From Port to Store to Home

These are also a few words that might come to mind when you read the January cover story featuring Zach Aregood and Deanna Miller at ARM Creative.

SOTI, or State-of-the-Industry, is a small dinner event that ARM Creative offers to Alaskans interested in gaining a better handle on the latest tools and trends in the digital marketing world. The budding Anchorage firm welcomes anyone—restauranteurs, physical therapists, even other marketing firms—as one of ARM’s chief goals with the SOTI series is to advance Alaska business while building community.

To learn more about the ways Aregood and Miller are pushing the needle in Alaska, explore our cover story, “Automating & Advancing.”

Photograph by Kerry Tasker • Cover by Monica Sterchi-Lowman

s Alaska was emerging from its longest recession on record, COVID-19 struck and delivered its devastating blow to the economy. The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted almost all the state’s industries, severely depressing revenue, employment, and consumer confidence. Now, what’s next for Alaska’s key industries? What economic forecasts are experts able—or willing—to make for 2021?

In October, the consensus among economists was that Alaska’s fate is uncertain. However, there was that ever-present cautious optimism that the state will recover slowly, but surely, from the recession—and the added burden of the pandemic.

ut of an abundance of caution, the Alaska Business Hall of Fame event has been postponed until 2022. While this feels like another blow to the business community due to COVID-19, we feel it is important to wait until we can celebrate safely in person—this year’s class of laureates is exceptional, and so deserving of this honor. We look forward to celebrating with them in person on January 20, 2022.

COVID-19 has so quickly and so profoundly changed our daily lives. Schools have closed for face-to-face learning and businesses of all sizes are suffering. As unsettling as the past months have been to us as adults, consider the impact this is having on thousands of young people who are suddenly schooling at home.

and Lake Elementary Principal Linson Thompson has been selected as the Junior Achievement of Alaska Educator of the Year. Thompson has been a strong supporter of Junior Achievement’s mission to encourage entrepreneurship and help Alaska’s youth build workforce readiness and financial literacy skills.

Through the annual JA in a Day event at Sand Lake Elementary School, in partnership with ExxonMobil, students are given the opportunity to interact with professionals from the business community while participating in hands-on, experiential learning activities that will prepare them for the future.

unior Achievement (JA) helps students develop successful financial management habits, empowers them to explore the idea of becoming an entrepreneur, and provides them with the skills necessary to succeed in a global workforce.

In addition, external evaluations have found that, overall, elementary students who participate in JA think about how the things learned in JA will be important later in life.

A significant number of middle school students develop or improve their entrepreneurial, leadership, and decision-making skills by participating in JA activities designed to give them financial literacy skills, prepare them to enter the workforce, and teach them about the pros and cons of entrepreneurship.

lmost one in four American adults will experience a diagnosable behavioral health condition this year, ranging from anxiety and depression to post-traumatic stress disorder to alcohol and opioid misuse. Prior to the pandemic, 39 percent of Americans were suffering from mental health distress, with 31 percent of people experiencing negative mental health conditions also suffering from an addiction. With the onset of COVID-19, the situation is only expected to get worse.

These conditions affect every aspect of a person’s life, and business owners, managers, and human resource departments must prepare for how they might also affect the workplace.

“Many employers find it difficult to deal with mental health conditions; they don’t know how to talk about it or how to provide accommodations for these employees. Human resources decision makers are not always confident in how to recognize or deal with these problems,” said Dan Jolivet, workplace possibilities practice consultant at The Standard, during a recent webinar titled “The Future of Behavioral Health in the Workplace” hosted by the Alaska SHRM State Council. “Making things even more difficult, workers often hide these issues due to stigma, shame, or fear.”

n June 20, 1977, first oil from the massive Prudhoe Bay oil field flowed into TAPS. It was the first trickle of the 24 billion barrels of conventional oil estimated to be in the oil field, of which 9.6 billion barrels was thought to be technically recoverable.

Four decades later, more than 12 billion barrels of oil have been produced at Prudhoe Bay alone, with billions more produced from satellite fields and other areas on the North Slope. That increase in technically recoverable oil (from 40 to 60 percent) is due to several factors, including improved drilling technology, better mapping, and the use of production enhancements such as water and natural gas injection.

That still leaves a lot of oil in the ground at Prudhoe Bay, not to mention other areas of the North Slope—some of it in deposits of heavy, viscous oil and shale oil that are more difficult to extract and process, according to the Resource Development Council (RDC). But oil companies on the North Slope are actively looking for and implementing new ways to bring that oil to market.

Scott Montgomery, a professor at The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, writes: “Oil companies have ways of being nimble in hard times, such as selling assets, adjusting production levels, and seeking mergers. Now rapid innovations in drilling, seismic imaging, and data processing allow well-run companies to cut costs in multiple areas.”

usan Bell is the Director of McKinley Research (formerly McDowell Group), which has provided quality research to Alaskans for more than forty years. “We’re working in data, we’re answering questions, we’re finding solutions—but what’s exciting is when we’re helping clients make a decision about an investment or a decision or a program that helps them go forward,” Bell says of what she enjoys most about her work. She currently lives in Juneau with her husband, Bob Koenitzer.