If the COVID-19 shutdown didn’t kill your business, trying to reopen might

Tom Fox, owner of Martini Cleaners in Burien, has doubts about the future of business casual.

Dress shirts, slacks and other office garb made up more than half of Fox’s dry cleaning, pressing and tailoring business before the pandemic. Today, he sees only a fraction of that, thanks largely to COVID-related work-from-home regimens that have left office workers everywhere in sweatpants and T-shirts.

Like many businesses, Fox has limped along by cutting staff hours and thinks he can stay open at least through the end of year. But he has no idea whether that will be long enough for business casual to return to business as usual. “We could see this cultural experiment going on for the next couple of years,” he says.

Anxieties like these are now standard operating procedure for business owners and managers, who know they face months of uncertainty until a vaccine or other treatment is widely available. That leaves them in constant fear of a COVID-19 outbreak among staff or customers, or another statewide lockdown — a possibility Gov. Jay Inslee warned on Friday was still a possibility.

Even if COVID-19 is kept at bay, many businesses are bracing for months of lower revenue from health restrictions, consumer uncertainties, and the complicated economic ripple effects of stay-at-home and other social changes during the pandemic. Just last week, Amazon extended its work-from-home policy to early 2021.

Many businesses can expect only between half and three-quarters of their pre-COVID revenue through 2020, warns Thomas Gilbert, associate professor of finance at the University of Washington Foster School of Business. In some sectors, such as restaurants and hotels, expectations are even lower.

That means “businesses are going to have to watch their cost line like hawks to ensure survival through the end of the year,” but without “making the experience unpleasant” for customers by cutting too deeply on service, Gilbert says.

Cost-cutting employers also run the risk of losing key staff they’ll need when business returns. Fox, for example, worries about retaining his seven employees, some of them quite skilled. “Some of them are stretched pretty thin,” he says.

Those fears are present in any downturn. But with the pandemic, many businesses must control costs, maintain service and retain staff while also effectively re-engineering much of their operations.

Much of that re-engineering has focused on safety.

When Rhein Haus Seattle, a Capitol Hill beer hall, moved last month into Phase 2 of Inslee’s four-step reopening strategy, restaurant staff had to master a welter of new safety protocols. Among these: daily temperature checks for staff, switching to compostable utensils and plateware, self-service ordering, and using specific floor routes to minimize close interactions with other staff, says Jeremy Walcott, who manages Rhein Haus…