San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
BUSINESSES
“We live differently than we did before the pandemic started,” Tunstall said. “The economy is essentially restructuring in response to different demand patterns.”
Test market
COVID-19 is the reason Meghan Garza and Juan Cano launched BexarAid. Their startup provides testing for the virus for individuals and businesses.
It began as a website this spring to connect essential workers with people wanting to donate masks and other protective gear. But conversations with friends in health care prompted them to shift to COVID-19 testing. They wanted to provide a quick, efficient way to get tested in South Texas.
BexarAid offers drivethru testing at a facility near the Pearl for $150, an at-home test for $200, and mass testing for businesses
and organizations. Customers can make appointments online for the polymerase chain reaction tests, which are administered by medical assistants hired by BexarAid.
The company partners with several laboratories. Results currently are delivered the next day, though they’re guaranteed within 48 hours, Cano said.
BexarAid was providing about 2,000 tests a week on average in July — one of the peaks in San Antonio’s COVID-19 cases — and has
worked with “dozens” of employers, Cano said.
Garza and Cano aren’t strangers to starting a business: The pair launched companies together and individually before the pandemic. With BexarAid, they hope to help flatten the curve and “get us out of this pandemic as fast as possible,” Cano said.
“We’re extremely blessed that it’s now an actual business,” he added. “We were not intending for it to be. I think entrepreneurship can
many times be accidental, but it doesn’t make it any less rewarding.”
A changing economy
The pace of U.S. business applications is starting to drop back to prepandemic levels but still remains elevated compared with last year, according to an analysis of census data by the Economic Innovation Group.
Many of the new startups are nonstore retailers; personal and laundry services; professional, scientific and technical services; administrative and support services; truck transportation; and restaurants and bars.
There are caveats. Applications in some of those sectors are automatically marked as businesses with a higher likelihood of hiring workers even if that’s not necessarily happening, and the data includes some acquisitions of existing companies, the public policy organization noted.
It’s hard to tell “how much of the increase is attributable to entrepre
neurs finding opportunity in the crisis to form businesses likely to hire employees as opposed to newly unemployed individuals starting their own businesses,” EIG said in the census report. “The latter are more likely to be non-employer firms (opting for self-employment) that are not well-positioned to fuel a rapid jobs recovery.
“Nevertheless, the sustained and unprecedentedly high rate of new business applications hints that the current
crisis could be part of an accelerating restructuring of the economy, as entrepreneurs and everyday workers adapt to a new economic reality,” the organization said.
San Antonio Startup Week, a conference for startups and entrepreneurs, was held online in October due to the pandemic. As part of the event, attorney David Jones participated in a free legal clinic to help aspiring entrepreneurs in underserved communities set up businesses.
More than 50 people signed up in one day. Legal clinics typically draw decent turnouts, but “everybody who was involved in it was frankly kind of blown away that the interest came as fast as it did,” Jones said.
Attendees consulted with attorneys and filled out paperwork for limited liability corporations, which cost about $300 to register. The clinic helped form about two dozen startups, a number of them launched by Black, Latino, LGBTQ and women
entrepreneurs, Jones said.
“It’s just an absolutely joyful experience to see people get as excited as they get when they realize ... ‘I’m a real live business owner,’ ” Jones said, adding he hopes to organize another clinic before the end of the year.
Nothing to lose
Anastasia Calhoun was already launching a business when the pandemic began.
The idea started materializing about two years
ago. After benefiting from massage treatments, Calhoun started researching spa kits with upscale organic products to use at home but couldn’t find what she was looking for.
She decided to start her own venture, selling handcrafted skin and body care products through a subscription model. She set up a limited liability corporation for the business, dubbed Godtliv, and targeted an April launch date.
Cue the pandemic. When it disrupted the supply chain for the materials and ingredients she needed, Calhoun switched to selling items she had in stock through an e-commerce website and launched just a few weeks later than planned.
Another COVID-19related upheaval followed. Calhoun, an architectural researcher, was furloughed and then laid off from her job in architecture. After her apartment lease ended, she headed to Oklahoma, where some family members live.
“In one sense, it does suck; but on the other hand, I was already so invested in it both emotionally and financially that to stop it I think would’ve been worse,” Calhoun said of starting a business during the pandemic. “If I had been at a different spot in the business development process, no, I probably would not have opened it.”
With people stuck indoors and grappling with pandemic-induced stress, it’s also a good time to be selling self-care items.
And an e-commerce concept fits the current business conditions, Calhoun said.
Aside fromworking on Godtliv, she’s part of a team that received a grant to research the intersections of climate change, racial justice and pandemics in the built environment.
“Even though everything’s so uncertain, I’m really loving my day-today right now,” Calhoun said, laughing. “My office smells amazing. ... I’m not opposed to taking something in architecture again, but if I can build this, I’m pretty happy here, too.”