What COVID Taught Me About Risk And Business Planning

I opened a second sign shop location, got three months in, and then lockdown hit. Suddenly my calendar meant nothing, my assumptions about growth got tested, and I had to figure out how to keep two employees paid while the world argued about curfews, safety rules, and who was “bringing COVID” into town.

What kept us afloat wasn’t luck. It was a fast pivot to the unglamorous work everyone needed right then: six-foot floor stickers, distancing decals, door signage, and simple instructions that helped schools and restaurants reopen. One school district referred another, and that referral chain turned into orders across roughly 25 school districts. I share what we priced, why we cut margins, and how that compliance signage became the cash flow that carried the business when everything else felt uncertain.

At the same time, the digital marketing side took a brutal hit: I lost about 75% of my clients in the first few months because marketing was treated like an “expense” to cut. That experience changed how I talk about marketing strategy, consistency, and why stopping your marketing often costs more than you think. I also get real about the second year being harder, closing the Stuttgart location, and what I learned about risk, leases, planning, and building a backup plan before the next big leap.

If you run a small business, a sign shop, or a marketing agency, this story will help you think clearly about resilience, client retention, and strategic planning when conditions change fast. Subscribe, share this with a business owner who needs it, and leave a review with your biggest lesson from 2020.

Transcript

Why We Are Talking COVID

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey y'all, welcome back to your favorite podcast. I'm your host, Shelby McFarland, the marketing boss. I'm so glad that you have tuned in for another episode. It is so much fun every single week to be able to share with you guys little tidbits of either marketing advice or experience that I've had in business. Recently I have posted on social media about um when I survived COVID through like the whole 2020, 2021. And I posted a picture of some stickers that I put on the floor in a restaurant. And I posted about how um yeah, we're gonna start that over. I just said posted 17 times. Okay. Okay. Here we go. I'm gonna do it in Riverside, but you're still gonna have to. I guess it's better than not or haven't uploaded. Okay. Hey guys, what's up? Welcome back to your favorite podcast. I'm your host, Shelby McFarland, the marketing boss. Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode. I love sharing my experiences. I love sharing everything about business and marketing with you guys and hope that you leave each episode learning more and being better in your job or in your business or in marketing, whatever you're listening to this for. A couple of weeks ago, I posted on social media a photo of stickers that I had put on the ground in a restaurant. And yes, you know what year that was. It was COVID. I posted about how I um outfitted 25 school districts plus several, several restaurants um that needed these little six-foot stickers. And if you remember back then, we were all supposed to be six feet apart, and that was the only way that my marketing business survived. So whenever I put that out there, people were like, please make a podcast about how you survived COVID through um with marketing and your sign shop and all the things. So here I am. Let's break it down on how the marketing broker actually survived COVID years. And I really want to talk about the years 2020 plus 2021, because I do think that both of those years were affected heavily with COVID when all that was around. Um and even to this day, if you're not, if you're listening to the future, it's 2026. Um, but I do think that we are still seeing some differences in marketing as well as um AI and things like that coming up this year. So when COVID hit, I was working about 60 to 70 hours a week and I was always networking. I was really just more so busy, right? We all think that the busier our calendar is, the more successful we are. And that is not true. That is from personal experience. And I know that I freaked out whenever they're like, hey, we've got to stay inside, you've got to go on lockdown. I had just opened a second sign shop location

Opening A Second Sign Shop

SPEAKER_00 2:55

about an hour and a half away from where I lived. I was servicing a really small town called Stuttgart, Arkansas. No one there did signs. So between like or around Stuttgart, there's about a 50-mile radius of where people um would call Stuttgart for things or like do business in Stuttgart because that was the quote unquote big town around. And so I um January of 2020 decided to open a new sign shop down there. I found a really great deal. Um, the the shop was about 2,000 square feet. I paid like $1,000 a month, and I was like, this is too good to be true. And so we go in, we had to do minimal construction, we opened this the shop up, and um it was March of that year, as you guys know, whenever the whole world shut down. So I got about three months into this new sign shop. I had slowed things down in Little Rock, where I'm based every day, um, to open up this shop. And so I went there every day. So you're talking three hours on the road and several miles, several hundred miles. And um, I didn't really have time to uh increase the awareness, market it correctly, right? Because we're from out of town, people were still getting to know us a little bit down there, and um I knew that it was gonna take time. But instead of having the six months I'd planned, I only had three months. So it was kind of funny whenever it all COVID first started and the whole six-foot thing, we stayed in our house for about 30 days, and then I was like, listen, we've got to somehow go down there. We were actually under lockdown, as in like we had curfews and stuff here in Little Rock. They didn't have that in Stuttgart, but you could get out if it was quote unquote business related. So we would always like if we ever had gotten stopped, which thank God we didn't, but if we did, we could just be like, hey, we're going to do some installs after hours because you know it's safer for our people because they're not going to be there. So when we were going down to Stuttgart um through all of this, we had the signs on the door that was like, you know, please make an appointment or curbside pickup, all that. We were still servicing a lot of small businesses when it comes to yard signs because construction didn't stop, right? Construction kept going. In fact, it boomed in COVID. So I did a lot of yard signs at the very beginning. Then a word got out that there was like a case of COVID in Stuttgart or whatever county that is. I don't remember what county it is. And they thought that we brought COVID to Stuttgart

Lockdown Reality And Small Town Pushback

SPEAKER_00 5:25

because we're the outsiders, we're from Little Rock. It was a whole freaking deal. It was so stupid. So the word got out that the Little Rock people, the Stuttgart Seintrack people brought COVID down to Stuttgart. And so people then started distancing themselves from us. So funny to think about. Um then I started getting calls from the local school districts that were like, hey, we're trying to open up school in August. So this was like summer of COVID year, so 2020. Hey, we're trying to open up school in August, but we have to legally have those six-foot stickers throughout the entire school. So you're talking about every elementary, every junior high, middle school, high school, the admin buildings, they all had to have three-inch stickers that were every six feet, which I didn't know where they started. I'm like, so what do you do? Like start at the door or do you like start of the classrooms? I didn't really know how these were supposed to go. I just knew that I could produce these decals for them and that could help me make money during COVID. So I found that or they found me. I did the first set, and then that school called another school and said, hey, listen, we had these done here. They're really affordable because I mean, I had like cut my margins in half because I was just trying to make a little bit of money. So then they're like, hey, we have this school. And it ended up being 25 school districts in Arkansas and around Arkansas. So that was pretty cool. And that brought in a lot of cash to the business

The Six Foot Sticker Boom

SPEAKER_00 6:55

so that way I could pay my two employees that I had at the time, as well as pay our bills personally so that way I wouldn't go broke. So the sign business boomed during COVID. Again, we had the school districts, you had the restaurants. I made little like please stay in here signs so that way they wouldn't walk in the door. I made decals that had like a little emoji with a mask on, which was kind of funny about like, you know, mask required to enter this building. So I was really grateful for that aspect of COVID because it kind of opened up the door for me to be able to do more decals and such that I wasn't used to doing beforehand. And also gave me an inn with these school districts because then they need anything in the future, they know that they can call me. So we kept our doors open all through 2020 and then 2021 came, and I think that that second year of COVID was harder than the first year when it came to this sign shop specifically. And on a personal note, I also was pregnant all through COVID or 2020. So I had my baby in 2021, and I decided in March of 21 that I was gonna shut down the stuck art sign shop. Yes, we had boomed during the time of COVID for like all those local school districts, but what was happening was everything was starting to slow down and construction and things like that in 2021. And so I noticed this trend of slowing down and I was like, I cannot keep two locations open. And I knew that my lease was gonna be up in January of 22 because I had to sign a two-year lease. So I knew that my lease was gonna

Closing The Second Location

SPEAKER_00 8:36

be up in January of 2022. I made a deal with the owner of the building, like, hey, if I can find someone to rent this building, can I move out early? He was like, absolutely. Definitely a perk of being in a small town is being able to talk to the person that owns the building or who you're renting it from and really just be like, listen, I can take everything back to Little Rock, still service this area like I was before, and I'm just not gonna be able to have two locations open anymore due to financial stuff, obviously. So he was really nice about it. I found someone that had a boutique and then they moved in there. Um so that was really great. And then I got to get out of my lease a little bit early. So you may be like, okay, so what happened with those people in StuckArt? Well, I move out and we still, I mean, to this day, we'll do a few things in StuckArt for people, but there was someone that came through and opened up another sign shop there um in 2022, I believe. And they are actually local. So that's great. They're they they're from there, they open a new business there, they're thriving, and I love that for them. I will still do a few things here and there for some of the industrial people that um are like the bigger companies, but I'm very grateful that they at least have enough to sustain a small business there in town and help people that are from that city. So, what I learned from that moment was I, or from those years in that aspect of having the second location of the sign shop is when I did not plan correctly. I was just really ambitious. And in 2019, I was like, Yeah, let's do it. I was just all about like, let's take risks, let's open this, let's open that. I didn't really think things through. And so I was like, well, I'm already like doing stuff down there. Why not just have a second location? Like, obviously, that makes sense, right? And at the time, uh, my partner was with me and he worked for me. And so that kind of helped where I could be like, okay, you go here and I'm gonna go there. And I was teaching him the business and he was kind of in between jobs, and so it was like easy to train somebody that I was that close to already. Um, but that also meant that that was our only income and our main income. And so that kind of made it a little bit more of a struggle as well. But I didn't really think things through. I didn't really have a strategic plan in place. I just knew like, hey, I'm gonna make this work. That's what entrepreneurship is, and our mindsets tend to be like, sure, I'll take that on. I'm just gonna make it work. And that's what I usually I have a really bad habit of saying, yes, I'll do that, I'll just make it work. Or yeah, I'll go ahead and buy that new car, I'll make enough money, I'll figure it out. And instead, uh instead, I need to be like, no, this is where I need to be at financially. This is how many clients I need before I can hire somebody else. This is what I need to do before I take on a new studio, something like that. So I'm grateful for those two years in that aspect of opening that sign shop, learning the hard way that like this is not what I should have done. I should just kept everything in Little Rock, made the trips once a week, once every two weeks, something like that. Maybe have gone and done sales down there, but then like produced everything in Little Rock because now I have a new content studio here in Little Rock, and it helped me really be strategic when I opened this place because I'm like, okay, I don't want another sign shop um debacle or fiasco. Like, I don't want it to be like, oh, I've got to close it down in a year or two years because I wasn't thinking things through. So I would say I learned from my mistakes, and it's been four years, almost five years since that happened. And so it's taken me this long to actually be like, okay, let's take that leap of faith again. Let's do that next thing. Let's like do the scary thing, but not be so scared where I'm not actually gonna take um action, right? We don't want to be so scared that we don't actually do it, but we do want to be scared enough to where we have a strategic plan. We have a backup, we have, okay, if this doesn't work out, it's gonna be okay. I'm only here for a year or I'm only here for two years or however long. And I will say during COVID, so that was a sign shop. The other side of my business is digital marketing. Obviously, you guys hear me talk about this all the time. I lost about 75% of my clients within the first three months of being locked down from COVID. People cut marketing like that. They were like, oh, this is just an expense. We're gonna cut you. Sorry, you're the first thing to go. They had um government

Losing Clients And Rebuilding Smarter

SPEAKER_00 12:59

like loans and stuff to help you with payroll, but they didn't really have government loans to help you with marketing. And so people had such a small mindset and said, listen, marketing's the first thing to go because that's just an expense. They didn't have the mindset of it's an investment. And I wish I would have just been who I am today back then, because now when people come at me and they're like, oh, it's just an expense, I have to cut expenses. No, this is an investment. This is something that's gonna help you get to the next level. If you stop this right now, all of our work that we've done the last six months or two years or however long we've been working with them, it's all gonna go away. It's all gonna stop. And then when you call me in three months going, oh, okay, I've got the budget now, then we're gonna have to start over again. And that really cuts into that consistency. And I, that is something I've learned as well that I wish I would have known back then of like, listen, let's change our mindset around it. It's not an expense, it's an investment. So I lost 75% of my business or clientele, which wasn't a very big clientele because I was still kind of um figuring out my way. I was still trying to figure out my packages. I offered way less than what I do now. Um, I had one team member at the time who I'm very grateful for. We worked diligently through COVID together to really make it. I didn't have to take out payroll loans. I was very grateful for that. But that's because the sign shop really came in and helped me guess get over that hump, right? So then I would say business started picking back up about 2022. I had my baby in January 21, and I just uh lost my way a bit because I didn't really plan out, like, okay, I'm gonna be out of work for three months. Um, then I like went through some personal stuff. So really I was out of work for about six months, and I was trying to figure out how to work with a baby full time. I didn't want to take her to daycare because I thought I was super mom. And so 22 is when she finally went to daycare and I was like, I've got to get back at it. And I started networking again. I joined a leads group and really just built my business all over again. So from 2020 to 2022, those two years were super rough. Lots of learning happened in those two years. I am so grateful. Some people, when you bring up the word COVID, they're like, oh, I hated that. I didn't hate it. I hated it in the moment. I was depressed in the moment. I was sad, I was freaking out, I was stressed out. Yes, of course I was. But it really helped me change my mindset moving forward and helped me learn, like, okay, shouldn't have done that, but

The Mindset Shift That Sticks

SPEAKER_00 15:30

now I'm gonna do this moving forward. Now I need to have more of a plan. Now, if there's even any mention of the world ending, I'm like, it doesn't matter. I've already got a plan because I've already survived this hard, this hard place. I've already survived these two hard years. So if the world does end, or if we do have a second COVID, then I am prepared moving forward. I know what conversations I need to have with my clients moving forward, with my team moving forward. Like I know what that needs to look like because I did it the wrong way the first time.