PORTLAND – Ignore the naysayers: If you’re a small business entrepreneur with a vision, now is a good time to launch your business.

That was the message Forbes publisher Richard Karlgaard brought to an audience of students, policymakers and business people at the University of Southern Maine’s executive forum Tuesday. Hosted by USM’s School of Business, the forum explored the forces affecting small business entrepreneurs by picking the brains of Karlgaard and two other panelists.

“Small town entrepreneurship has some wind behind its back now,” Karlgaard said during his keynote address.

Propelling it is a strong national economy; technology that is accessible and affordable; a transparent Internet; and available risk capital.

That means smaller communities can be just as competitive incubating new business as the big cities, especially compared with the ridiculously expensive coastal communities like Silicone Valley and the Route 128 corridor.

“If costs have gone off the urban coast grids, but the services are the same, that’s a real opportunity for entrepreneurship,” he said. “This is a fantastic revolution.”

Of course, entrepreneurs need to take care of the details. Karlgaard and co-panelists Laurie Lachance, former state economist now head of Maine Development Foundation, and James Wilfong, consultant, entrepreneur and teacher in the school’s Center for Entrepreneurship, stressed the importance of having a sound business plan and enough money to back the project.

But attitude plays a huge role – on the part of the entrepreneur and the community. Karlgaard cited several case studies, including one of brothers Alan and Dale Klapmeier of Wisconsin, who enjoyed building kit planes. When they each inherited $100,000, they decided to launch their own business making real planes.

But the local bank turned them down for a $100,000 line of credit, even though they had $200,000 in cash collateral. So the brothers took their business to Grand Forks, N.D., where a local university specialized in aeronautical engineering. This time a banker turned them down for a house loan.

Off they went again, settling in Duluth, Minn., where the brothers found friendlier financiers. They launched Cirrus, an aircraft company that now ranks second in the world in the manufacture of its class of personal jets. Two-thousand people are directly employed by them and another 1,000 indirectly, Karlgaard said.

“This is the power of one … a real way for a community to transform itself through the power of entrepreneurship,” he said.

Maine has several things going for entrepreneurs. Tops is that state is “a very pleasant place to live,” Karlgaard said. Plus it’s cheaper to live here than other parts of New England. And Maine probably hasn’t fully capitalized on its proximity to Canada, and the markets that exist to its west and north.

A presentation by Lachance that highlighted some of Maine’s most notable entrepreneurs and the impact they continue to have on the state’s economy (the Cianchette brothers; L.L. Bean, Arthur Hannaford) was infused with optimism about the future. Karlgaard said that’s the another thing the state has going for it, “you’re getting your confidence back.”

“All it takes is confidence,” he said. “The macroeconomic and technology trends give you a wind at your back.”

And a final bit of advice, which he offered with an apology to the students in the audience:

“Everybody should get a Facebook account,” he said of the electronic social network. “It is a living, breathing Rolodex and will change the business climate.”