Big business gets most of the attention, but out of 32.6 million U.S. businesses fewer than 21,000 employ more than 500 people, according to census data. Developments in Toledo and Perrysburg are notable for their concentration on the vast majority of small businesses that fall below that number of employees.

It’s easy to ignore small businesses. They aren’t traveling the country looking for sites for a billion-dollar development. They don’t have an army of consultants negotiating development incentives or lobbyists seeking special treatment in the law or bid specifications tailored to the product they want to sell the government.

But the sheer mass of small businesses makes it wise for local government to worry most about their competitive prospects and structure development programs to

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