Where to Start?

I've not really ever messed with the SEO side of marketing. Im trying to help a buddy of mine out and figured I would ask a few of you.

This is what he is doing. He is launching a Local company and is trying to rank it for on local keyword terms.
Local population is a little over 10,000 so not a huge market. There is really no other people ranking on these keywords. *2 other bizs in his niche do appear, but you can tell they are not trying to rank*
My question is where should he start and work towards to try and get his biz ranked?

As always TY all for your comments and any help you can provide

Try Submitting your website to all the search engines.

I ranked a local term simply by creating literally 10 backlinks to it. They were a combo of web2.0, article sites, and wikis.
Manually create some backlinks to your site with good content on high pr sites. Once they are indexed, check to see if your rankings have increased. If they have not, then start building tier 2 links to your tier 1 links. If still not increasing, either build tier 3 links to your tier 2, or create more tier 1 links.

It won't be that hard for you if the keywords you wanna rank aren't competitive like you say.

Just my 2cent.

For local business, it is a good idea to build successful Social Media campaign along side with some offline marketing.

For the SEO parts, i would highly suggest you to do give high quality information than trying to rank. of course, it highly depends on your niche as well.

For e.g, my parent's company is on a motorbikes business, so i will do research of bikes preparing and put up high quality contents along side with promotion on social media as well as forum marketing.

Most of the time, i implement "marketing" instead of SEO to local business site.
Peter