nextpittsburgh.com: Ben Peoples got an early warning.
He’s a provider of theatrical and architectural lighting, with suppliers in China. He closely watched that country’s winter shutdown. When COVID-19 reached the U.S., he wasn’t shocked that Broadway — the source of much of his business — closed for the spring.
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Both of these stories made me look ahead with hope. Briefly, in passing I have seen the Strip District business mentioned, and it took me a second to realize I have passed by it almost every time that I have gone, which was a very odd and kind of funny realization that everyone inside of those shops has to get by somehow. But anyway, I thought that Peoples’ idea was genius. Like he himself mentioned, he was mentally ready for at least the concept of what was about to happen. He was expecting to financially struggle, which he did, but he also was lucky enough to practice a discipline that could in theory be transferable to a smaller scale setting. I would personally be interested in his set of home-installed lights if I was a person who relied on well-lit recordings for my job, so the fact that he saw that opportunity and took it is wonderful.
The toll that the pandemic has had on small business is indescribable. I know about the repercussions of the pandemic on small business pretty first hand, because my parents are self-employed. And back home in LA, they owned a restaurant. And despite management being handed over to somebody else, the effects of the pandemic on that restaurant still affect us. Business in general has been slow, especially for service related businesses, and income is highly reliant on the customers that restaurants and businesses get day to day. Unlike massive fast food corporations, while the pandemic might have (and still does) make a dent into the income and money that rolls in, it’s not comparable to the effects it has on small businesses. Small businesses don’t have a massive endowment like funds to fall back on when times get tough. I really feel for small businesses that have had to shut down or stop employing workers due to the pandemic. And I wish there was more I could do than just keep supporting the businesses I am familiar with, with what little I’ve got.
I think when I thought about how small businesses had to adapt to the pandemic economy my expectations for what they were doing/ what they needed to do was limited greatly by my lack of understanding for their situation. I figured restaurants had to learn to social distance, have less staff on hand at once, do takeout and curbside pickup, sanitize well. But I didn't consider how some small restaurants had to consider new and inventive ways to make money on top of modifying the way they currently work. So many of these companies had to change courses entirely or flip their business in a favorable direction to suit pandemic needs and differences. Reading this article gave me a much larger respect for the small businesses that did inventive things to stay afloat and make themselves better in the long run as well as for the companies/ organizations that support them. I had never heard of the progress fund and it's good to know people are out there to offer them help both financially and informationally.
The story about the first business that was successfully able to pivot directions is an interesting one because it’s something that only small businesses and individuals can do. We even saw that when ford and GM were going to start to make ventilators at the beginning of the pandemic, but that took so long to get going because of all the moving pieces, that we were out of the woods by the time they were ready to start production. It’s also interesting what things were hit more heavily. The second example of a local business said that there was such a boon in the grocery store market that his company was able to continue doing what they did best. Hopefully many businesses had a lifeline of a second set of skills, but it definitely became obvious to me that it would be important to have a variety of skills so that in the event something like this happens again I wouldn’t be out of work for a year and a half or two years.
Knowing how tough the pandemic was on so many people makes me feel extremely fortunate for the situation I have been in. Small businesses that have been severely hit have been closing across the country ever since last March, but this article sheds a light of hope that may have been previously unforeseen. All thanks to The Progress Fund, small businesses could afford to keep their doors open. At the start of the pandemic my father was starting a business so I know a little bit of what it feels like to have COVID-19 affect your family. People like David Kahley (CEO of The Progress Fund) are like a saving grace in some people’s lives and I am sure they will be forever grateful to him. The fact that even your average grocery shoppers were turning to local small businesses for necessities to keep them afloat sparks something of inspiration in me. Let’s hope they continue to do so even post-pandemic...whenever that may be.
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