Payson Regional Economic Development Corporation

Just about an hour north of Phoenix, Arizona, a new lifestyle is unfolding. It is a lifestyle particularly inviting to owners of small businesses and light industrial firms that do not need to be in a high-rent industrial park or next to a freeway to be profitable.

That lifestyle is in the quiet, friendly town of Payson and the handful of smaller communities surrounding it that make up the fabled Mogollon Rim country of the late western novelist Zane Grey.

Grey is but a lingering memory in the minds of the ranchers and other Payson pioneers who hunted deer and elk with him, but the clean air and the awesome beauty of the ponderosa pine-covered Rim Country remain. So, too, does the warm and openhearted friendliness of the people of the Payson area.

Newcomers to this region have little difficulty adapting to the relaxed, straightforward and neighborly ways of the men and women of this country. It is such attitudes, and the residents’ belief in time-honored values and virtues, that often influence families to choose Payson over metropolitan areas as the place to live and work, and to raise their children.

Those attitudes permeate life in the Payson area. Combine them with the natural beauty of the Rim Country; a mild, four-season climate; the cleanest air in the West (according to Sunbelt Retirement Magazine), and you have the Payson kind of business lifestyle that is conducive to happier employees, less absenteeism, and increased productivity and profitability.