Today's Guest

In this special year-end episode, we catch up with three small business owners we interviewed in the Spring of 2020 when the pandemic hit. All closed their businesses temporarily in the early, dark days of the COVID-19 crisis, they were also recipients of a Thryv Foundation Grant, which was designed to help small businesses through the pandemic. Despite the tough odds, all are still going strong and looking forward to 2021.

Episode Summary

While we, Big Frog Custom T-Shirts of Durham, have survived the storm so far it is heartbreaking to watch other businesses and colleagues that have left or shutdown. Our primary customers are event-based businesses so when the economy shut down we had to pivot or risk becoming another business casualty from this pandemic. The one silver lining the pandemic did give us was the opportunity to reset and adjust our strategy to apply the lessons learned from the past four years. 

A lot has happened here since we last spoke, we licensed our first location of The Sandwich Shop. Pre-COVID 80% of our sales were online and our sales have only grown since March. However, we are still being very careful to only spend what we need and operate with a skeleton crew. Looking forward we hope to sell more licenses of The Sandwich Shop and there is a bit of an opportunity to get a good price on commercial real estate in Manhattan right now. 

During the early days of the pandemic we, Brooklyn Bark, received the Thryv Foundation grant along with the PPP and EIDL loans that helped us keep payroll going. Right now we are focused on how to best get the PPP loan forgiven and exploring new revenue streams, such as selling pet products online. 

Resources Shared

• Big Frog Custom T-Shirts 
• The Sandwich Shop
• Brooklyn Bark
• Thryv Foundation
  

Listener Reviews