Katie Billo has no illusions. If her restaurant and brew pub hadn’t quickly transitioned to online sales and curbside pickup once the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the lights would have been turned out long ago.
“Takeout has been keeping us going,” Billo says. “Takeout is everything.”
Billo is the Front-of-House and Events Manager at Arabella Park Beer Bar, the popular Kitchener eatery and craft brewhouse.
When the COVID-19 lockdown began, Billo says that Arabella had already begun building an online Shopify storefront. Resources were quickly mustered to finish and launch the website, settle on a workable menu and establish payment and pickup procedures.
It hasn’t been easy by any means. Even with online sales, staff had to be reduced, and much tweaking of processes has unfolded over the past three months to make it all work. But the bottom-line mission – to stay afloat – has been a success.
“Yeah, it’s a bit weird. It’s kind of interesting how we used to be a place where people would come and socialize, and now I might wave at you through your [car] window. It’s quite different.
“But I don’t know that we would be able to continue going [otherwise],” Billo says.
The decisions made by Billo and Arabella Park are the decisions many brick-and-mortar operations have faced, or are currently facing. Business as usual, defined as customers walking through a front door and interacting with staff and other patrons, is not only in need of reinvention for the short term because of COVID-19, but likely for much longer, too.
To that end, Communitech is working with various partners to help as many companies as possible make the transition to the new reality and help preserve local commerce and livelihoods.
In an announcement today, Communitech was named as one of the agencies that will help to deliver Digital Main Street programming across Ontario, as part of a $57-million investment by the federal and provincial governments.
Digital Main Street, led by the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas and the Ontario Business Improvement Area Association, is focused on helping small and medium-sized businesses in the retail, hospitality and trade/service sectors adopt digital business models.
Over the next nine months, Communitech and other regional innovation centres will work with 5,200 businesses across Southwestern Ontario to help them transform digitally through the use of e-commerce and other tools.
Before today’s announcement, Communitech was already working on a similarly themed initiative called the Future of Retail, led by Joel Semeniuk, Communitech’s Vice-President of Corporate Growth and Innovation.
“We’ve identified three challenges, essentially,” says Semeniuk.
The first, he says, is the rethinking of the brick-and-mortar experience and the transition to digital. A conventional storefront is expensive – literally accounting for the overhead. What should a storefront be amid the new reality? What kind of experience should a customer be welcomed with as a digital replacement?
The second challenge is the level of comfort for entrepreneurs making a digital transition. For many store owners and shopkeepers, particularly older ones, creating a website, maintaining the back end, establishing an online payment system, can be fraught and intimidating.
“I think there's a lot of assumptions around the idea that a given group of people can't go digital, yet that same group of people use Facebook every day,” says Semeniuk. “But we have to think differently about the way that we engage them because they might use Facebook every day, but maybe they’re reluctant to, for example, put their credit card online or something like that, right?”
And the third challenge is one of resources.
Many small-to-medium sized businesses traditionally don’t have a lot of reserves with which to experiment. “They can’t start up [an innovation] lab,” says Semeniuk. “So how can we enable them to change their customer experience more rapidly?”
Semeniuk describes creating a playbook, “a prepackaged way of doing things that would enable their type of business to engage digitally, or have a digital component to it, very quickly and cheaply.”
For Arabella Park, the need to move online was obvious if the business was to survive. Sometimes necessity really is the mother of invention. And sometimes, under pressure, we discover the impossible really isn’t.
“So that week [we transitioned to online was] kind of crazy,” recalls Billo. “It was a whirlwind of getting product photos and figuring out what we could physically do as a takeout entity.
“Many of our dishes in regular service are beautifully plated, where the presentation is a huge part of it, and you can't really facilitate that in a takeout container.
“So we had to really pivot.”
Billo says her advice would be that if a business is considering moving online, they should, and do so quickly, and figure out the details as they go. In Arabella’s case, it meant cutting menu items down to a fraction of what they began with, and sorting out how many online orders could be accommodated within a given time frame.
“Yeah, I would recommend it,” she says. “Start small. Keeping it manageable is the key.”
Doing so might well be the bridge that allows a business to make it through to the day when COVID-19 is a memory.
“Everyone keeps saying we can't wait to come sit on your patio again,” says Billo. “We feel the same.”
