The Rural Center has developed a profile of entrepreneurship and business activity for each of North Carolina's 100 counties. We are grateful to all the agencies that have provided us with data and would like to express our special appreciation to the Employment Security Commission, the Department of Revenue and the Secretary of State's office who have made unpublished data available for the first time.

In using the profiles, we ask that you understand that measuring the economic impact of businesses is a challenging task. No single source of data and no single indicator exists that adequately describes rural businesses and what they contribute to the financial well-being of their communities or to the state and nation as a whole. For that reason, we have secured data from a variety of sources and offer it to you as a snapshot of business activity in your home county.