Helping businesses cope with uncertainty

Apr 08, 2020

Richard Allen, Manager of Economic Development for Frontenac County, and Anne Prichard, Executive Director of the Frontenac Community Futures Development Corporation, FCFDC have been talking with each other often, lately.

They both work to enhance opportunities for the business community in Frontenac County. Recently, they collaborated to develop a series of workshops for business owners that were set to run in late March right through April.

Those workshops went the way of all plans for the spring of 2020. They have been replaced with uncertainty.

Anne Prichard has been very busy providing consulting services for the businesses she deals with on a regular basis, as they try to determine which of the various support programs applies to them. She has also been participating in network meetings with the 15 Eastern Ontario CFDC’s and the broader Ontario Association of CFDC’s.

“We are developing proposals to bring to Industry Canada, the federal department that funds us, on how to help businesses get up and running sometime later this year,” she said.

She has been keenly analysing all of the updates from the province in order to advise local business owners, and she has also spent a lot of time on the phone with them, sometimes helping just by talking.

“It is difficult to provide advice to my clients when no one of knows when that is going to happen. A lot of my calls are longer than normal. People need to talk sometimes about what we are facing,” she said.

Richard Allen has been spending a lot of his time, working from home as is Prichard, “attending video conference after video conference,”

Not only does he confer with the management team at Frontenac County, he sits on the board of two regional tourism marketing organisations, and, with his colleague Alison Vandevelde, has been organising a weekly meeting of Frontenac business people on Thursday afternoons.

“For the most part, we are just trying to help our businesses, by doing what we are best positioned to do. We refer people to each other pretty often these days,” he said of the ongoing relationship between Frontenac County and the Frontenac CFDC.

This week, Allen is also mulling over the results of a quick business survey that his department undertook over the last week. 110 Frontenac businesses answered the survey, which gauged the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on the business community. The survey ended early on Monday morning, and he was in the midst of analysing the results when we talked later that day.

“There was good diversity among those businesses who answered the survey,” he said, “there were people involved in health and wellness, auto service, artists, real estate, and the most responses came from the accommodation sector. Some folks have been greatly impacted, and some have not been impacted at all.”

While the responses as a whole were as upbeat as can be expected given the circumstances, the answer to one question is pretty telling.

When asked whether they expected their businesses to survive the COVID induced crisis, 16% said they were likely or very likely to go out of business, 52% said they are unlikely or very unlikely to go out of business, and the rest did not know.

“That tells me that half the businesses expect to weather the storm, even though they are hurting,” Allen said.

Other notable results were that 62% said they have suffered revenue losses, and none said revenue had increased. 15% had already laid off staff, and 40% have temporarily closed their business.

“We are planning to do a similar survey each month, at least in May and June. That way we can gauge where this is all going, from the point of view of our business community,” he said.

One of the emerging issues, which has been surfacing, is the difficulty that many businesses are having accessing the supplies they need to continue operating.

“There are people who are able to keep doing business, but they are finding it hard to find supplies that were easy to find before all this happened.”