Thousands of small-business owners hit by Hurricane Dolly last week are still dealing with getting their companies back to normal again. But sometimes normal doesn’t exist anymore and a business owner has to quickly deal with not only physical damage to its premises but its whole reason for being having disappeared.
Such was the case with many of the people who owned businesses in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck in August 2005.
As the storm approached, Peter Menge and Aaron Wilson were about to have the grand opening of The Savvy Gourmet, a recreational cooking school, cookware store and caterer in the city.
“We boarded up the windows and kind of left thinking it was going to be, back in a couple of days and continue on with the process we were in — in the middle of getting ready to open,” Menge recalled.
Instead, it was weeks before they could get back into the building, which had taken water in but otherwise had little damage. Their bigger problem was a cooler filled with rotting food. It took days to clean up the mess.
Menge and Wilson got the work done, and on Oct. 1, they had the first of what they called devacuation parties, gatherings they ended up holding weekly into December to give returning residents a chance to reconnect.
The owners started thinking about running their business again. But with an estimated 1,600 people having died and great swaths of the city ruined, “it almost seemed like an insult, totally inappropriate” to be opening a cooking school, Menge said. “For the forseeable future, our entire business model, there was just no place for it.”
But New Orleans was in need of places for people to eat. So Menge and Wilson converted their business model to a restaurant, and early in 2006, began serving meals. Within a few weeks, “the line was literally out the door,” Menge said.
Then, in December, residents started asking, “are you going to have those cooking classes?” Menge said. He and Wilson realized that “they were looking for fun and they wanted to feel normal again.”
“We were worried about the inappropriateness of marketing something that was completely frivolous. It wasn’t until people were asking for us to bring it back that we started to bring back our original business model.”
So the cooking classes began. It was only just a few weeks ago that the restaurant was finally phased out.
Tim Williamson also found himself having to reassess his reason for being. Before Katrina, The Idea Village, the economic development organization he runs, provided strategic consulting to entrepreneurs, advising them on how to build their businesses. After the storm hit, “no one needed consulting,” he said. They needed cash and resources.
“We went out and raised what we called a triage fund” that gave grants to business owners, Williamson said. His organization also helped owners find plumbers, electricians and other help for companies he described as “stripped down to the founders again.”
A devastating event like Katrina forces business owners to do what Williamson called “a very interesting self-analysis.”
“How do I become relevant?” he said. “What services do I provide that someone needs?”
Williamson saw many business owners, including Menge and Wilson, go through that analysis, change their businesses radically, and do so without writing a business plan.
“I found that Katrina really exposed the inner entrepreneur in everyone. It delineated between small-business owners and entrepreneurs,” he said.
“Three years later, from our perspective, we think our entrepreneurial community is stronger,” said Williamson, who’s back to consulting.
Joyce Rosenberg writes about small-business issues for the Associated Press.
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