Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the City of Manassas has been working hard to help local restaurants, shops and other businesses adapt. We have created a COVID-19 landing page on the Choose Manassas website to provide the most recent information and resources to the local business community. Ads have been running across Google and Facebook encouraging Manassas residents to support our businesses, and other ads are providing information about grants and loans to local business owners.
These initiatives have been helpful so far, but we are still working to understand the long-term damage to our local economy and how we can best support the business community. On March 26, in the early days of the pandemic, the City put out a survey to gauge the impacts of COVID-19 so we could develop a strategic approach to dealing with the crisis. Here are a few of the findings from that survey (126 respondents) most of which were small businesses in the retail, food service, and health and medical service industries:
Over 80% reported that COVID-19 social distancing measures have been “very to extremely disruptive” to their business.
Nearly three quarters have experienced a loss in revenue of 50% or more.
Half of respondents said they have laid off employees or are considering doing so in the near future.
A follow-up survey is now available, and we are hoping for strong participation from the local business community. We need all businesses to respond, large and small. The more information we have, the better prepared we can be to fight this.
Please take the new COVID survey now, and share it with other business owners in the City!