Measuring what matters
for local economies

What is the Business Friendly Index?

The Business Friendly Index (BFI) is a structured survey platform that gives a community's business owners and operators a credible, scored voice on how welcoming — or how challenging — their local environment actually is.

Communities that participate survey their business community across 30 dimensions spanning government support, existing business support, and growth support. The results come back as a scored, certifiable report complete with an IPA quadrant chart, category scorecards, verbatim comments, and a prioritized action plan.

Unlike opinion polls or informal feedback, the BFI produces a single comparable score that local officials can track year over year, benchmark against similar communities, and present with confidence to boards, councils, and economic development committees.

The problem we solve

Most communities believe they are business friendly. Survey data consistently tells a different story — businesses regularly rate their local governments far lower than officials expect. Communities have scored in the 40s out of 100 while leadership maintained they were welcoming and responsive.

The gap exists not because officials don't care, but because there is no structured channel for businesses to communicate systematically. Individual complaints are easy to attribute to a single difficult operator. A scored, anonymized survey of dozens or hundreds of businesses is not.

The BFI creates that channel. The survey opens the door. Annual subscription cycles keep it open — and the data compounds in value each year as trends become visible.

The methodology: Importance-Performance Analysis

The BFI is built on Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA), an established research framework first published in the Journal of Marketing in 1977 and widely used in public administration and economic development research since.

Respondents rate each of 30 survey items on two dimensions:

• Importance — how much does this factor matter to your business?
• Performance — how well does your community deliver on this?

The gap between importance and performance determines where a community's energy is best spent. The results are plotted on a four-quadrant chart:

Why AI is central to the Board and Business Reviews

The Survey Report above is driven by structured human input. Our Board Review, Planning Commission, and Business Win/Loss reports work differently — they're built from the actual public record: years of meeting agendas and minutes, often scattered across a dozen different government portals, with no search index and no summary anyone can trust.

Reading that entire record by hand, consistently, without skimming or getting tired thirty pages in, was never realistic for a hired researcher on a deadline — which is exactly why so much of this evidence goes unread in practice, and why community assessments of a Board or Commission tend to rest on impressions rather than the documented record.

Our AI analysis engine exists to solve that specific problem. It is not a feature added to a survey product — it is the core capability that makes it possible to actually read the whole stack, every time, and turn it into a scored, sourced evaluation instead of a guess. Two rules govern how it works:

• Only what's documented. Scores are built strictly from votes, motions, and statements that are actually in the public record — never speculation, inference, or hearsay. Every source document is listed alongside the report, so any finding can be checked against the original page.
• A true picture, not a verdict. The goal is never to build a case for or against anyone — it's an accurate mirror, good news included. That is what makes the result something business and government can sit down with and discuss, rather than argue over.

That distinction matters because these reports are meant to start a conversation between a business community and its local government, not end one. A biased or cherry-picked analysis would poison that conversation before it began; a fair, source-backed one is what makes ongoing dialogue between community, business, and government possible in the first place.

Certification and public recognition

Communities that meet the BFI performance thresholds earn certification published publicly on BusinessFriendly.net — a searchable, mapbased directory of certified communities across the country.

• Gold Certified — BFI Score of 4.0 or higher (out of 5.0)
• Silver Certified — BFI Score of 3.0–3.99
• Recognized — BFI Score of 2.0–2.99

Certification is renewed annually for active subscribers, keeping the recognition current and giving the business community confidence that results aren't stale.

Who runs the Business Friendly Index?

Business Friendly, Inc. is a Michigan-based company dedicated to improving the relationship between local government and the business community. The BFI platform is operated and continuously developed by our team, with survey methodology grounded in peer-reviewed IPA research and refined through years of real-world community deployments.

The platform is administered by community leaders — chamber executives, economic development officers, city managers, and elected officials — who purchase survey engagements for their communities and use the results to drive meaningful improvements.

Contact

Questions about the platform, methodology, or a specific community's results? We're glad to help.

info@businessfriendly.net