Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
No shutdown for business owners with virus
Guiding the company still top job if possible
NEW YORK — When Chris Hyland caught the coronavirus, his ordeal went beyond being sick and exhausted — he couldn’t help his business partners manage the virus’s impact on their company just as the outbreak was sweeping across the world.
Hyland and his wife and children became ill in early March. Customers were cutting back orders at his employee management software business, The Happiness Index. Revenue was plunging, and the London-based company was forced to furlough 12 of 20 staffers.
Hyland tried to handle the crisis while also taking care of himself and his family but was so sick he had to hand off his responsibilities to his partners.
“I had to just lie in bed and accept it and turn the laptop off for a week,” Hyland says. It took a month before he was feeling like himself again.
When small business owners are diagnosed with the coronavirus, being sick is just one of their problems. Like Hyland, they can be too ill to shepherd their companies through the crises the pandemic created, a painful situation for people used to being their enterprises’ driving forces.
Some owners deal with the virus’s aftereffects months after recovering.
Some have been afraid to let clients and customers know they’ve been ill — they fear their companies will be stigmatized.
Suffering through the virus has changed some owners’ perspectives about the balance between work and personal time, for their employees and themselves. Some have established more liberal policies about time off and after-hours emailing. Some are beefing up employee health benefits.
The virus left Hyland with existential questions.
“You start thinking, ‘What would happen if I hadn’t made it? What if I’m alive but not up to work?’” he says.
Hyland recently increased his individual life insurance, and he and his partners are considering key person insurance, which helps companies survive after losing an owner or top employee.
Some owners have had to ask employees to run the company. Laurina Esposito and her business partner were diagnosed with the virus in early September. Esposito, owner of Espo Resto, a Los Angeles-based company that restores Porsches, was very ill for three weeks. She did as much work as she could on her laptop in bed but at times was too exhausted.
“There was a point where I had to put all of my trust in the people in the shop,” Esposito says. They kept the company running until she was back on her feet.
Warren Cohn’s relatively mild bout with COVID was complicated by the fact his wife and two children, ages 3 years and 3½ months, also came down with the virus at the end of March. He had to turn the management of his two marketing firms over to his co-owners.
“If it’s just me, I can handle it, but once it turned to my kids, that’s when I said, ‘I’m dropping everything, you guys have got to handle it,’” says Cohn, co-owner of New York-based HeraldPR and New Orleans-based Emerald Digital.
Cohn kept up with email as best he could but was in bed for two weeks while also caring for his children. Even when he was past the worst of the pain and exhaustion, he needed a daily nap.
A sole proprietor has an even bigger worry: There’s no partner to hand off to. When Marisa Vallbona came down with the virus in March, she didn’t miss a day of work although she was in bed for weeks and had lingering aftereffects.
“I would never let myself not work,” says Vallbona, owner of CIM Inc., a publicity firm based in Houston and San Diego.