Your Town Needs You! Now!
MISSION: SAVE MAIN STREET
The COVID-19 pandemic threatens not only to imperil our health and economy today but it could also mark the end of many small businesses that make our communities special. The potential decimation is an economic travesty and a cultural one as well. If we let these small businesses perish, then we let the towns we love and the people we love perish as well. That’s why we’ve started Main Street SOS as a way for all of us to support and help local businesses now.
The cash crunch faced by small business owners is immense. The average SMB has a cash cushion of 27 days. For restaurants, it’s 16 days.
While those stats predate the COVID-19 crisis, the pandemic is certainly shining a spotlight on the precarious financials of many local businesses, which create the majority of the country’s new jobs. Pandemic-related business restrictions have negatively impacted 92% of small business, according to the National Federation of Independent Businesses. What’s more, half report that they’ll need to close within two months without substantial assistance.
The CARES Act will provide money, but for most, it won’t arrive fast enough. Business owners and their employees have already suffered as we see from the job numbers. However, that doesn’t even begin to show the potential bad news we may see as they navigate their next round of expenses. For instance, under temporary laws, some business owners are protected from evictions, but many still have to pay rent where applicable. If they don’t, they risk ultimately losing everything. Their landlords — often not in a good spot themselves — end up losing as well. The situation magnifies the interconnectedness of our local economic engine. And without cash flow, the necessary fuel, it’s seizing.
Like so many others around the country and around the world, we don’t want this engine to break down. This is our mission at Main Street SOS. Simply put, our local businesses and our communities need support from each of us. With Main Street SOS, you can do that by connecting to your favorite local businesses to purchase credits. By pre-buying products and services, we can help buy them the time and buffer they need until they receive federal help or we emerge from this crisis, whichever comes first.
It’s important to know that Main Street SOS isn’t about one merchant or business. It’s about our entire community. It’s about sustaining small business employees, maintaining the services we love, and the vitality of where we call home. That local economic engine? It connects small businesses to employees to vibrant downtowns; it drives our local taxes to keep our schools and public-safety funded; it preserves the value of our homes. We’re all part of it.
In the two weeks since we began on our journey to create Main Street SOS, we’ve heard from businesses and nonprofits across our hometown of Bend, Oregon where we’re launching first. We’ve also heard from other cities in Oregon. And we’ve heard from people in India, Europe, and Australia. Our focus is first to prove this out here and do our very best to help Bend businesses survive this catastrophe. If it works, we will review rolling this out to other communities.
Our small businesses are part of the fabric of our communities. They are the very tapestry that binds us together in so many ways we too often take for granted. Our towns need each of us now. If you’re a business owner, please go to sosbend.com to register yourself. If you’re a customer or someone who cares and wants to help, please hold tight for another week while we onboard our local businesses. Once they’re registered, you will be able to find the businesses you frequent and buy credits to help. Please do what you can now to preserve the town you’ll love today — so that there’s something to love tomorrow.
Originally published at https://medium.com on April 30, 2020.
