this week's Global Entrepreneurship Week Fort Worth, indicate “startup businesses have a substantial impact on job creation in Tarrant County and could be key to the recovery from the economic fallout of COVID-19,” the Health Science Center said.
Surprising were the numbers of jobs created relative to other cities in Texas, Cameron Cushman, associate vice president for innovation ecosystems at HSC, said in an interview.
“We just don’t think of startups creating this many jobs in Fort Worth,” Cushman, hired three years ago by Dr. Michael Williams, HSC’s president, to help build Fort Worth’s entrepreneurial community, said.
Tarrant County ranked third in Texas for job creation by new firms, behind Harris and Dallas counties, and ahead of Travis and Bexar counties in the research report, called the Fall 2020 Jobs Report. New firms created 63,588 jobs in Houston’s Harris County and 43,108 in Dallas County, according to the research and analysis, performed by the Kansas City, Mo. firm SourceLink for the Tarrant County Spark-yard initiative, a collaboration of the Health Science Center, TCU’s Neeley School of Business, and City of Fort Worth.
Average wage for jobs created by new firms in Tarrant County was $34,224, compared to $55,275 for all firms. It was lowest among the four largest North Texas counties, behind Dallas, Collin and Denton counties. It was fourth in among the state’s five largest counties, behind Travis, Dallas, and Harris counties, and ahead of Bexar County.
Accomodation and food service (6,654) and healthcare and social assistance (3,518) created the most number of jobs among industry segments.
Most employees – 6,214 – in the new Tarrant County jobs were ages 25-24, the SourceLink research indicated. Sixty three % of the employees had at least an associates degree.
Separate data indicates Tarrant County, despite the job creation, lags in new company formation in the state, Cushman said. “We’re just not starting enough companies,” he said.
The datasets SourceLink was able to examine were limited in scope. Missing is a sense of how many new firms are creating the jobs, Cushman said. “That’s really the next piece.” Net jobs created also is missing. “We need better data, and I think we can get to some of that.”
The report highlighted two Tarrant County entrepreneurs: MELT Ice Creams CEO Kari Crowe Seher and NewCraft software entrepreneur Cameron Sadler.
SourceLink, which used U.S. Census tools to extract the data from federal quarterly workforce indicators, earlier did a more robust report for the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, which has backed a broad mapping of entrepreneurial resources available in that region that’s used as a model by other cities. The SourceLink research in Kansas City showed 16,000 new jobs created annually in that region. “That just kind of blew everybody’s minds,” said Cushman, who reached out to SourceLink and brought it on board for the months-long Tarrant County research project. Sparkyard paid SourceLink less than $20,000 for the research, Cushman said.
Williams said the Tarrant County research justifies a greater emphasis on entrepreneurship.
“As our economy recovers from the effects of this pandemic, this research shows that additional resources should be provided to encourage more job creation in this important, but underappreciated segment of our local economy,” Williams said in a release.
Williams is heading a sub taskforce under Mayor Betsy Price’s Fort Worth Now initiative, launched this spring to help Fort Worth businesses recover from COVID and identify new opportunities for the city. The sub taskforce is expected in the coming weeks to make recommendations, Cushman said. “It’s going to fill some of those gaps.”
For one, he hopes Williams’ group will recommend bringing an entrepreneurial accelerator to Fort Worth, Cushman said. Accelerators like the Capital Factory provide direct investment on strict timeframes.
Fort Worth has only one venture capital firm – Bios Partners – listed by the PitchBook data source, Cushman said. The Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce and City of Fort Worth, in their economic development plans, have identified Fort Worth’s wealthy family offices as a source of potential venture capital for the city’s entrepreneurs. Gozova, a growing Fort Worth-developed truck-on-demand app, secured VC funding earlier this year from Fort Worth investors Sasha and Ed Bass and Bobby Patton. But except for energy and real estate, venture capital in Fort Worth is hard to find.
“We are really good at investing in oil drilling in West Texas and investing in real estate, but we are not really good at investing in startup,” Cushman said.
The Cowtown Angels angel investing group scored its first exit in late 2016, the sale of Encore Vision, a company nurtured in the offices of the TechFW incubator and sold for up to $465 million to Novartis by founder Bill Burns. “They’ve done a bunch of deals this year,” Cushman said. “If you didn’t have the Cowtown Angels, that early stage data would be really, really scary.”
But Fort Worth has a small number of incubators, Cushman noted. In TechFW’s case, Fort Worth hasn’t expanded it as the city grew rapidly to become the nation’s 13th largest. “Resources didn’t expand to keep up with that growth,” he said.