Decision makers often evaluate whether a state or community is a good place to do business based on factors such as taxes, workforce, school systems and the cost of living. As someone new to the area, I’ve experienced one more variable that is unique to Greater Des Moines — access to leaders.

My insight comes from living and working in other places and listening to how our clients make decisions. Working for the Ryan Cos. has provided the opportunity to travel throughout the nation and live in Minneapolis, Phoenix and Chicago. Day in and day out, I hear our clients evaluating the business climate of an area. As you would expect, that evaluation is incredibly important to deciding where to build corporate headquarters, where to expand and where to invest in development for the future.

Until I moved to Des Moines eight months ago, I thought the checklist was complete. Yes, there are a few other important variables, such as the ease or difficulty of working with a city’s planning and zoning board and the ability or willingness of a state or community to provide incentives, but even those factors don’t capture what is unique and valuable about my experience here.

What makes the Des Moines business community special is time. Not as a resource. Not as an asset. Time as in responsiveness and access given by leaders and decision makers in this community. Those of you who are in sales or business development know what I am talking about. It’s one thing to call a leader of a company; it’s quite another to connect and have a conversation – to have access. The access in Central Iowa is amazing and inspiring, and I wonder if those who live and work here know how valuable and rare this is.

The chairman, president and CEO of a company that serves more than 13 million customers worldwide, the president and CEO of the largest privately held bank in Iowa and the founder and chairman of the board of a very successful transportation and warehousing company are on a long list of people in this community who are the most responsive business people I have ever met.

Not only did J. Barry Griswell of Principal Financial Group Inc. take my call; he met with me in person for 45 minutes. Mike Earley of Bankers Trust Co. returned my call within minutes, answered my question and offered to help in any other way he could. Dick Jacobson of Jacobson Cos. said he could spend 15 minutes and proceeded to be gracious with over an hour of his time. And the only person who wasn’t as responsive as all the others apologized when I saw him at an event. That doesn’t happen in other business communities — at least not the three major cities I’ve worked in over the past 15 years.

Doing business starts with building relationships. Greater Des Moines has a terrific advantage by virtue of how we treat others in this relationship-building process. In the world of marketing, it is called a “unique selling proposition.” Let’s find a way to add it to the list of ways companies evaluate a community’s business climate. All things being equal, I’m confident we’ll win on this point every time.

Doug Dieck is vice president of development for the Ryan Cos., a real estate development and construction company that is a single-source provider for design-build, development and property management projects all over the country.