Missouri's many rivers -- especially the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers -- cut through its vast, fertile plains. At their many points of confluence, settlers founded numerous counties and homesteads. Although they never intended it, their work has led to bureaucratic chaos as cities such as Kansas City, lie over multiple counties -- creating a licensing and permitting debacle. Business owners in different parts of the same city can easily need completely different sets of local licenses -- making it more difficult to wade through the regulation than to ford the state's great rivers.
In Missouri, governments at all levels – federal, state, county and city – need supplies and services. Governments do a significant amount of business with the private sector and can be fantastic clients and customers to businesses in many industries. Any business can apply to do business with any governmental body through a vendor registration process.