Health and economics became fused as never before when the scale and potential effects of COVID19 were realized. Researchers in all disciplines continue to gather numbers and assess trends in the effort to get some predictability on what health care, business, society, and economics in general need to do to ensure our survival and recovery. Right now, there seems little predictability. We at Waubetek found this out the week that the pandemic emergency was declared. Since then, we have been in a cycle of making assumptions based on available information then making plans for maintaining workflow, creating new systems for emergency financing and then backing up to make adjustments on the fly as new information arrives.
This is likely the challenge all of us will face for quite some time yet. Having to deal with COVID19 might not be really “over” for a while. So, what can businesses do to keep positioned for recovery? Pretty much what they’ve been doing since the start of the pandemic: communicating, conserving, planning, and believing in themselves. If a business idea was a good idea at the start, then it should still be a good idea. Society still needs goods and services which is all the reason needed to maintain a forward-looking attitude. This attitude can be used to retain a customer base by making sure that customers know that a business is still around and working to be around as soon as conditions permit. Businesses should keep in mind that their future methods of goods and service delivery and how they are structured might have to be quite different from how they started. Repurposing might be a useful concept. There is a lot of rethinking of health and safety measures for staff and customers, handling of goods, and communications, so, efforts should be made to be informed, adaptable, creative, and to keep going.
For our part, Waubetek immediately recognized that the health emergency declaration would have serious and abrupt economic effects upon our clients. The Waubetek Board of Directors quickly convened and authorized immediate measures so that on March 20th, 2020, notices were sent to all loan clients informing them of the deferment of loan payments and with links to government programs that might be of assistance.
Since then, staff have been working very hard on means of enabling our clients to access the emergency business loan financing announced by Canada. We quickly developed a new application and disbursement system and then incorporated updated guidelines as they were released to us. We now have in place the FedNor Regional Relief and Recovery Fund (RRRF) and the Indigenous Business Stimulus Fund programs. Notices to clients and website information on these programs were released on May 12th, 2020.
We did our best to represent client interests to the program sponsors as these programs were being developed and will continue to do so as these programs are further refined. As businesses themselves are the only sources of information as to the effectiveness of these and perhaps other financing programs, we will contact them from time to time and trust that they will assist us with the facts and figures needed to support our efforts to support them.
New information and updates will be posted to our social media pages and sent directly to clients by email as these become available. All are invited to send views and information that might help policy and program development or even be passed on to other clients. So please, everyone, keep safe, keep healthy, and keep going.
