A workshop series aimed at boosting new business in the Northeast Kingdom could be more crucial than usual, organizers say, as people in the historically depressed region look to recover from the Covid-19 downturn.
The second-annual NEK Entrepreneurship Week began Monday. It features nine scheduled events — with two weeklong competitions — and runs until Saturday afternoon.
“We need to be showcasing and highlighting entrepreneurs and small business owners and help give people confidence that they can do it on their own,” said Evan Carlson with Do North Coworking, the Northern Vermont University coworking space in Lyndon that hosts the series.
This year’s events are all virtual, held on Zoom or streamed to Facebook, in a cautionary measure against spreading the coronavirus.
The pandemic altered more than just the week’s format: Carlson said at least a third of the sessions this year touch on economic recovery. That includes a presentation by the Vermont Small Business Development Center about its “Covid-19 Recovery Roadmap” and a panel discussion Wednesday night by the Northeastern Vermont Development Association focusing on its assistance programs and federal funding.
Transitioning from hands-on, in-person workshops to digital presentations presented a challenge, Carlson said, but he likened organizers to “any good start-up.”
“You have to be nimble,” he said.
And the switch to remote sessions appears to have boosted participation, he said: At least 65 people had signed up, and live-stream viewers have boosted the total to “well over a couple of hundred people,” a significant increase from last year’s event.
During a panel talk Wednesday, several young business owners in the Kingdom talked about the impact the pandemic has had on their operations.
“It could not be any busier, I don’t think,” said Ted Benoit, owner of the Lead and Tackle outdoor store in Lyndon.
He’s seen more people taking up outdoor hobbies like fishing and hunting since the onset of the pandemic, he said. And, as other gun shop owners have reported, he said the panic led to a rise in first-time firearm owners. Gun sales in the past have spiked during times of national uncertainty — sometimes driven by fear of stricter regulations — and the onset of the pandemic saw consumers stockpiling goods across the board.
On that front, he said he “physically cannot get inventory,” citing one of his distributors running out of handgun stock.
Annie Myers, owner of food distributor Myers Produce in Craftsbury, said the pandemic had eaten into her pool of customers.
“A lot of our customer base was restaurants,” she said. “Very few of them have reopened.”
But she said more people have been buying from small, local operations, leading to an increase in sales in the end, despite the shallower customer base — another pandemic trend.
Jeff and Gillian Scarpino, who run the Off the Beaten Trail Canine Facility in Newark, said the pandemic forced them to completely change the business model for their dog training and boarding center.
When people canceled travel plans at the start of the pandemic, “we probably saw a 90% drop in our business right off the bat,” Jeff Scarpino said.
But the couple got lucky, he said. They had started an online membership program beforehand and had the foundation to transition dog-owner classes online.
He said that years ago, when he first pursued dog training, people ridiculed his business dream.
But Scarpino took a lesson from that experience, one he shared with others and will have to put to good use again now.
“You need to know what’s best for you and continue forward and trust yourself. If I had listened to people at the very beginning, we wouldn’t be where we’re at now.”
Carlson, the Do North organizer, said event planners are particularly interested in showcasing younger entrepreneurs because they’ll ultimately lead the charge in the Northeast Kingdom.
He hopes people listening to the sessions, who may have been dabbling with a business idea, can get a spark from hearing others’ stories.
Along with the Covid-focused discussions, some of the events are focused on longer-term trends in the region.
One of the weeklong competitions — a forestry-centered “hackathon” — challenges teams to design ways that digital technology can be used to revamp the area’s once-formidable forest economy, such as using data to make it easier for wood harvesters to figure out what trees are the most cost-effective to chop, based on their location.
