Celebrating Neighborhood Businesses
Our neighborhood businesses are the creators and keepers of our community Quality of Life
This post grew from some reflections I had as my wife, Rosi, and I had dinner at Epsilon Fine Greek Restaurant in Monterey for the first time since the COVID emergency compelled all of us to shelter in our homes and took a catastrophic toll on businesses in the service industry.
COVID takes its toll
As a community, we saw established and well-loved businesses shutter their doors, one after another. To our sadness, Rosi and I discovered last fall that Epsilon, after 30 years as a community mainstay, had fallen victim to this new and unsettling trend. Epsilon had long been one of our favorite restaurants, and over the years we developed a friendship with the owners. Seeing Epsilon closed felt like a real loss.
I reached out to the owner, Christos Hix, to find out more about what had happened, how they were doing, and if there was any hope that Epsilon could rise from the ashes. As it turned out, Christos and his team were exploring every option to re-open the restaurant. Having exhausted all of their resources, they were considering a GoFundMe campaign to raise the cash they needed to reopen the restaurant, However, they were concerned that such an effort would be received negatively by the community they serve.
I suggested that no, on the contrary, it would actually be empowering to the community. I and other neighbors would see it as a way to contribute to saving an important part of our community. We could overcome the feelings of helplessness that had become the norm over the past year. Perhaps most important: we would feel a stronger sense of community with Epsilon, Christos, and his team.
Resilience takes a community
They pushed forward with the crowd-funding campaign — and the community responded. They raised over $16,000 to help them reopen. Their timing was perfect; they reopened just as the county moved to allow indoor dining again. They instantly had patrons excited to see them open again, and while they are not yet “out of the woods,” things are looking good for the 30-year-old restaurant to be embarking on its next 30 years.
Our neighborhood businesses make for a rich community
Our neighborhood businesses — the places we go to eat, to shop, to entertain ourselves, and be entertained — make our community a rich place to live. This to me is the essence of working with our clients at 21CM Digital Marketing, many of whom are these neighborhood businesses creating their online presence and communicating who they are in the community. In helping them to be successful, we help to strengthen and enrich the community in which we live.
Our thanks
I (and we at 21CM Digital Marketing), look forward to working with our current clients and other neighborhood businesses to make them successful and to make our communities great places to live. Beyond a client-agency relationship, we feel very much to be partners with these businesses and with the community and are as committed to their success as we are to our own. After all, we exist to make them successful, so their success and our success are one and the same.
We thank all of our community partners and members for the opportunity to work with them. They are, after all, the creators and keepers of the Quality of Life in our communities.
Brad Barbeau is Professor of Entrepreneurship at CSU Monterey Bay and Executive Director of the Institute for Innovation and Economic Development at CSU Monterey Bay. He is also the founder of 21CM Digital Marketing.
