For nearly four years, I’ve profiled several south suburban small-business owners in this column. With the COVID-19 pandemic still raging and continuing to claim lives and damage the economy, here is a look at how two of those businesses have been affected in the fourth of an intermittent column series.
Last year was supposed to a big year for Monica Mason’s M & M Staffing Agency. Her Flossmoor-based company, which provides temporary hiring, direct hiring and contract hiring services, was positioned for major growth thanks in part to several lucrative multiyear government contracts she had landed, including one with the CTA and one with City Colleges of Chicago.
But the COVID-19 pandemic slammed into both her and her business. She contracted the virus and was laid up for weeks, and the pandemic put the contracts on hold.
“I knew when the pandemic happened those contracts would be impacted,” she said. “Both of them deal with the public a lot and face-to-face customer service, so I knew they would be put on hold.”
Meanwhile, her private sector clients also dropped off as lockdowns were implemented and companies laid off workers. Her revenues dropped roughly 40% last year, she said. Before the pandemic hit, she had been anticipating roughly 150% growth, she said.
Mason, who holds a master’s degree in human resources management, launched the business six years ago after first working in corporate America. She focused on building a diversified client base of government clients and private sector clients in fields including accounting, finance, health care, manufacturing and transportation.
She said she has also focused on being positioned to weather unexpected storms.
“We had reserves put aside for emergency purposes,” she said.
Still, she never expected to be hit with a pandemic. To help sustain her business, which employs three people, she successfully sought assistance from the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program. The latter helped her pay for insurance that CTA and City Colleges require her to have, she said.
Amid the pandemic, she has been providing services to mostly small clients and she is hopeful this year she will be allowed to proceed with work on the big contracts and be able to pursue other big contracts. In the meantime, she said she plans to seek more assistance from the latest round of Paycheck Protection Program loans for her company. She said federal legislators need to provide even more targeted assistance.
They need to “be more supportive, have a little more empathy for the small businesses to make sure we do have an opportunity for any grants that could help us get back on our feet,” Mason said. “The bigger companies, they are going to be OK because they have billions of dollars. It’s the smaller people they need to worry about to make sure our needs are met first.”
Mason said the pandemic pushed up plans she had to launch another venture, COMO Boutique, an online business that sells women’s apparel, accessories and shoes. For years, she had an interest in launching the enterprise and had been perfecting a business plan. After she contracted the virus in March and during her recovery, she used that time to research e-commerce. She decided to build her own website and launched the business in September. More than 5,000 people have already visited the site, she said. She wasn’t sure what to expect for her first Christmas shopping season.
“We did 12 deals of Christmas, and every day people were buying stuff,” she said. “We did really well.”
When asked what is the greatest lesson she has learned over the past year, she quoted Madame C.J. Walker, who said don’t sit and wait for opportunities, get up and make them.
“That’s what made me go for the boutique,” Mason said. “I read that quote. It means if a door is closing, go make something else happen for yourself.”
Kozy Korner Deli & Catering
Karen McClinton, owner of Kozy Korner Deli & Catering, said she was scared when the COVID-19 pandemic struck and sent the economy into a tailspin.
“I don’t even have a dining area,” McClinton said. “I do have takeout, carryout. But we really didn’t know what was going to happen because they were shutting down everything. We were so happy we could do curbside.”
Her business, which she runs with her children, opened in Dolton in 2016 after she operated it for many years in Chicago. She sells her signature “hoagy” sandwiches with the signature special sauce she created with her dad.
Amid the pandemic, McClinton said revenues dove to as low as $150 a day.
“It was very hard for us,” she said. “We were thinking of ways we could sell outside of people not walking in.”
Simultaneously her catering business collapsed.
“Nobody was gathering in large groups, so we weren’t getting any catering, and that’s where our main revenue is from,” she said. “The pandemic impacted me from not being able to do birthday parties, lunch box accounts that I had throughout the summer. FedEx and UPS, they have parties and gatherings, the post office. They feed their employees. We missed all that money.”
That included the summer jobs program for kids in Dolton, that was canceled, as well as the larger contracts she had for companies that had gatherings or meetings. She also missed out on high school student business.
“Prom is a big, big thing for us,” she said. “We have all of the moms come in and they tell us all the stories. It’s like they’re planning a wedding. We missed the prom send offs. We missed the graduations. We missed all of that.”
McClinton said they initially responded to the drop in sales by doing their own deliveries and suspending use of delivery service vendors, to avoid having to pay them fees.
“I told my sons if customers want delivery, then we are going to go far,” she said. “We are going to have to go far because people aren’t coming outside. I needed a strategy to bring in some kind of money to pay the bills.
“I was not going to let DoorDash take the little money we can make. I said we can also have our customers just pull up, and we are going to go right outside and take it to their car, and they can Cash App us or pay online, so we started doing that.”
She said she focused on what had built her business — the personal relationships she had with her customers.
“I’m so personal with my customers, and my customers are very personal with me,” she said. “In my phone, I have over 500 customers that I text and that text me back.”
She would send texts regarding specials, and sales began to rise, she said.
“When people say can you sell somebody something through text messages, well it works,” said McClinton.
She has also focused on marketing via social media, and her daughter assists with that, which has also helped sales, she said.
“Another thing that saved us was churches and different organizations when they started to place orders with us to feed first responders,” said McClinton. “That really helped. We were doing lunchboxes, sandwiches and catering trays, and we were delivering to hospitals downtown, local fire departments, local police stations.”
She is now considering getting a food truck or trailer. She said a $5,000 U.S. Small Business Administration grant and Paycheck Protection Program loan has helped the business persevere. She stressed legislators need to provide more assistance for small businesses and said restaurants should be a priority.
Starting last June, Kozy Korner, which employs five people, began to recover and has resumed using delivery vendors, McClinton said. Sales were good for New Year’s Eve and Christmas, she said.
“A lot of people stayed home, and instead of cooking, got the (sandwich) trays,” she said.
But while the business is recovering, she said it’s still not back to the level it was before the pandemic.
“I’m hoping and praying that it all comes back this year,” she said.
Francine Knowles is a freelance columnist for the Daily Southtown
