IT COULD happen to any business – everything is going well, customers are satisfied, profits are coming in – and then out of nowhere, the perfect storm hits and your business is struck with a disaster.

Over the last two years the same thing happened to many businesses as a result of enforced closures and covid19 restrictions, higher production costs and all the other worldwide shocks which rocked small-medium businesses, leaving many wondering what was coming next.

For businesswomen – who already have challenges such as being mothers and wives as well as those of building a business – dealing with work-related disaster is that much harder.

At a brunch held especially for women in SMEs, business divas and "mompreneurs," the host, Kelisha Mills, Angela Lee Loy, Anya Ayoung Chee and Elizabeth “Lady" Montano shared their experiences in balancing business and home, conquering fears when pushing a business forward, and most of all, how to help businesses weather the storms that come their way.

When disaster strikes

Lee Loy, founder and CEO of Aegis Business Solutions Ltd, recalled that her business was among the hardest hit when covid19 began ravaging the country and businesses, as she suffered tremendous reductions in revenue. She said for her, dealing with disaster in business meant being transparent and honest with both staff and customers and rethinking how your business operates to find new ways and new streams of revenue. But most important was having faith that a solution would come.

“We do temporary recruiting, and when covid19 hit, everyone started to pull back. Our revenue went down by 85 per cent,” she said. “Now that is really something to face, especially when you have people – permanent staff – working for you.”

How did she cope? “A big part of it was telling myself to remain calm.

"I believe in the man up there. I spend time with my sister in Toronto meditating before I start my day. So I think you have to have that spiritual grounding and trust in the Lord that something would happen.”

Lee Loy – a 2021 Chamber of Industry and Commerce hall of fame inductee – said she eventually began pivoting and planning, while being fully transparent to her staff about the need for pay cuts, the position of the business and the overall plan for its future.

“Funny enough, people were willing to take pay cuts, because they believe in what you have been doing, and because at the end of the day, they still had a job.

"Then we started looking into training, we started looking at things such as: can we help people to write their resumes? We just started to think about what we weren’t doing, and we started to build on that. Eventually, you got some other revenue flowing in – maybe not as fast as you would like – but slowly and surely you started moving up by creating other revenues.”

“Lady” Montano is the mother of soca star Machel Montano, co-lead in the Machel Montano Foundation for Greatness, head of Montanos’ Chocolate Co Ltd, author and director of several other companies in the Montano empire. She