Granite State News Collaborative

At the very beginning of March 2020, when there were relatively few cases of coronavirus in the Granite State, Roger Weinreich, president of Good Fortune Jewelry & Pawn in Keene, caught the virus. That, coupled with his conversations with business contacts in Asia, prompted Weinreich to shut down his shop even before the governor issued a stay at home order. Weinreich hoped he could lead by example and help the U.S. get ahead of the pandemic.

“We optimistically thought, ‘let’s shut down for 60 days,’” Weinreich said.

He urged others in his region and his industry to do the same, but it soon became clear that the impacts of the pandemic would last much longer than two months.

In the fall of 2020, when many schools and colleges were opting to go remote, Keene State decided to try to safely bring students back to campus. The initiative — which includes frequent testing of students and staff, monitoring of local waste water, and a 24/7 rapid response team — has cost the school nearly $5 million, but pending any major changes it will enable Keene to keep students on campus and in classrooms until the spring semester ends on May 28.

When Danya Landis and her business partners opened Machina Kitchen and Art Bar, a farm-to-table restaurant and artistic space in Keene, they went in aware of the risk they were taking.

“As industries go, the restaurant industry is not an easy one to get into,” Landis said. “It was definitely something that was going to be a learning curve in the first place.”

Despite that, they thought that they could make it work. Landis and her business partner Rebecca Hamilton had already been running events in the greater Keene area. When they crossed paths with Jordan Scott, their third active business partner, they saw how they could build a space dedicated to connecting people through art and food.

With social distancing, only about eight audience members would be allowed into MoCo’s black box theater. Even if they utilized theater space at nearby Keene State University, the crowd would be much smaller.

Instead of returning to live performances, Messer borrowed an idea from professional dance and theater troupes, which began releasing videos of old productions during the pandemic as a way to keep some revenue coming in. MoCo would film productions, making them available for streaming or download to family members and anyone else who was interested.

Before the pandemic hit, Sargent Denium Reynolds, an Army recruiter based in Keene, spent a lot of time on the road. The Keene recruiting office is one of six Army recruiting offices in New Hampshire. Reynolds and the five other service members in the office are responsible for recruiting in southwestern New Hampshire, all the way up to the Upper Valley. To do that, they used to go out into the community, visiting high schools and colleges to talk to people who may be interested in an Army career.

Shae Sterrett saw the stress and anxiety brought on in the early days of the pandemic, and she thought she could help. Sterrett had been working for herself for four years in sales and marketing, but she was interested in launching a business focused exclusively on yoga therapy and wellness. The pandemic, Sterrett believed, showed just how critical the need was for services like the ones she could offer.

“In the midst of COVID, there’s this mental health crisis going on,” she said.

At the beginning of 2020, Sport & Spine Physical Therapy, Inc. had moved into a new space. It was bigger than their old location and, importantly, didn’t have any shared entrances or waiting rooms. With a medical background and the new, safer space on his side, Campbell was confident that he could keep treating patients safely. Still, patients were wary about coming in for treatment that they saw as non-essential.

Campbell knew that he had to make people comfortable coming in the door, not only for the sake of his business, but in order to keep his patients healthy. He extended patient appointments from 30 minutes to 40, in order to have fewer people in the clinic at a time and to allow for cleaning between appointments. Both practitioners and patients have appreciated the longer time slots, Campbell said.

At the beginning of 2020, ConvenientMD was looking toward expansion. The Portsmouth-based company had plans to open multiple new locations, and continue to offer more intensive services that are usually reserved for hospitals, like infusions for patients with long-term conditions like multiple sclerosis or arthritis. The company was also preparing to launch a telehealth platform, but more for balancing loads between locations than for delivering care to patients directly.

However, the leadership of the company, including Co-founder and Executive Chairman Gareth Dickens, was also monitoring the coronavirus emerging in China. Before the virus was declared a pandemic, Dickens and his team could see what was coming, and began stocking up on personal protective equipment. Soon, a conference room at the company’s Portsmouth headquarters was transformed into a PPE holding space.

With the deluge of regulations, staffing challenges and policy changes that have faced small businesses over the past year, many businesses have needed a human resources professional in a way that never did in the past. And yet most small businesses don’t employ an HR staff person — let alone department — in house.

That’s where HR2Fit comes in. The company, with offices in Tilton and in Walpole, Massachusetts, offers outsourced HR services to companies throughout New Hampshire and Massachusetts, even before the pandemic. Since coronavirus hit, demand for their services has grown almost 20%.

Customers come in and tell Kelly Pearson, who owns Cowabunga’s along with her husband Matthew, that they’re excited to see so many families visiting. But after a year of trying to keep the business together amidst COVID, Pearson finds it hard not to focus on all the customers who aren’t there.

“Running a business has such high expenses,” Pearson said. “Just to be able to cover those expenses you need more people.”