San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
SOME SEE PANDEMIC AS A TIME TO BUILD.
Amid the upheaval, entrepreneurs find opportunity
When the coronavirus pandemic forced Pinch Boil House partners Sean Wen and Andrew Ho to close their downtown restaurant for months, they decided to use the time to check off an item on their to-do list.
They reached out to South BBQ & Kitchen owner Andrew Samia about opening a restaurant combining Southeast Asian curry with Texas barbecue, an idea they’d been contemplating for a while.
“We just never had the time to do it because we were caught up in the everyday stress and struggle of running a restaurant,” Wen said.
The trio teamed up on popups to test their idea before opening a permanent Curry Boys BBQ location, at 2334 N.
St. Mary’s St., last month. The building is small and the restaurant doesn’t require much staffing — it’s a low-cost setup, Wen said.
Customers can take their meals to go or eat at picnic tables outside. While traffic at Pinch Boil House downtown is still about half of what it was before the pandemic, Curry Boys BBQ has sold out every day since opening.
“Too early to say if we’re crazy or not,” Wen said, laughing. “I’m going to count my blessings for now when I have them.”
With COVID-19 cases rising again in San Antonio and winter approaching, the restaurant might add delivery or to-go family packs.
“We built this thing with the idea that it could scale for the future,” Wen said. “Obviously, the future for food and beverage, for better or for worse, is skewed toward … ease of takeout or contactless ordering and delivering.”
Uncertainty a motivator
Starting a business during the coronavirus pandemic — which is ravaging the economy, throwing employees out of work and disrupting myriad industries — may seem crazy. But plenty of people are considering striking out on their own, even as hordes of businesses fold permanently.
Census data shows business applications for employee identification numbers have risen in recent months, totaling more than 3.2 million over the first three quarters compared with about 2.6 million during the same period last year. That includes independent contractors and gig-economy workers.
The number of startups that are likely to become employers — as gauged by so-called “highpropensity business applications” to register the ventures with the government — reached a record level in the third quarter. In Texas, they are up about 19 percent across the first three quarters of 2020 compared with the same stretch in 2019, seasonally adjusted data show.
The COVID-19 recession may be one of the biggest motivators for these entrepreneurs.
Layoffs and uncertainty about future unemployment may be pushing more people to take their working lives into their own hands, whether that’s turning a side hustle into fulltime work or finally fleshing out a business idea they’d been gestating for years.
“They’d always been thinking about doing their own thing, and (the pandemic) ended up being that sort of trigger point,” said Luis Martinez, director of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Trinity University.
Another factor: new opportunities created by COVID-19. The virus has reshaped how people work, attend school, shop and spend their free time, and there’s money to be made with each change.
Just think of face masks, said Thomas Tunstall, research director at the Institute for Economic Development at the University of Texas at San Antonio. For many wearers, they’ve become small fashion, or personal, statements. Somebody has to meet the demand for face coverings that tell something about us to passersby.
There’s also the fact that entrepreneurs also may be able to borrow at lower rates than before — through Small Business Administration programs or microlenders such as San Antonio-based LiftFund — or lease space more affordably.