One Year Later: Northern Nevada businesses reflect on industry shifts, lessons learned due to the pandemic

By Kaleb Roedel

In February 2020, we shook hands and hugged without hesitation. We packed into convention centers, meeting rooms, restaurants and concert halls — networking, talking, laughing and dancing less than six feet apart.

Then it all went away. In March 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic shut down Nevada and the entire nation, we started bumping elbows instead of shaking hands. We connected via Zoom rather than network in person. We relied on breweries and distilleries for hand sanitizer. We snapped up toilet paper and pasta at breakneck pace. We wore masks when we shopped.

All the while, the business community here was impacted in countless ways, big and small. Some shut down completely, others struggled to reopen, and many more found innovative ways to shift their business model to survive — and some even thrived due to a pandemic-related rise in demand.

One year later, the NNBW fielded responses from more than 20 business owners and executives in Northern Nevada — bars, banks, contractors, developers, Realtors, healthcare providers and more — to find out the biggest lessons they have learned since March 2020, and the biggest differences in how their industry now conducts business.

Dave Archer, president and CEO, NCET

“NCET traditionally provides in-person educational and networking events — focused on business and technology — for Northern Nevadans. When last year’s meeting caps virtually eliminated public gatherings, we moved our meetings online using Zoom and we offered 30 minutes of virtual networking before each program. We were pleasantly surprised to discover that our meeting attendance actually increased. Our audience finds the Zoom meetings to be more convenient since they no longer require travel time, and they can access our archived video library in case they missed the live event. Zoom also allows us to offer virtual tours of companies that might have been impractical before because of distance, security or meeting size restrictions.”

Read the entire article in the NNBW: https://www.nnbw.com/news/2021/mar/22/one-year-later-northern-nevada-businesses-reflect-/