Small businesses can’t just shut down.

They don’t have big balance sheets and lines of credit supporting them. They depend on employees who are like extended family. And while they hear reports daily from Washington that help is on the way, the specifics and time frames remain as uncertain as the coronavirus threat.

So far, President Donald Trump signed a bill into law that includes food and medical relief for Americans and ensures paid-leave benefits to many workers. The next phase of negotiations in Congress includes a $300 billion proposal designed to help small businesses avoid mass layoffs. As of Friday, small business owners across Texas can apply for up to $2 million in long-term, low-interest Economic Injury Disaster Loans from the Small Business Administration.

But questions remain about how rapidly aid will be made available to the businesses and workers that need it.

Survival in a capitalist society is on the shoulders of small-business owners.

Last week, Thomas Crowther watched as the coronavirus outbreak was deemed a global pandemic by the World Health Organization. Every 24-hour news network picked up on the announcement. But at the time, it was just news on TV that he and the staff of his small business — The Crowther Group — were keeping a close eye on.

Over the weekend, however, the construction industry became more attuned to the potential impacts of coronavirus’ spread, both from a financial and public health perspective, Crowther said.

As additional cases of the new coronavirus emerged, elected officials across North Texas banned large gatherings and some companies directed employees to work remotely to stem the spread. And with each passing day, more restrictions have been put in place.

So on Sunday evening, Crowther moved quickly to set guidelines limiting business travel for his 12-person team whose offices are off Dallas North Tollway and Arapaho Road.

Crowther Group is a commercial general construction company that works with clients including Target, PNC Bank, Parkland Hospital and AT&T. It hires subcontractors for retail jobs such as renovating changing rooms in a Target or completing an interior and exterior brand refresh for Walmart Neighborhood Market locations.

“I haven't slept a full night all week,” said Crowther, the company’s CEO. He’s concerned about not only the health and safety of his direct employees but the smaller companies they rely on.

Nearly half of Texas’ private workforce is employed by a small business, according to a Small Business Administration analysis from 2018. Nationwide in the past three weeks, those businesses have seen revenue decline 15% to 80% depending on where they’re located, and are struggling to pay bills.

Groups like the Main Street Alliance are pushing Congress to come up with assistance for small businesses. Its message, “investments in Main Street will go much further to protect families in America than investments in Wall Street,” is grabbing attention in an election year and with memories still fresh of the big-business bailouts of the Great Recession.

Keith Colvin managed through that downturn more than a decade ago. He has operated comic book stores in the Dallas area for 31 years, surviving even as others have gone out of business.

“I moved a store on 9/11. We survived the Great Recession and the comic book crash of the 1990s, competition on eBay. But I can’t see how to navigate this one,” said the owner of Keith’s Comics.

“It’s not even like a tornado. That at least has an ending,” Colvin said Wednesday just as he was notified that the Simon Group, the largest U.S. mall operator, was shutting down its properties, including Garland’s Firewheel Town Center, where he has a store.

On April 1, Colvin is facing rent on six stores and one storage facility. Payroll for his 34 full-time and part-time employees on Friday was taken care of, but he has to do it again on the first and 15th of the month. Some of his employees have been with him for 20 years.

In January and most of February, business was good and he placed orders for three months of comic books and toys. Now he’s keeping up with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requirements, local government rules, social distancing restrictions and contemplating curbside service.

It’s not dire yet, Colvin said, but it is a new reality that requires immediate change.

“I have a responsibility to my customers and my employees. I have a responsibility to stay in business,” he said. “I don’t know. I can’t envision 30 days or more of this.”

Best-laid plans

Small-business owners are the superstars among the self-motivated. But this sudden-stop economy is blowing up even the best-laid plans and a decade of economic growth in Texas.

After getting her two elementary school children started Thursday morning on their school assignments, Nisha Patel, owner of Apples to Zinnias in the Plaza at Preston Center, hit her books.

She made lists of options, resources, people to contact and the minimum bills that must be paid if her business continues for a prolonged time at 50% of what it was just last month.

“We’re open on a limited scale, taking phone orders and leaving deliveries on the porch and offering curbside pickup,” Patel said. “I have five employees, and they depend on me.”

Normally, the florist shop’s business comes from customers celebrating anniversaries, birthdays and special occasions or trying to cheer up people in hospitals and nursing homes. The latter has dried up in the past week as health care and nursing homes have locked down.

Patel had put in place a strategy right after Valentine’s Day to expand Apples to Zinnias’ business with office and restaurant customers. Much of that’s been canceled.

“We’re doing what we can,” she said. “It’s really scary. Everything is changing.”

It took father and son David and Brad Schweig a couple of days to come up with a plan to accommodate the realities of coronavirus during the busiest time of the year at their Sunnyland Patio Furniture stores.

“It’s Christmas in the patio world,” Brad Schweig said. “We have a business plan, but it doesn’t allow for being shut down for a couple months. These are uncharted times for everybody.”

Should they close the family’s stores in North Dallas and Frisco at the start of their prime season? No, they decided. People are home for an extended time, and they may want to spruce up the backyard. So they reduced the store hours and added appointment-only hours as well.

This is Sunnyland’s 50th year in business, but the promotions and other events they had in the works for April, May and June may have to be scrapped.

“We want to keep our employees. They’re valuable to us and we’re trying to figure out how we can get through this,” Brad Schweig said. “In retail, there are very few small companies that can pay two weeks of salaries without sales.”

Providing crucial services

Some small businesses, such as BCI Janitorial, provide services to other companies that are suddenly looking for ways to save money.

Dozens of the Carrollton-based company’s employees are hard at work cleaning and disinfecting the offices that workers across Dallas-Fort Worth are trying to avoid.

“We’re on the front lines of this thing,” said BCI Janitorial services’ 42-year-old head of business development Oscar DeLeon. “ We didn’t expect to be, but … it’s where we’re finding ourselves.”

The company has a core management team of six people and employs around 80 workers who provide cleaning services to commercial clients around D-FW. It had just over $1 million in revenue in 2019, according to the Dallas Business Journal.

As more and more companies direct employees to work from home, DeLeon said, some clients have asked for reduced prices on their contracts and a rash of jobs were canceled for the latter half of March.

“If we can't bill it, then I can't pay it to my employees,” he said.

“The past decade has been, you know, just really good,” said DeLeon of BCI’s business. The family-owned company has been around for close to 30 years, he said.

But the janitorial services industry is competitive, DeLeon said, and profit margins are thin.

Some of his clients that are keeping skeleton crews in their offices are ramping up cleaning services, he said. DeLeon said the company has some cash reserves and will hopefully be able to lean on the diversity of BCI’s client base to keep the company afloat and its workers paid — for now.

“It's been so chaotic here lately that we're trying to keep abreast of all the payroll changes and all the billing changes that are going on,” DeLeon said. “Billing and payroll is going to be a bit of a nightmare here in the year coming up.”

‘Winning locker room’

The Crowther Group pulled in $12 million in revenue in 2019, and Crowther is still optimistic about matching that this year.

“We have great clients. They believe in investing and leaving the communities that they serve better than they found them,” Crowther said. “Some of the Fortune 500s we work with have been instrumental to our growth over the last three years.”

But Crowther predicts that some of his project start dates may be pushed back.

Cowen Equity Research expects that Macy’s will spend half the $1 billion it had planned on renovations and its new store concept. Nordstorm will shave spending by about $100 million to $450 million, Cowen estimated.

Mobile carriers like AT&T have temporarily closed between 40% and 80% of physical retail storefronts, while grocers such as Walmart, Target, Kroger and others are trying to cope with an overwhelming demand for food as Americans continue to stockpile essentials against the advice of government officials.

“During this time, it’s probably more important to make sure that end users get their perishables, their toilet paper, their meat products than to actually start some of our projects,” Crowther said. “So we do forecast some of these projects will hit a pause button.”

And with fewer projects comes less revenue.

“Like any other company, we may be forced to make some tough decisions,” said Crowther.

But Crowther isn’t thinking about layoffs yet. Instead, his team is working on a four-step plan to keep the company as nimble and healthy as possible during an unpredictable time.

The plan begins with mobilizing his team to operate remotely. It will offer voluntary PTO to employees so that they have time to cope with the emotional and family stress that accompanies life during a pandemic. The third step involves thinking outside the box to bring workers indoors who may otherwise be out at construction sites where they could be exposed to large gatherings of people. And finally, his team is trying to find ways to add value to the services they traditionally provide clients.

“We have a saying internally: Never let a good crisis go to waste,” Crowther said.

He’s hoping that the Texas economy’s unique ability to bounce back from past recessions, specifically in Dallas-Fort Worth, will hold true in 2020.

“We are in the winning locker room,” said Crowther, “that’s the best thing about being in North Texas."

He’s worried, however, that other minority-owned businesses might not be able to bounce back from difficult economic conditions.

“I’m emotional to even think about the smaller minority business that’s been working so hard over the last few years to partake in this robust industry and is now probably just starting to get some traction and to have such an economic disruption,” Crowther said. “It’s going to take those businesses three times as long to get back up to speed.”