Small-business owner Joe Shamess has mixed feelings about whether 2021 will be an improvement over this year or just more of the same.
“There’s certainly apprehension,” he told the Washington Examiner, because the unknowns are many, from the pace of vaccinations to when infection spikes will finally subside.
One thing is for sure: He doesn’t want a repeat of 2020, which was rough.
“I hope 2021 will be a lot more back to normal,” he said.
Shamess is the co-founder of Flags of Valor, a small business in Winchester, Virginia, that creates handcrafted wooden flags. He started the business in 2015 with Brian Steorts. Both of them served in the military before becoming entrepreneurs.
“When we left active duty, we wanted to start a company that employed veterans and manufactured in the United States,” Shamess said.
Shamess graduated from the Air Force Academy in 2003 and became an Air Force special operations pilot who was deployed several times to Afghanistan, the Middle East, and East Africa before leaving the military in 2014.
Steorts began his service in the Army as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division. He briefly left active duty to attend the University of Alabama, but after 9/11, he returned to service to become an Air Force special operations pilot.
During one of his deployments, Steorts was wounded, and during his rehabilitation, he took up woodworking. He chose to craft the American flag because it was a part of his uniform when he was on active duty and he missed it.
Steorts began handcrafting wooden American flags and donating them to the families of fallen soldiers. From there, the genesis of a business was born, according to Shamess.
“We decided to get into work that put people we cared about back to work and make beautiful products in the U.S.,” he said.
Flags of Valor employs veterans and uses a manufacturing plant where the flags are created and a retail space, which is closed because of the pandemic.
“We closed retail down in April and don’t anticipate restarting any kind of retail anytime soon. That’s a big loss there,” Shamess said.
The workshop is currently open, and it normally employs between 12 and 14 workers, which was recently increased to 20 workers during the holiday season. This year is no different despite the pandemic because the company has the space to comply with social distancing rules.
“We’ve got a 14,000-square-foot workshop, so we’re able to spread out a lot. We can make social distancing work and follow all of the appropriate guidelines to keep our team safe. That’s been a blessing,” Shamess said.
What has not been a blessing is the pandemic. When the virus hit in March, Shamess and Steorts quickly took inventory of their options for how their business would survive.
They discovered that the pandemic had knocked out two of the company’s three revenue streams: Its retail store and its business-to-business operation were gone. The only thing left standing was online sales.
They also had to shut down all operations temporarily, including the workshop, to comply with Virginia’s shutdown order of nonessential companies.
Once they were allowed to reopen, they did so at a slow pace by hiring back just a fraction of their workers.
“We were down to five people,” Shamess said, adding that with the reduced staff, “we had to make a decision early on to focus on the things we could do instead of the things we couldn’t.”
That meant boosting online sales, which included spending money to increase their online presence through social media and blogging. It also meant having a website that could handle the increase in traffic.
They also created new products, such as the Kid’s Flag Build Kit, which gives children and their parents or grandparents a project to work on together.
“We tried to make our way through the pandemic to be relevant to our customers and grow our brand despite everything else going on,” Shamess said.
So far, their plan has worked, and they are back to full staff.
“We were incredibly fortunate that everyone wanted to come back,” Shamess said.
Even the business-to-business operation has started to show signs of life.
“It has slowly started to thaw and come back, which has been good,” he said. “And we’re relieved that online [sales] continue to be strong.”
Reopening the retail store is a different story.
“We’re at the point where we are not even thinking about it,” Shamess said.
He would like to see Washington, D.C., enact another relief bill that would include COVID-19 liability protections for businesses.
“Liability protections are something that we would be grateful for as soon as possible to give us confidence that if we do the right thing, we’re not going to be held liable down the road. We’ve been asking for it since the beginning,” he said.
Congressional Republicans want broad liability protections for healthcare facilities, schools, and businesses to shield them from coronavirus-related lawsuits targeting actions beyond gross negligence. Democrats oppose the idea.
Shamess thinks that more businesses will close if protections are not provided.
“Suddenly, you will see lawsuits flying all over the place based on COVID liability issues, and you’re going to see even more small businesses get shuttered,” he said. “Small businesses don’t have the margins. They don’t have the legal teams — most don’t have [human resources] departments. These are small companies that, in many cases, are owner-operated with community employees. … To have a lawsuit like that would be crushing.”
