How the Covid pandemic changed us
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Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Sam Fenwick. Five years ago, the world was struck by the COVID pandemic, a crisis that claimed millions of lives and reshaped billions more. Today, we travel to the USA, to Tanzania and to the United Kingdom to meet three individuals who were running businesses when the pandemic hit. We'll hear about the shock of lockdowns

and the personal grief when COVID death statistics hit close to home. I lost my manager. It was a horrific experience. And how, even after five years, the economic scars are still raw. All in all, it cost us about a half a million dollars. So it has definitely changed the trajectory of my life. Some governments stepped in with financial aid. Others offered nothing.

But how did surviving the pandemic reshape the entrepreneurs who endured it? We will make decisions, we have to do this because it's life and death for the business. COVID, five years on, all coming up on today's Business Daily.

Joining me today are two business owners and one former business owner. Martin Greenhow runs the Mojo chain of bars in the north of England. Sam Deer owns the Tanzania Travel and Safari Company in Arusha. The lockdowns imposed worldwide forced hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs to shut their doors for good.

And one of those was Kelly Rickabus, who was a franchisee of Anytime Fitness in Michigan until she made the tough decision to close her gym in 2022. Today, we'll hear from all three about the toll the pandemic took and how it's reshaped their approach to life and business.

But first, let's go back to those early days five years ago when it became clear that economies were shutting down and running a business would never be the same again. It was like a joke. Every morning you arrive in the office, you check your email and you are told this group is not coming. And all of a sudden everything was shut down. There was no business, nothing.

Nothing, nothing, nothing. Can you remember when you were reading those emails, how you felt? Oh my God. You know, Sam, tour operation has been my only business that I've been doing. And this is the only place that I was earning my bread, supporting my family. Behind me, there are more than 500 men and women. These are porters, mountain guides, cooks.

and they all have dependents. So it was a big shock that I could not support my family. Kelly, you were in the health and fitness industry. You were a gym owner. I remember gyms just shut overnight. Yes, very much so. We were shut down rather quickly. My governor was very strict and she shut us down immediately. So it was very devastating. I've had the same employees. I've had very little turnover ever.

It was hard knowing you're taking that livelihood from people. And Martin, in the UK on the 23rd of March in 2020, cocktail bars were forced to close along with pubs, restaurants, gyms and non-essential shops. Yeah, it was quite shocking. I mean, speaking about the circumstances and the build up to it, I can remember what we were hearing through the media and what have you.

It was telling us what a horrific situation was coming down the line. So for us, when we closed, I suppose we were quite fortunate. We'd been doing well for a few years and we'd built up something of a war chest. We were like, right, well, we know we can get X number of weeks from our war chest.

And we sent everybody home because we were worried. We were worried for our staff. But then we did start to hear about deaths from COVID and they started to ramp up. And Sam, you were dealing with managing your business, but also you lost someone very close to you who you work with. Oh, yeah.

Oh, that's reminding me of a very bad moment. When COVID started, our president did not accept the lockdown. He commanded that everyone should continue working, but taking precaution. Eventually, I lost my manager. It was a horrific experience. When the thing started to take people, it was so terrifying, so horrifying. Do you think then that when you look back now that the

president of Tanzania did the right thing? There are two schools of thought here. Initially, there was no information, no enough information about the COVID. Now, if you look at the economies in East Africa or in Africa, majority of people, they work from hand to mouth.

On the other side, it was a bit risky because you do not know where you're going, people you're meeting, people you're rubbing shoulder with if they are contaminated. So it was like a 50-50. We cannot blame anyone. We cannot even blame our president because he thought if I asked these people to remain at home...

We are going to have more deaths than allowing them to go out and look for their bread. Michigan, Kelly, was one of the U.S. states which had really, really tight restrictions. Describe some of those restrictions and how it affected your business. Well, I didn't have any business. They completely shut us down and we were closed for six months and there was no business.

possibility of any income coming in. The bills continued. I still had rent. I still had utilities. I still had my franchise fees. And those things continued. But there were different rules in different states, weren't there, Kelly? And I understand where your gym was. You had five different levels based on federal, state, and

and then all the way down to town and village authorities. So it was very confusing. It was difficult to navigate what I should and shouldn't do. In June, we were shut down in March. And in June, our governor was sued and she lost her executive powers for only about 48 hours.

And when she lost those powers, everyone opened up again. But my situation was my county was in a stand down position. So the county said, if you defy this order, we're just going to look away. But my business was in the village. The village told me that if I did reopen against the order, that I would be fined $1,000 a day and up to three years in prison.

So myself, I could not open, but just three miles either direction was County Line and they were open. They basically chose who was going to survive and who wasn't. And Martin, across the UK, there were different lockdowns depending on where you were. I have to admit, I thought ours were complicated, but Kelly's sound like an absolute nightmare.

But for our business, it didn't matter too much which tier you went in because the restrictions meant that your capacity was either so low or your trading hours were so curtailed that very quickly it just wasn't practical to stay open. We were closed for nine months. That left us with quite the debt burden. But the UK government did spend hundreds of billions of pounds supporting workers and businesses...

with schemes like the furlough wage subsidy. There were grants and loans to companies as well as tax relief on their property. So really, there was quite a lot to help businesses keep going, wasn't there? There were a lot of things, whether it was a lot of help is a different matter. Some of the things you mentioned there are a worthy furlough,

seemed like a very noble effort to begin with for us ultimately i would say it was a waste of time for both the public purse and for us as a business because four months after we properly returned to trading terms of the 92 people or so we had employment at the beginning we had 12 who hadn't left there was business rates support i'm not sure i see that as support i i question how you can charge somebody a rate a bit like kelly where she was having to pay um

fees towards the franchise. How can we be charged business rates when we're being prohibited from trading by the government? On top of that, there were grants available. They went nowhere towards covering costs.

For larger businesses, you had to take out something called a Corona Business Interruption Loan, which the government underwrites to a certain extent. But then the bank could insist that the business owners underwrote the rest of it. So that's what we had to do. We had to borrow quite a sum of money. And from a business that had no debt going into it, we're still burdened with it afterwards. Such a similar experience.

And it felt like they were just kind of reaching for something they could do, but those programs were not thoroughly thought through. We did receive one extremely small grant. It was only about $8,000, barely. You know, my rent was $12,000 a month, so it didn't even cover one month's rent. I exhausted all of our resources, and I ended up taking out what's called a federal injury disaster loan.

I took that out to survive. It is about a 3% rate, but there is no forgiveness and it will follow me until it's done. And it's a 30 year loan. So you still got that loan, even though you closed the business? Even though my business shut down, I never recovered. We tried to reopen when the initial, the lockdown happened. I had 1200 members in my facility. When we reopened, I had 450.

And my break even was 600. I hung on until early 22. We barely recovered. I think when I closed, I maybe had 550. People had in the interim, they went to the places that were defying the order and were open. It was devastating. It really changed everything. My husband and I are in our retirement years.

we were using our gym as a retirement plan. So we not only lost the income coming from the business, but in order to get released from the business, I had to pay all the back rent. I had to pay all of the franchise fees that I had contracted to do. Actually was able to sell the assets of the business, but that did not cover my original business loan. So I had to pay that off. All

All in all, it cost us about a half a million dollars. So it has definitely changed the trajectory of my life. Sam, when you hear from Martin and Kelly about the support that they did get from their governments, how does that make you feel? Because in Tanzania, there were no grants or loans available, were there, to help you run your business? I feel jealous. There was zero support from

government. If you had loan, you have to pay loan whether COVID or it's not. I'm still paying my debt. I have a mortgage for the safari cars. Even in terms of like support or anything, there was nothing like we took measures to make a plan to support the staff that you had.

You buy like 20 bags of rice so that your staff can manage their life. There's no any other support, no pension, no anything. You go and talk to your bank to see how they can prolong the repayment time so that you can survive. You're listening to Business Daily on the BBC World Service.

When you have bars in the sky, onboard showers and award-winning in-flight entertainment, it's no surprise that Emirates was recently named the best airline in the world. We fly you to over 140 destinations, and with partners across the globe, we connect you to another 1,700 cities across six continents. So when we say we're also the largest international airline, what we really mean is...

If you're going there, so are we. Book now on Emirates.com. Fly Emirates. Fly better.

I'm Sam Fenwick, and today we're reflecting on the challenges business owners face during the COVID pandemic and the lessons they've carried forward. The pandemic transformed small businesses, some diversified, while others like Kelly were forced to start entirely new ventures. Kelly, what do you think you have learned from trying to navigate the last five years? No one is as invested in your business as you are. I learned that the government really didn't know what was going on

which, you know, can you blame them for that? No one had gone through a pandemic. I get that. But it's the fact that nothing was followed through. When this was all over, we lost thousands and thousands of small business. The large businesses like the cruise industry and the airline industry, they were completely bailed out by the government. But us small mom and pop businesses were

you know, where we rely on our local economy, which was shut down. It just, it feels like the reparations should have been there. I felt very let down.

it's dealing with that I guess I've become a little bit more independent. You did start a new business didn't you so when you talk about surviving that's what you're referring to? Yes and we we started a little business and of course this experience changed how I do that I have no interest in a brick and mortar building I have no interest in employees it's just me and my husband part of that is because of what I went through you know we have our we uh refinished furniture and

and build and create furniture. And we just keep it simple. Martin, are you, do you think more cautious now as a businessman? Definitely more risk averse. And I really empathize with what Kelly was saying there. I can completely understand how you can get to a point where you go, I just need to draw a line under this and do something else. Because when you have had to keep continually reinvesting and hoping to start breaking even again, it's psychologically very, very difficult. So, you know, I feel that.

So, yeah, probably also more decisive and can be somewhat more cutthroat. We will make decisions and go, no, we have to do this because it's life and death for the business. And if that means you have to lay people off, we've recently had to lay some staff off. But you get to a point where you go, we lose these people or we lose everybody if this continues.

Sam, were you agreeing there with Martin? I do, because sometimes you feel like, why did I go into this business? Because everything is on top of you. In Tanzania, we all expected that there'll be some reliefs on tax and this and this and this after the pandemic, just to make us recover from what has happened.

but this was not, not happened. The lesson here is that you should not depend on one thing. When everything was shut down, I was depending on agriculture, small poultry. I was raising chicks at my, at my home. I just got to say, I couldn't agree more with Sam. It's,

I don't know any business owner that isn't currently examining their life choices on an almost daily basis because it's very, very difficult to go through the period we went through and now the struggles that everybody's talking about to recover. And fundamentally, that has a knock-on effect on the economy because the three of us on here are all entrepreneurs. We're all trying to drive a business, trying to create employment, trying to create growth. And actually, we've been beaten down and put in a position where we're not probably as good at it as we once were. Well, you said you're

might be better, Martin, because you're a bit more ruthless now. You're not afraid to make those decisions and possibly make them quicker than you would have done before the pandemic. That's true. But on the other side of it, I'm also much more risk averse. So whereas we may not go for an opportunity that we once would have done. And ultimately for the economy, we need growth and we need employment for people. I totally agree. Totally agree. And as entrepreneurs,

Part of our goal is to build up our communities and provide unemployment. And before we had a little more leeway with our employees, we could stretch things a little to keep someone on or where now that's just not an option. And for me, that was a very difficult to change that mindset is okay, now businesses first.

It makes you question why you're doing it. Would you not have behaved like this after any economic downturn, whether it's from a pandemic or the 2008 crash? I think we were. I think we were definitely a little more cautious. But this was so all-encompassing. You know, it just wasn't our business. It was the entire country. And it was, you know, I just think it wasn't something we were prepared for. When you look at the economic downturn, that was a gradual recovery. It wasn't, you know, you're shut down. You have no income.

There was still money coming in. Sorry, I was just going to interject. I don't think you can compare the two. I was in business for both. It's a seismic difference. With the financial crash, you had a little diminution. Compare that to lockdown and the restrictions that happened there. That's just off. And not only off,

It's the knock-on effect that happens to people's behaviour after the fact. It didn't all go rushing back to Kelly's gym. As much as you'd think, oh yeah, well, everybody's now very health conscious and they're going to start doing this. It didn't happen. Or for us, there was a bit of a surge and then it quickly diminished. So the

There is no comparison. And to follow up with that too, with your saying how it changed people, people at home at the pandemic, if they were health conscious, they found other ways to do that. So they started to enjoy the outdoors more. They may have got some equipment in their home. And so for two years or more, this was their life. So they had real no interest in going back to the gym. Sam, one thing we have been told has recovered is international travel and a

pent-up demand for us all to go on holiday. Have you experienced that? We are experiencing a good number of tourists now coming in from all over the world. But remember, economically, these tour operators are coming from debts. Yes, business is coming, but the healing is slow.

The global response to COVID saw trillions of dollars spent on measures that, like many controversial policies, sparked inquiries in countries ranging from Italy and the UK to New Zealand, Brazil, the US and Japan.

And that brings us to the end of today's programme. A big thank you to Sam, Kelly and Martin for sharing their experiences and perspectives on such a turbulent time. This episode of Business Daily was presented by me, Sam Fenwick, and produced by Josh Martin. To catch more episodes, search for Business Daily wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

When you have bars in the sky, onboard showers and award-winning in-flight entertainment, it's no surprise that Emirates was recently named the best airline in the world. We fly you to over 140 destinations, and with partners across the globe, we connect you to another 1,700 cities across six continents. So when we say we're also the largest international airline, what we really mean is...

If you're going there, so are we. Book now on Emirates.com. Fly Emirates. Fly better.