Businesses both small and large are fleeing California in search of friendlier pastures.

From 2018 through 2021, 352 companies relocated their headquarters from California to other states. The rate of exit more than doubled from 2020 to 2021 and was highest in Los Angeles County, an analysis by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University found.

The wave of departures has continued in 2024: Last month Elon Musk announced he will move SpaceX from Hawthorne to Texas, and this month Chevron announced plans to move its headquarters to the Lone Star State as well.

It’s part of a larger pattern. Headquarters and manufacturing plants are closing down and relocating operations to cities in Texas, Nevada and Florida. The Farmer John Meatpacking plant, a fixture of the Los Angeles meat industry for nearly a century, ceased operations and left the city to continue business elsewhere last year.

While the exodus has been headlined by a few big names, I often hear that medium to small businesses are quitting the city quietly, unburdened by public disclosure requirements and individually too small to register in media reports.

The explanations are varied, but the ultimate reason is clear: Los Angeles is an increasingly difficult place to operate a business. Affordability issues including high taxes and escalating labor, utility and energy costs, in addition to burdensome liability and punitive regulations, top the daily challenges. California perpetually resides at the bottom of state rankings of business favorability.

These factors are compounded by the enticing pull of recruitment efforts by other cities, including the promise of governmental partnership — especially appealing to Golden State businesspeople who complain of treatment as diverse as apathy and outright animosity from local officials.

Tantalized by prospects of greater opportunity, profitability and incentives out of state, the rational business mind makes a compelling case to leave. It practically screams it.

So this may sound crazy: Despite the mounting challenges in Los Angeles, my family-owned business isn’t going anywhere.

We care deeply about cost savings, efficiency and growth opportunities, and we recognize profitability as imperative to survival. But like many other small businesses in Los Angeles, we measure success and derive value beyond just profit and loss.

I am the proud owner of a four-generation beef jerky company that has called Los Angeles home for nearly 100 years. It brings me immeasurable joy to work in the same brick building built by my great-grandfather, greet customers who knew my grandfather, and share an office with my father. You can’t put a price tag on legacy. This legacy of course extends to our employees, many of whom have dedicated more than 25 years to our business, or have gone on to achieve successful careers elsewhere and even start their own businesses.

Rather than chase cheaper labor, our company would rather invest in our employees through health benefits and professional development as well as cultivate a sense of family. Other states have tried to recruit our business to leave California, but among the reasons we have refused is that we don’t want to abandon these connections.

We also value our role as part of L.A.’s communities. This year we launched a program targeting causes that align with our mission — supporting youth, families and active lifestyles — through monetary and product donation, as well as volunteering our time and expertise.

That’s the difference between huge corporations and small businesses. The former each employs thousands of local residents and contributes robust tax revenue to the city at a scale we can’t match. But larger companies — whether publicly traded, backed by private equity or international holding firms, and sometimes led by celebrity billionaires — are moving targets. They will pursue shareholder value at all costs regardless of regional ties or other considerations.

Meanwhile, there are 4.1 million small businesses in California that generate 7.5 million jobs, representing 47% of private-sector jobs. More importantly, two out of three net new jobs come from a small business.

Although corporations are important to L.A.’s financial ecosystem and should continue to be recruited, small businesses should not be discounted. Just because my business and others have chosen to stay here doesn’t mean we should be taken for granted.

In good news, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce reported a 7.8% increase in new business applications in California from 2022 to 2023. Los Angeles County may lead the state in departures, but it also had the most business applications during that year — 160,925. The challenge is getting them to stay.

To that end, we are rallying our peers around a common goal of improving the business landscape. These efforts have coalesced in the Made in LA Coalition working to raise consumer awareness about products manufactured in Los Angeles.

Some of the key initiatives we’d like to see include financial incentives for local manufacturing that encourage job creation and advancement, protections against pernicious lawsuits by bad actors seeking personal gain rather than the public good, and a commitment by the local government officials to use their platform and reach to celebrate the businesses, and people behind the businesses, who are committed to the city.

That kind of investment will help make Los Angeles a place where both business and community can thrive long term.

Brian Bianchetti is the fourth-generation CEO of People’s Choice Beef Jerky.

Northrop Grumman could cut as many as 550 jobs at its Redondo Beach and Manhattan Beach aerospace facilities after laying off several hundred employees earlier this year.

The Falls Church, Va.-based government contractor announced the second round of cuts this week to its space business without specifying what programs are targeted. In February, it told employees that it could eliminate about 1,000 jobs in the two South Bay cities, as well as Azusa.

The company did not cite the reason for the earlier cuts and ended up redeploying more than 600 of the targeted workers to other positions in the company, which has nearly 100,000 employees globally. It said it would attempt to do so again.

“We are providing all potentially impacted employees with advanced notice and have begun the process of working to match them with existing opportunities across the company,” Northrop Grumman said in a statement.

The company said it filed a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act notice about the potential reductions with the state’s Employment Development Department and notified local officials.

Northrop, based in Century City until 2011, operates a historic 110-acre Space Park in Redondo Beach dating back to the Cold War where it developed the intercontinental ballistic missile, and has other facilities in the region.

The company currently operates a microelectronics foundry at the park and has multiple civil and defense space programs throughout the South Bay, including spacecraft manufacturing, space instrument design and orbiting space platforms.

Northrop took a hit this year when the U.S. Space Force canceled a multibillion-dollar program to build a new military communications satellite because of rising costs and delays in its development, Bloomberg News reported.

The company also has suffered cost overruns in building the Habitation and Logistics Outpost to house astronauts returning to the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program. Northrop received a $935-million fixed price contract to build the module in 2021 and took a $42-million charge in last year’s fourth quarter because of higher expenses, raising its 2023 program charges to $100 million.

Northrop’s other Los Angeles County operations include a large aircraft facility in Palmdale where it is building the new B-21 stealth bomber, the center fuselage for the F-35 fighter jet and drone aircraft.

It also has facilities in El Segundo, San Diego, Northridge, Woodland Hills, Ventura County and Sunnyvale that employed some 30,000 people as of early this year.

Northrop is not the only government contractor to file WARN act layoff notices this year in California.

Lockheed Martin filed notices for more than 200 employees in Palmdale and more than 130 in Sunnyvale, and RTX Corp., formerly Raytheon, filed a notice for more than 130 employees in El Segundo.

In February, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory laid off 530 employees, or 8% of its workforce, because of federal budget cuts.

Longtime YouTube and Google executive Adam Smith will join Walt Disney Co. as chief product and technology officer for Disney Entertainment and ESPN, indicating the media and entertainment giant’s intent to improve its customer technology experience.

Smith will be responsible for setting the strategy, development and innovation of technology across Disney’s streaming platforms and networks, its advertising tech and “consumer digital touchpoints,” among other aspects, Disney said in a statement Thursday.

“We could not be more thrilled to have Adam join the Disney team in this pivotal role,” Disney Entertainment co-Chairs Alan Bergman and Dana Walden and ESPN Chair Jimmy Pitaro said in a joint statement. “Adam brings a bold, consumer-focused vision for the future and a proven ability to effectively lead global teams in implementing ambitious, scalable and flexible products and technology that will continue to elevate storytelling as the center of the Disney experience.”

Smith starts in his new role Sept. 3 and will report to Bergman, Walden and Pitaro, the company said. He replaces Disney veteran Aaron LaBerge, who left the company after 20 years to join casino and sports-betting company Penn Entertainment.

Smith worked at both YouTube and Google for more than 20 years. He last served as YouTube’s vice president of product management since 2016 and was in charge of the company’s subscriptions, music, commerce and premium efforts. While at Google, he led development and strategy for projects such as Google Fiber and also oversaw a portfolio including Google News, Google Books and Google Scholar.

His hire comes as Disney has made more strides in its streaming business. The company’s overall streaming business — which consists of Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ — finally turned a profit in the third fiscal quarter after years of losses totaling billions of dollars.