Local Businesses Getting Creative to Survive, Thrive in Face of Shutdown

This is a very tough time to be in business, whether you’re a big one or a small one.

So what do you do? You get creative. At the Rooster Boy Café in northwest Las Vegas, here’s how owner Sonia El-Nawal social distances: she Facetimes her food to her clients.

“Pasta and peas, mac-n-cheese, cucumber salad,” she told a family as she held her iPhone to a refrigerator.

The shutdown put the kibosh on her popular cafe. So she shifted gears: it’s now more carry out and grocery store.

“Stocking up in a way that you can instead of having to go to a grocery store and deal with a lot of people, you can come, here,” she told me.

They even have toilet paper, along with lots of mouth-watering stuff.

“Business has been great. I am really lucky and fortunate that everyone that works with me was able to transition also,” says El-Nawal.

And it’s not just small business getting creative. Big ones are, too.

Uri Vaknin is a partner at Kre Capital, which owns some upscale Las Vegas condo developments like Juhl and One Las Vegas.

It’s tough to make a condo sale when people are told not to go out. So the condo comes to them. They’re giving prospective buyers virtual 3D tours of units for sale.

“We closed our physical sales centers but we actually kept sales going and the exciting thing is that in the past four days we had a closing of a condominium each day at One Las Vegas,” says Vaknin.

The sad fact is not all businesses may survive this; they’re waiting on help from Washington.

But many aren’t waiting at all: they’re adapting, like the folks at greens and proteins. It’s doing carry out these days.

The only place open, managing partner Greg Jarmolowich tells me, in his downtown Las Vegas neighborhood.

“But there’s also the importance of providing for the community for those that don’t have the ability to cook and eat healthily,” Jarmolowich says.

Back at the Rooster Boy Café, Bruce Vail was picking something up. He says it’s important to support local businesses that can stay open.

“I would do the same thing–hope somebody would do the same thing for me, if it was me,” Vail said.

Well said.

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Local Businesses Getting Creative to Survive, Thrive in Face of Shutdown

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