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The operating restrictions are back in place. But that doesn’t mean we have to give up.
It’s tough to be an optimist these days. Especially if you have an over-developed interest in the health and welfare of the regional and national business communities.
As this God-awful business year limps to a conclusion, new concerns about operating restrictions are again clubbing small business owners over the head. It can be tough to find green shoots of hope in a landscape desiccated by, of all things, a virus.
Then along comes an Alan Kneeland.
Into the fray of the pandemic, Kneeland has taken point on The Combine, a fast-casual restaurant that opened its doors last month at 30th and Troost, an area not overrun with dining venues. He and his partners, Jason Pryor and Charles Peach, are rolling the dice on a new venture at a time when the odds have never been this stacked against a hospitality-sector start-up.
“It’s very scary in the middle a pandemic,” Kneeland concedes, “but for any business that’s open right now, keeping active and creative to bring in customers, those are the ones that are going to be on top once the whole pandemic is over. They’re going to come out of it stronger and wiser.”
Kneeland has been in this line of work since he first started washing dishes for Panera as a high-school sophomore in 2006, eventually working his way up through Pryor’s Pizza 51 and back to Panera in a general manager’s role, honing his whole-enterprise skill set. Convinced he was ready to make the ownership leap, he and his partners moved ahead—straight into the teeth of a global health crisis.
“We were planning to open last March, and I took a three-week break between my GM position and going full force with this to get it ready to open,” Kneeland says. “That plan ran smack-dab into the week the stay-at-home was put I place. We had to stop all production on the build-out.”
As the COVID-19 numbers waned a bit, work resumed, with doors opening for the immediate community in November. Just as the virus case count began to soar again. But even in the face of that, this young entrepreneur remains optimistic.
“We went through a period debating whether we were even going to go through with the plan,” Kneeland says. “But this community backed us, as well as the owner of the building—they all really wanted us to be here, and there aren’t that many dining options around here. This community needs us and we need this community.”
When this is all over, the effects of the pandemic will be with us for years. We can cower in the face of it, or prepare to come out stronger in the end.
Everyone in that sector, he says, “has to sit down and re-evaluate the way we do business. Since the beginning of this, restaurants have gotten super creative with their processes, with their marketing, with their one-on-one with customers. That’s what you have to do to make it. As business owners, it’s not all about self at this point. We have staff to worry about, and I worry about them and keeping them safe as much as I worry about my own family members.”
It is, he knows, a tough time: “But we’ve been through times—nothing comparable to this, but we know what it takes, even if this is uncharted territory.”
It’s impossible to know how this whole thing is going to play out. The virus is here; try as we might to shield ourselves from its reach, it’s only a matter of time before every one of us is exposed. Some may consider that a dark view of the world, but it’s one grounded in history, biology, math and probability theory.
And when it is over, the effects of the pandemic will cling to us for years. We can surrender to them, or we fight back the only way we can: By getting back to the business of living our lives and accepting—prudently accepting, with the appropriate levels of caution—the risks that are all around us every day.
Maybe you’re the kind of person who never cared much for dining out in the first place. That’s fine. It’s your choice. But if we all cower in our homes hoping this particular monster will eat us last, we’re never going to get the opportunity to make that choice again. Fear will have made it for us.
That’s not the America I grew up in.
So here’s to the Alan Kneelands of the world. They stare the beast in the face and charge forward in pursuit of a dream. I don’t think I’d want to live in a world that lacked his sense of optimism, his appreciation for opportunity, or his defiance of the odds. His is the entrepreneurial spirit that helped make this country a global ideal.
Best of luck to him, and the legions like him.
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