he COVID-19 pandemic has been less than kind to small businesses.

The Alaska Small Business Development Center’s 2020 Annual Report, which surveyed 550 small business owners across the state, found that 60 percent of businesses experienced decreased revenue in 2020, between 25 percent and 95 percent lower compared to previous years. Fifty percent of businesses surveyed said adapting to COVID was the biggest challenge they faced in 2020.

Despite those challenges, business license applications soared during the pandemic. According to the Alaska Division of Corporations, Business and Professional Licensing, the state issued 25,309 businesses licenses in FY2021, a 79.8 percent increase from the 14,072 licenses it issued in FY2020.

Of course, the number of licenses issued doesn’t equal new businesses opening their doors during that period. Some businesses that obtained licenses are still in the planning or construction phases. Others may have found the challenges of operating during a pandemic too overwhelming and either postponed or scrapped plans to launch. Others still shut their doors almost as quickly as they opened.

But there were bright spots, with some small businesses able to establish a foothold in their community and navigate their way to what qualifies as success during a pandemic.

Whether it was the ability to quickly pivot to a new service model, offering a niche product or service uniquely suited to pandemic life, or a combination of both, these businesses managed to succeed—not despite the pandemic, but in some way because of it.

Shutdown orders for non-essential businesses and risk-tolerance levels of owners and customers meant many small businesses had to reevaluate and quickly change how they delivered goods and services.

Sierra Roland owns Twisted Root Market, a small organic grocery store in Wrangell. At the start of the pandemic, she offered residents of Wrangell, Petersburg, and Prince of Wales Island the option to submit wholesale orders through her network of small suppliers, who weren’t initially affected by the same supply issues encountered by Wrangell’s larger grocery stores.

When COVID reached Southeast, Roland had just learned she was pregnant, and she was unwilling to risk her health or that of her baby. Even though Twisted Root was classified as an essential business, she closed the store to in-person shopping and switched to online ordering only with curbside pick-up and shipping as delivery options.

There was only one catch.

“We did not have a website at all, and we had Facebook and Instagram just for posting our specials,” she says. “My husband became a website developer overnight. He took a day off work and said, ‘Okay, if this is what needs to happen, close the store for the day and let’s do it.’”

Within 48 hours the store had a website up and running, and a week later it had completely transitioned to online ordering.

“He definitely did it [the website] out of necessity; I don’t think I could pay him to do it again,” she says with a laugh.

The transition to online ordering and the addition of shipping helped the store reach customers not just in Wrangell’s surrounding communities, Roland says, but people in the Lower 48 as well.

“It really brought our little shop to the forefront of Wrangell’s mind of somewhere to grocery shop,” Roland says of the changes she made to the store’s business model. “On a personal level, I believe it made us more tied to Wrangell and the Southeast community at large because we were able to meet people by offering online orders. We helped a lot of folks who couldn’t get items at their regular store because they had run out.”

Beyond changes to the delivery of goods in Southeast, the pandemic shook up delivery of services. Dr. Elisa Rosier, owner of Pacific Pediatrics in Ketchikan, had been hoping for exactly that.

“Prior to the pandemic, I had a vision of doing kind of a hybrid well-child check, where I would do telehealth for all of the things that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that doctors talk about at the various visits,” she explains. Changes to state licensing and insurance reimbursement requirements surrounding the provision of telehealth helped her put that long-time goal into practice.

“Parents would be in the comfort of their home and the child would be secure and playing, and we could really delve into all of their questions,” Rosier says. “And then, the child can come in with the parents and do the examination and everything that needed to be done in a more focused way.”

Rosier says she now sees most of her patients virtually, scheduling clinic appointments only for issues that can’t be resolved virtually or which she feels more comfortable doing in person, such as writing prescriptions. The switch, she says, was better than she’d imagined and has even helped her provide better care to her patients.

“Surprisingly, I was able to get most of the clinical problems totally resolved via telehealth, which was awesome,” she says. “And I learned more about my patients, especially the teenagers, because they’re used to talking to their friends on Facetime and Zoom and they’d tell me things they would never tell me in person. It’s a very comfortable way for parents and patients to express themselves when they’re at home in a relaxed setting.”

It would be difficult to imagine a more surprising product to experience a glow-up during the pandemic than houseplants. According to a March 2021 Garden Center magazine survey of more than 250 independent garden centers across the country, that’s exactly what happened. Overall, 64 percent of respondents reported that in 2020 sales of houseplants increased 15 percent or more compared to 2019.

“It was one of those things that I don’t think people expected to have such an impact, but we’ve seen plant shops pop up all over the country at this time,” says Morgan Johnson, who opened Juneau Plant Studio in early 2020.

A recent college graduate, Johnson moved to Juneau for an internship with the City & Borough of Juneau and hosted several successful plant sale pop-ups during lunch breaks and First Friday events. When the pandemic ended the internship, she decided to try her hand at running a brick-and-mortar shop full-time.

Now business is blooming.

Part plant doctor, part plant life coach, many of Johnson’s customers are new plant owners and self-described “black thumbs,” she says. She guides customers to plants that will thrive under their home’s conditions, offers tips for the proper care and handling of their new housemates, and even diagnoses problems to help revive wilted or dying plants. Chatting with customers, she says, has revealed several reasons for the uptick in plant ownership.

“People are spending more time at home, so they’re wanting office plants to look nice in the background of their Zoom screen,” Johnson says. “People have said now that they’re home, they realized how much they liked the plants that were in their office.”

And after so many months of at-home isolation, the greenery helps build a connection, whether it’s talking plants with her at the shop or over Zoom calls.

“At the beginning [of the pandemic], people were kind of alone, and going into a shop and getting to talk to somebody and talk about plants gives them a little bit of social connection,” Johnson explains. “And also, they tell me that people in their Zoom calls will talk to them about their plants, and that will give them something to connect over. It’s just been like a snowball effect, of people seeing other people’s plants and getting into them.”

Alaskans are known for being outdoor enthusiasts, and then the pandemic’s restrictions on indoor gatherings inspired even more people to head outdoors, both to escape the confines of their home and to safely socialize. Frosty Feet Running Company in Fairbanks, which pushed back its planned March 2020 opening to June 2020 after Governor Mike Dunleavy ordered all non-essential businesses closed, was perfectly poised to meet the upswell.

“There hasn’t been a specialty run store here aside from a multi-sport store that had shoes. That’s where I kind of got the concept,” says owner Stacy Fisk, who ran cross country and track and field in college and went on to coach her college team. In addition to offering shoes and other running-related gear, the store provides specialized services like gait analysis, footwear fittings, and coaching.

Because Fisk is an active, recognizable member of Fairbanks’ running community—she organizes several local events, including the HooDoo Half Marathon and the weekly Thursday night beer runs, both in collaboration with the HooDoo Brewing Company—she says she expected support from her fellow runners. What she didn’t expect was the number of non-runners, spurred on by a newfound desire to be outdoors, who would also form her customer base.

“Eighty percent of customers were non-runners,” she says. “It’s a whole new crowd of people at the beer runs; not just runners, but walkers and people who never thought they could get outside and do anything. Doctors’ offices were sending people to get fitted for the proper shoe. So there’s a new group of individuals who are just getting out, so the demand has been a lot higher than I thought.”

As the novel coronavirus sent more Alaskans outdoors, it also made them more cognizant of, and proactive about, protecting their health. Elevate Wellness Center, which offers “innovative and integrative wellness therapies,” was ready-made to meet those dual desires.

“I always knew this was what we always needed,” says owner and registered nurse Jodi Tansky, who opened the center in Fairbanks in 2020. “I really thought that COVID and this pandemic was going to bring peoples’ awareness of their whole health to the forefront, and my gut feeling was that people were going to need this more than ever.”

The center offers float therapy, or sensory deprivation tanks, as well as infrared sauna, hyperbaric oxygen treatment, and IV nutrition therapy, all of which Tansky says help patients “reduce stress, increase energy, and get better sleep” and “rebuild their immune system and become what we call immune resilient.” Two-thirds of Elevate Wellness’ clients visit with the goal of either preventing COVID or minimizing the effects of having already had it, she says.

“People have two mindsets: they’re fearful of getting it, so they’re motivated to get healthy, or they already have that preventative mindset,” Tansky explains.

Because of the nature of the center’s therapies, social distancing requirements and indoor capacity restrictions caused minimal disruptions to the center’s ability to serve clients.

“[The float therapy] is a single service; only one person goes in there at a time, and none of the staff has more than 15 minutes of contact unless it’s me or a nurse for wellness coaching,” Tansky says. The hyperbaric oxygen treatment and saunas are similarly socially distanced experiences.

The only pivot Tansky made to the business was her planned cooking and nutrition classes. The space wasn’t large enough to accommodate social distancing, so she instead used it to make pre-packaged snack boxes to sell to clients.

Even with the niche nature of their businesses and the ability to retain or grow their customer base with a pivot to COVID-friendly delivery models, these businesses aren’t immune to the challenges of operating during a pandemic. Tansky says staffing shortages keep her from extending the center’s hours, and Fisk continues to experience supply issues, although customers are more patient than she’d anticipated.

“They’re still willing to wait and still willing to pay me for something I don’t know when it will show up,” she says.

But if being able to meet the needs of customers played an important role in these small businesses’ ability to find some modicum of success throughout the pandemic, so too did their ability to be flexible and transparent with customers.

“If you think you’re flexible, give yourself an extra 10 percent, and be brutally honest with your customers,” Roland says. “And then going above and beyond for your customers, especially to those who have been loyal to you, is really what set our business apart during all of this.”