Starting A Programming Business

As I wrap up my last semester at USF I've always considered starting my own business. I decided to look at data from new business tax report data from Hillsborough County Tax collector to determine if I should start a new Programming business in the Tampa Bay Area. I started out by viewing the reports from the tax colellctors office. From there I pulled reports for 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2020. I copied all the data into one Excel file to load into R studio and Tableau.

I planned on using R Studio as it was what I had mostly used through out my time at USF, but Tableau visuals look just a little bit better with little manipulation. I did use R to determine how many obeservations i had retrived and the amount of column and their data types.

My approach

I will use this data to make different visuals to help determine if the data i collected could aid in helping decide if i want to create a business related to programming in the tampa bay area, using techniquse learned in my Visual Analytics class such as Time series.

From there i loaded up the data into Tableau and confirmed I had columns in the proper data types to make the visuals I needed to support my research. I started by creating a visual that showed me all businesses in the area that had Programing in the cateogry name.

Oddly enough one of those busineses happened to have to pay a hazard tax which you can see because the area in which that business is located shows in blue. This gave me an idea of where these busineses were dispersed around the Tampa Bay Area. Essentially every town in the county had a business that was Programming related. I had found 9 different programming related category names so I visuallized them using Packed Bubble visual.

This visual allowed me to visually see the different category names and how many businesses were registered with that category. I filtered the data by business start date which was different than the business created date which would fall under the 4 years I had pulled reports from. I assume that the difference in dates was when someone may have started operating and conducting business and then when they started paying taxes for the business that they were conducting. Such as me doing all the things to build and put my business together and not actually earning enough from the business to pay taxes on it. I could only assume that would be the situation for some of these businesses. Since some of these start times go back past 1990 I filtered out years that had less than 100 start dates in total regardless of cateogry. That brought our data from 2013-2023 with 2013 having the highest number of new businesses started with programing in the category name.

In this visual you can see the number of new businesses created by year and the number of categories related to programming. It is interesting to see how many businesses that were started in 2013 which is more than tripple any of the following years. Also interesting that the year with the most new programming businesses was 2020, the year that covid happened. From then there has been a steady decline of new programming busineses. Is this due to AI or just more services offering website design like Square Space, Shopify or Wix becoming more popular.

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I created this pie graph to help visualize the most popular cateogry names containing programming. As well as this TreeMap to help show the amount of businesses created by year with Computer Programming/Data Processing/Web Design. I believe that cateogry would best summarize the services I would offer.

Conclusion

Based on the data I have collected I would say that it is a bit inconclusive to as to if I should start my own programming business. While the data does show the new busineses created in recent years it doesn't tell me if any of those busineses have closed. It does show that there are not many businesses being created currently while the demand for those services could possibly be higher than in previous years. Unfortunately that category is so broad it is hard to determine what exactly do these busineses specialize and what I should specialize in. The fortunate thing about programming and other IT related busineses is that I can have clients in other cities, states or even countries. In conclusion, if you want to work for yourself and have an idea of what services you can provide, you should persue it regardless of what the data says. Especially if you are passonate about it and enjoy the work you will be performing.