Bedford County has a healthy business climate, with more than a dozen industries that employ at least 100 workers. Officials here are proponents of business – in fact, a recent study by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research ranked the city of Shelbyville as one of the state's top 25 most business-friendly communities. This south-central Tennessee county of 45,000 residents has a dedicated and qualified workforce, with more than 4,000 people employed in the manufacturing sector alone. Here is a sampling of Bedford County companies:

Jostens Inc.
The multimillion-dollar company is headquartered in Minneapolis but runs a busy production facility in Shelbyville. The local plant specializes in high school and college graduation announcements, and prints at least one million diplomas each year. The Shelbyville site has been in operation since 1960 and has 500 employees.

CalsonicKansei North America
The company is considered a global leader in integrated automotive systems, and has a manufacturing workforce of 1,000 in Shelbyville. Its product lineup is primarily heating-cooling related, including air conditioning kits, fans, aluminum heater cores, refrigerant hoses and tubing, condensers and switches.

Sanford Corp.
The company is owned by Newell Rubbermaid Inc. and is known for producing the sharpie, the world's largest selling writing instrument. In Shelbyville, Sanford Corp. opened a new packaging and distribution center in late 2009 that employs 125 people.

Walmart Distribution Center
The general warehousing and storage facility in Shelbyville has 450 employees. The center distributes a wide variety of products to Walmart stores primarily throughout the South and the Southeast United States.

Tyson Foods
The processing giant in Shelbyville packages chicken, beef and pork products, with a workforce that can be regarded as somewhat out-of-the-ordinary – and that's a compliment. About one-fifth of the plant's 1,200 employees are hard-working political refugees from Somalia, who wound up at Tyson as a result of refugee resettlement efforts in Nashville. They were ultimately employed at the Shelbyville plant thanks to the Tennessee Department of Employment Security office.

Tennessee Walking Horse National Celebration
This is not classified as a business, but the wildly successful event has been clip-clopping into Shelbyville every year since 1939 and provides an approximate $50 million impact upon the regional economy. The celebration occurs over 11 days and nights in late August and early September, with more than 150,000 people passing through the gates of the 105-acre celebration grounds that includes a 4,500-seat Calsonic Arena.