Across Central Kentucky, while many businesses are struggling to stay open, some Central Kentucky entrepreneurs are expanding or starting new endeavors they think will help get them through COVID-19 and beyond.
The key, said chef Ranada Riley, is being able to pivot quickly.
Riley, formerly with Ranada’s Bistro, has opened up the new Ranada’s Kitchen in Chevy Chase.
Ranada Riley
A shift from the restaurant she and her business partners had run since 2018, this business focuses on providing family-style carryout dinners and small catering jobs. It’s a business model she said she thinks will serve her well during COVID and beyond.
“For me, I felt like we really needed to look at what COVID was going to do to the restaurant industry as a whole,” she said. “I wanted a place that would be COVID-friendly, but I wanted to enjoy what I was doing again.”
“When I was writing the business plan for this place, I found that online grocery ordering is up 157 percent. I want people to be able to pick up their groceries here and then do an online cooking class with me,” she said. “Online book sales are up 777 percent. People are at home more. They’re cooking more. They’re learning more and they’re being more health conscious about what they eat.”
But finding the funding for new business ventures in a pandemic has been difficult, she said.
“Here, it’s just me,” Riley said. “I’m the one who is funding this. And I just have to dig in, hunker down and deliver the best product possible, as consistently as I can.”
John Ireland
John Ireland, owner of The Academy, a gymnastics and cheerleading facility, is digging into his own pockets to reenvision his business, too.
The company will be adding a trampoline park onto a new building he moved into after 20 years in another location. The move was precipitated by the death of the property owner, he said. But both the move and the pandemic caused him to reevaluate what his business was supposed to be and how it operates.
For example, he had a foam pit at the old facility, an impossible area to keep clean according to CDC guidelines. Instead, at the new facility, there will be a trampoline park and some inflatables in the parking lot in order to make up for it.
“I feel like I’m going to do this for my lifetime,” Ireland said. “But I had to switch things up because of COVID.” He’ll also offer other services that make sense during a pandemic, like opening up the facility to a limited number of students during the day.
“We call it the NTI Day Camp. Where working parents that now have their children at home for school, we’re going to open for them and let them drop their kids off in the morning,” Ireland said. “We’ll do the homework with them during the day and then care for them until they get picked up after their parents get off work.” So far, he said, his drop-off service is about two thirds full.
But with opening up again, comes more cleaning costs. Staff will work to clean the facility up to four times a day, he said. And they’ll follow CDC guidelines about mask wearing and handwashing throughout the facility. Like Riley, the money for the transition and renovation comes from his own pocket and not from a bank.
“A lot of the assistance programs were based on payroll, and we’re such a small business, we didn’t qualify for a majority of that,” he said. “I just dug into savings, basically, and risked it all. That’s pretty much where I’m at now.”
For Richie Walsh, owner of Kentucky Indoor Lexington, an indoor soccer and sports facility, the pandemic was a chance to step back and assess what his business needed in order to succeed. As an industry, indoor entertainment is a struggle during COVID, he said.
For his business, which generates a large part of its revenue during the winter, figuring out how to proceed during a time when large indoor gatherings are deemed risky has been a challenge.
“We kind of had to take a step back and gauge what this new future was going to look like. It did give us an opportunity to start reevaluating everything that gets pushed off to the side when you’re deep in day-to-day operations,” he said.
Some of the reevaluations led to concerns about the condition of the facility. When negotiations with the building’s owner about updating the facility broke down, the business and the property parted ways. That led to another look, Walsh said, of what his business offers and how he was going to deliver for his customers.
That means finding and retrofitting an existing property, or building to suit on an undeveloped property. Over the course of the next few months, he said, he’ll be considering his options and watching what happens in order to open up in the winter of 2021–2022.
“We’re essentially just waiting to see what’s going to happen. It’s a tremendous ask to start a new venture in the world of indoor sports in this climate.” — Richie Walsh, owner Kentucky Indoor Lexington
“We’re essentially just waiting to see what’s going to happen. It’s a tremendous ask to start a new venture in the world of indoor sports in this climate,” he said. “I do not have a tremendous amount of confidence that, even if the government or the governor himself were to say, ‘That’s it! The virus is eradicated, everybody celebrate. Take off your masks and let’s go outside!’ I just don’t know that [everything will return to normal] that quickly. And because of that, we have no chance and have no plan to come back this winter.”
But a good relationship with his bank and good relationships with others in the community are helping him to ensure that when he is ready to start moving, he’ll have the funding to do so.