With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March, 2020, OED's business development team's mission and workplan underwent a radical pivot. 

The pandemic and resulting public health closures of virtually all small businesses throughout most of 2020 and 2021 created a hardship that changed the way San Jose relates to the owners of small businesses, especially those in hospitality and retail. Within a few weeks of the California shelter-in-place order, OED's focus switched from an audience of possibly 500 major global companies to San Jose's 60,000 existing small business owners and their economic survival.

Until March 17, 2020 OED's central mission was to enable jobs-producing companies to locate or expand in San Jose. A key goal was to help reduce the city's persistent imbalance between the number of jobs and the number of employed residents. For decades, San Jose has been the bedroom for Silicon Valley, with more people here during the night than during the day. This makes San Jose unique among the 20 largest cities in America -- and puts the City at a serious economic disadvantage. In order to support our residential areas - which make up more than 85% of our usable land and are costly in terms of services - we need many more large employers and the revenues they contribute.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to expand our services and communications to serve the small businesses as well, as they were the most impacted by the pandemic-related public health orders.

Although we created a new website for COVID-related business information, and started multi-lingual social media, email outreach and a series of business support webinars, we found that we needed new communications tactics to overcome two major barriers in the small business world -- language and digital engagement. Many of our most threatened small-business owners are not proficient in English, and may not be active users of email, websites and other technological communications channels. To address this need, by the time retail businesses were able to open again, OED had launched the BIzWalk series.

Starting in May, 2021 at La Placita shopping center on Story Road, we fielded small teams of multi-lingual OED staff, going door to door in retail areas of the city. 

The chart shows the 20 commercial areas we have visited through March 30, 2022. Each walk touches 15-20 businesses, with some conversations lasting as long as an hour.  Each walk is about two hours long, and we split up into two to three smaller teams, working opposite sides of the street or covering different segments of a shopping center. By keeping in touch by text and cell phone, we can deploy a Spanish- or Vietnamese-speaker over to a specific business if needed.

We are collecting information from the businesses visited on each walk, to capture a sense of the relative recovery in the area, to record insights into the significance of federal and state loan/grant programs and to understand the challenges each area faces. It must be noted, however, that our records of these walks are far from projectable, and are anecdotal.

We have been struck by the resilience of these businesses and the general sense of guarded optimism for the future that the owners have shared. 

Certain major challenges for our retail businesses have emerged, including the issues of crime and homelessness. For some areas, coping with homeless problems is a significant disincentive for customers. We have flagged these concerns with the City's homeless services and with the Police Department. 

We found many instances of businesses that had been saved by a PPP or SBA loan, and others who found the application process daunting, or who applied successfully, but after funds had already run out.