Business owners and CEOs throughout North Texas are trying to keep their companies afloat until we emerge from this unprecedented global human and economic carnage. They’re cutting staff, shifting gears, reducing salaries and taking none for themselves.
Many of them enjoyed robust growth in 2019 and began this year with high expectations.
Now no one is immune from the effects of the pandemic, and they’re doing what they can to make it to the other side of catastrophe.
Here are the inspiring stories of four resilient top executives who are making painful decisions, pivoting their focus and making innovations so that there will be something left to salvage in 2021.
Andrea Meyer: ‘Everybody’s on board’
Andrea Meyer is a fighter.
The 39-year-old executive pastry chef and owner of Bisous Bisous Pâtisserie, a French-style pastry shop in the West Village, has waged war against an extremely rare form of bone cancer. So she isn’t about to let an economic plague get the better of her.
“I definitely had some dark days fighting the cancer,” she said Wednesday in a video call. “But by and large, my personality doesn’t wallow. I don’t sit around and say ‘why me?’ ‘this sucks’ or any of that. It’s like, ‘OK, what’s next?' I’m not going to worry about things I can’t control. I’m going to concentrate on things that we can actually impact.”
In July 2018, a renowned medical team at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., spent two days performing a highly complicated surgery to remove a grapefruit-size tumor on Meyer’s spine. She spent two months in the hospital before returning to Dallas, where she began her long, slow journey of physical therapy. She was intent on recouping as much of her old life as she could — especially her love of being in the kitchen.
In February, Meyer celebrated the pastry shop’s fifth birthday with champagne toasts and the signature macarons and other French delights that helped her earn CultureMap’s Tastemaker Award for “Best Pastry Chef in DFW” last year.
Then her world stopped spinning — again.
Meyer is trying to keep the lights on using the same tenacity and fortitude that she used to face down death. She’s added new products, updated her website and extended her neighborhood and social media outreach.
For Meyer, the situation came to a head three weeks ago when she lost most of her wholesale business, which accounted for 30% of her sales.
Her retail business isn't what she expected it to be a month ago, but it’s holding its own.
“We sell happiness, and people still need that,” she said. Residents in the neighborhood condos and apartments are keeping the store alive.
She’s using customer feedback and ingenuity to try to replace some of her wholesale business.
In two weeks, Meyer has expanded her freezer-to-oven line using ingredients she had on hand. These are goodies that can go directly from frozen into a hot oven without thawing on the counter.
As of Wednesday, customers could grab frozen croissants, scones and cookies, take them home and bake them later. This week she hopes to offer Danish rolls, brownies, apple crisps and monkey bread.
“Most of our innovations are things that we want or need," Meyer said.
She and her tech-savvy husband, Matt, went into high gear and are updating her website to focus on e-commerce. She’d been dragging her feet on the project for several years because she preferred face-to-face repartee with customers in the intimate pastry shop.
That’s no longer an option.
Customers still have to pick up their goodies at the store.
“We don’t ship anything,” she said. “It helps us build a delivery structure outside of UberEats. Most restaurateurs will tell you that UberEats, Doordash and others are serving a necessary purpose, but they’re also taking 30% of our money. That’s money that I could use to buy more ingredients, donate to charities, help my staff, whatever.
“I want that 30% back. Matt’s phone makes a little chi-ching noise whenever there’s a sale through the website. So when something sells when we’re not open, it’s a high-five success.”
She hasn’t had to let any of her 19 employees go. She was upset when she lost five people through attrition in March, but now she’s thanking her lucky stars.
“That really helped shave hours off the team. Everybody’s had a bit of a reduction, but all of my full-time people are at least at 32 hours," Meyer said.
The core culture is keeping her team together.
“We have each other’s back," she said. "We are a drama-free kitchen. We are strong women doing what we need to do to make things happen. You can feel it in the air in the kitchen every day.”
She’s had to space out scheduling at the offsite bakery in the Design District so that there are fewer cooks in the kitchen at the same time.
“But everybody’s on board. They are grateful for the fact that I don’t take a paycheck, but they’re still getting one.”
Meyer kept hearing customers lamenting on social media that they can’t find sugar, flour and other baking pantry essentials. “We have easily 450 pounds of each of those things sitting in our kitchen while our production has been reduced by at least in half,” she said. “I had no idea that there was such an overwhelming demand for yeast in the world. Amazing. I’m happy to know that someone is trying to bake any kind of bread.”
Last week, she began selling one-pound containers of sugar, powdered sugar, flour, bread flour, cake flour and little ¾-ounce containers of active dry yeast — charging $1.50 for each just to recoup the cost of the container and packaging the ingredients.
“Then somebody told me they’re having trouble finding butter. I’ve got that, too,” Meyer said.
The food supply chain to Dallas’ restaurants has been minimally affected so far, Meyer said, but she expects that to worsen with the spread of the virus. So she’s continuing to stock up with her shelf-stable ingredients as well as butter, which keeps for months or can be frozen.
“We’re making sure we have it while we can get it. If we can get the extra to our customers because they need it at home, great.”
Anybody who has battled something as big as cancer comes out on the other side with gratitude and a desire to grasp onto the things that bring joy, she said.
“If we stay true to our core values as a business, and we’re still providing value to our customers in a way that I think is safe, then we can keep moving forward," Meyer said. "If at any point we aren’t doing that, we’ll close and deal with the repercussions of not having any revenue.
“I try to lift up everyone around me because I can’t do this without them. I need them as much as they need me.”
Eric Devlin: Hitting close to home
Eric Devlin felt so positive about prospects for the upcoming year that the 53-year-old CEO of Dallas-based Premier Transportation Services sent his best customers wine with the company’s logo and 20 in 2020 etched into the bottle as a thank-you.
It was a way of saying the company wanted to reach $20 million in sales. That didn’t seem like a stretch given the $18.6 million that the 24-year-old luxury limo business hauled in last year.
Two months into the year, Devlin was on pace to reach that goal and then some.
Now he’ll be elated if Premier brings in half that. He figures $6 million to $8 million is a more likely figure.
On a typical day in March, April or May, his company would do 200-plus runs. Last week, it was four, maybe five.
“I so wish to be in a hut on a beach in Belize without a worry or care,” Devlin said. “Geez, what a massive pain this whole deal is.”
Devlin is pulling out all the stops to keep at least a small fraction of his $10 million fleet on the road.
“I’ve made significant gains in reducing our monthly burn rate,” he said. “BTH Bank in Dallas and our national lenders who carry our big vehicle notes have deferred payment for 90 to 120 days so we have no car payments. That’s a godsend.”
Yes, it is. He has 13 big motor coaches that cost $550,000 a pop.
He worked out an agreement with his insurance carrier to mothball about 90% of his vehicles so he doesn’t have to pay premiums on them.
Premier had 97 vehicles regularly navigating North Texas roads before shelter-in-place. Now 85 are parked indefinitely at his company headquarters in the hospital district near Harry Hines Boulevard.
“We kept four motor coaches on the books because we have a contract with Amazon to do employee shuttles. That requires two of them,” he said. “We kept a third as backup and a fourth in the rare chance that something else pops up.”
He has a handful of sedans, four SUVs, three minibuses and a couple of vans, and that’s it.
Premier is delivering food, running errands and even giving family joy rides.
He’s offering private, long-trip transportation for those who want to travel in luxury, but so far he’s had few takers. “It’s primarily personal travel to see family,” he said. “Nobody wants to do that either. Grandma doesn’t want to go down to Austin to visit the grandkids who might have it [coronavirus] and vice versa.”
He’s applied for every conceivable government relief program and state grant.
On Friday the 13th, he laid off 102 of his 140 employees.
“It was the worst day of my life,” he said. “There was crying, people slamming stuff, people hugging and falling down on the floor. It was something I never want to experience again.”
He retained a small core of operations staff and 15 of his 90 chauffeurs. Drivers are paid by the run, and they’re not making many. “At some point, I'll have to figure out a way to make up their salaries if we’re asking them to stay with us versus them staying at home and filing for unemployment.”
Devlin’s younger brother and his 13-year-old son who live in Far North Dallas have the virus. “So this has hit really close to me. He’s in his late 40s, is in great shape and only has a little bit of chest tightening, but it’s still scary stuff. He and his son are quarantined on one side of the house, and his wife and other son are in the other half. They don’t talk. They text.”
It’ll be a long haul to recovery for his company, he said.
Premier’s business is heavily dependent on corporate and convention travel.
“So even if we found a cure today, and everyone was inoculated tomorrow, it would be more than two months before corporations could plan and organize meetings again,” Devlin said.
“Typically July and August are our slow times. No one wants to come to Dallas when it’s 106 degrees."
He hopes meetings that were scheduled for March, April or May will resurface in August or September. The start of football could also bring some relief.
“But I heard yesterday that the University of Texas head coach predicts that the college football season will be canceled,” Devlin said. “That means that high school football will be canceled. We usually have motor coaches running all over the state taking teams, bands, cheerleaders and drill teams to games.
“So it’s probably six months before we’re back to about 50%. And maybe a year or a year and a half before we get back to 2018 and 2019.”
He’s learned personal lessons with this business implosion.
“I’ve been the first one to go show off at dinner and buy a super, super expensive bottle of wine or stay at a highfalutin resort in Cabo [San Lucas] at $1,200 a night. No more,” Devlin said. “I’m going to start enjoying the smaller things in life. I’m going to take better care of myself and continue to support my employees. I need to have fun.
“I don’t need to be the biggest and the best in the transportation world. I need to be the most profitable.”
Jason Craven: Choosing optimism over fear
Jason Craven considers himself among the more fortunate.
His landscape company, Southern Botanical, has been deemed essential, so it’s been pretty much business as usual as his crews continue to install and maintain some of North Texas’ most high-profile greenspaces.
Think Klyde Warren Park, Southern Methodist University, the new Charles Schwab campus in Westlake and the George W. Bush Presidential Center, including Laura Bush’s Prairie Chapel Flower Garden.
Craven founded the company 25 years ago when he was 19. Now it’s a $30 million business that employs just under 300 people. And he’s never had a layoff.
He is determined to keep that streak intact regardless of the current upheaval.
“My employees are like family,” he said last week. “I can’t fathom having to lay anyone off, so we’re doing everything we can to get in front of this.”
Nor does he expect to cut salaries — including his.
“I’ve always paid myself very modestly and have relied on dividends based on profitability,” he said. “All of our team just received raises and bonuses based on 2019, so I’m not asking anyone to take a pay cut. We’re not looking to pay new people less. Our entryway is $14 an hour, and our true average wage is in the high teens and low 20s.”
Craven knew about the pandemic but frankly didn’t become critically concerned until the week before shelter-in-place was mandated.
“We tend to be bullish,” he said. “The magnitude of this thing surprised everybody.”
He’s relying on his team's “scrappy" mentality and creativity to maintain a steady course for both the company and its clients.
His staff rallied together on March 22 after Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins issued the shelter-in-place order. They came in Monday morning battle-ready, immediately working the phones.
Within a week, they’d spoken to every client to find out where that company stood, asking all of them whether they wanted to dial back or proceed as planned.
These weren’t shallow, obligatory “we’re here to help” calls, Craven said. They were detailed, often personal.
None of the clients seem panicked. “We have had very little fallout. But we have had a few that we’ve had to get creative for.”
Southern Botanical is looking at how it can help expand outdoor work areas and eating spaces for corporate clients, retailers and restaurants when they reopen.
“We’ve installed a lot of outdoor seating and living areas where people can expand their workspace,” Craven said. “I imagine there will be more interest in this as everyone tries to figure out how to keep people safe with social distancing. The outdoors is a great opportunity to do that.”
Craven has steered Southern Botanical through two downturns — 9/11 and the “great one” of 2008.
“This time is different due to the uncertainty that we face in the upcoming weeks,” he said. “The massive shutdown will have a devastating effect on the working class. The sudden nature has caught many off guard, unprepared and out of money.”
He sees opportunity in the aftermath.
“Demand for our services is growing. There’s been a lot of private equity roll-ups and mergers in our industry, and they’ve got different pressures in times like this than we do as a private company. We can think longer-term.
“As a company, we are choosing faith and optimism over fear," he said. “We are choosing sacrifice over selfishness and putting others first.”
Michael Browning Jr.: A world upside down
On March 17, Michael Browning Jr. awoke to a world turned rudely upside down.
The day before, the 35-year-old co-founder and CEO of Bedford-based Urban Air Adventure Parks and his Dallas-based counterparts, Dave McPhillips, CEO of Chuck E. Cheese, and Chris Morris, CEO of Main Event Entertainment, had agreed to shut down all of their units in unison in a show of solidarity.
“All three of us said, ‘Look, this is bigger than us,’ ” Browning said in a Google Hangouts interview Tuesday. “That was a big moment in our industry.”
That morning, the new reality hit him — hard.
Urban Air wouldn’t be opening its 131 mostly franchised family entertainment centers around the country, leaving its 12,500 workers with no place to go. Expansion plans for 155 more franchise units in the pipeline were now mothballed, and the company’s 416 franchisees were stuck in limbo.
A week later, Browning, McPhillips and executives at a few other chains struck a deal with Amazon, which was looking to immediately hire 100,000 people. Amazon created a special link where their employees could fill out an application and have a job in seven days. Amazon also promised to let their employees return once the businesses were back up and running.
“I got an outpouring of thanks from our employees,” Browning said.
A second harsh reality hit even closer to home Monday when Browning had to let go a quarter of his full-time corporate office staff. The remaining 82 full-timers took a 15% salary cut, while the executive team — including Browning — suspended their salaries indefinitely.
“As a CEO, you have to look at how to keep the business going so that when we come out of this, we hopefully can call our people back and maybe even employ more,” he said the day after the bloodletting. “But you can’t escape the emotional connection that you have with these people who are friends and colleagues and have gone into battle by your side for the past few years.
“I’m so proud of my leadership team and the bravery and courage that they’ve displayed during this time. But it’s awful. There’s no other way to describe it. There is no playbook for this.”
So he and his executive team are creating one.
“We have great partners in our landlords who are helping our franchisees by deferring rent. Our lending partners began deferring principal and interest even before the government stepped in. As a franchiser, we’ve deferred our royalties and pass-through costs to help our franchisees. And we’ve reached out to our vendors asking them to provide support,” he said. “We will get through this, ramp back up and get back to business.”
This is a guy who has created a culture that celebrates on-the-job play, good times and teamwork.
He’s trying to be transparent to customers, employees and franchisees while taking swift, decisive action based on information that changes by the hour, if not minute.
It’s a hard row to hoe.
"My philosophy at the onset of this pandemic hasn't changed,” he said. “Everyone should suffer a little so no one funder, partner or franchisee will suffer a lot. Hopefully, we’ll be able to look back on this as the two months that never were — when the world froze temporarily."
To stay engaged with its customers, Urban Air asked customers to build their own “Warrior Courses” with pool noodles, blankets, throw pillows, Nerf balls, whatever, and send videos of their kids “training” at home.
As an entrepreneur, Browning is an eternal optimist and sees opportunity in turmoil.
Larger competitors are going to be handcuffed by debt, he said. “We’re small, lean and mean. We’re going to come out of this and still have cash on hand to market in a big way.”
He hopes that U.S. coronavirus cases will peak in mid-April and then trend lower.
“We hope to start bringing parks online in early May in some way, shape or form,” he said. “Now that may mean limited capacity and some social distancing requirements inside of our parks.”
He believes there is pent-up demand — literally. The father of three young kids bought everyone bikes at Walmart to save his family’s sanity.
“There’s pent-up demand, but the question is: Are people going to have the disposable entertainment dollars available to do what they want to do?”
As for assuring parents that Urban Air is safe and sanitized, Browning said there is nothing new in that.
“Since the start of this company, we’ve used an antimicrobial, antibacterial, antifungal, misting/fogging technology that leaves a protective coating on our attractions for 90 days. And we do an additional fog every 30 days,” Browning said. “If it’s not coronavirus, it’s hand-foot-mouth, flu or something else. Obviously, when we reopen, we’ll have more people walking around, wiping down everything.”
Urban Air is looking at thermal camera technology that could identify any guest with a fever at the door.
He sees a silver lining to this very black cloud.
“You never know why things happen. But I believe that good can come from even the darkest of situations,” he said. “Maybe the good that will come from this is a rallying of the American people — the world, for that matter — that we’re not in control as we thought we were. There’s something out there that’s bigger than us that can in one day rock our world — like coronavirus.
“You know what? People matter. Let’s slow down a little, appreciate what we have, work together and stay home.
“When this is over, I hope we all celebrate like troops coming home from war.”
