Picking up the pieces: New Orleans business owners have tough decisions to make in the wake of Hurri

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, September 22, 2005

Claire Ryan doesn’t know yet if she’ll be able to get her small business up and running again in New Orleans, but she’s anxious to get back to the city and try.

“Absolutely, New Orleans is my home,” said Ryan, who owns a Drama Kids franchise in the city’s Garden District. Having evacuated before Hurricane Katrina struck, she’s in Houston, evaluating if she indeed can reopen the business, which runs drama programs for schoolchildren.

A handful of small business owners all said they wanted to return to New Orleans and restart their companies. How certain they are about their chances depends largely on the nature of their enterprises, not on how much damage the businesses suffered.

For Ryan, the question is whether the children that her company served will come back to the area, or whether their families will relocate.

“All of my children have been lost or scattered,” she said, and her teachers have also left the city. “I don’t know what I’m going back to.”

Adam Vodanovich and his brothers suffered catastrophic losses. They are the master franchisors for 11 Wing Zone fast-food outlets in New Orleans, owning four franchises themselves. All but one of the stores suffered major flood damage. Their homes near the 17th Street canal also were inundated.

The family is undaunted.

“We have nothing to go home to, but we are very fortunate,” Vodanovich said. “We’re all going to try to go back and rebuild what we can.”

Another New Orleans store owner, Robert Thompson, considers himself lucky. He has seen pictures of the flood damage at his coffeehouse, Fair Grinds, near City Park, and “we fared much better than a lot of my fellow shop owners. … The building is reasonably intact, but flooded. I’ll have to pull out Sheetrock and cabinetry, but by and large I’m not facing the kind of damage that so many are.”

What helps Thompson’s stay optimistic is the fact that his store is a magnet for people looking for the social atmosphere of a coffeehouse as well as a cup of joe, and so a reopened Fair Grinds can help rebuild a neighborhood.

Many owners whose businesses are more national in scope and not dependent on a neighborhood have already restarted their companies, thanks to the Internet and computer networking. But they still face a long recovery before they can head home.

Michael Azzano, owner of Cosmo Public Relations, is running his business out of San Francisco, where his business started and where he still has clients.

“We can manage our enterprise from anywhere – the wonders of the virtual office,” he said.

Before he can go back to New Orleans, his office near the Mississippi River will have to be rebuilt, and “there has to be a support system in place. … We need to have the basics – phone, Internet, schools, hospitals,” Azzano said. His house sustained very little damage.

Why go back if he’s got a place to work?

“We’re passionate about New Orleans. That’s why we moved there,” he said.

Building Small Business is a weekly column on the topic by the Associated Press.

Associated Press

Claire Ryan (center) sits in her Houston hotel room with her daughter, Jessica (left), and mother, Grace. Claire Ryan is evaluating whether she can reopen her New Orleans business, which ran drama programs for schoolchildren.