In early February, we started including questions about the Covid-19 in our monthly small business surveys. We wanted to get a sense of how this crisis is affecting business owners and their plans for the rest of 2020. The initial results showed that businesses were not that concerned. Only 10% of business owners interviewed thought the coronavirus would have an extreme impact on their business in the long-term. The majority of those businesses were in the travel, hospitality, manufacturing, and healthcare industries, and they already saw some significant implications.

As the majority of States entered lockdown mode in March and April, business owners started feeling the direct impact of the crisis.  The number of businesses extremely concerned about their long-term sustainability increase by 150% over 60 days between surveys. In April, one out of four businesses were extremely concerned about the long-term sustainability of their business.

Luckily this has stabilized according to our most recent data. With the majority of States starting to open things up again, business owners are beginning to see a path forward. The numbers of businesses concerned have flattened and, in some cases, decreased. The number of businesses concerned is still too high, and there will inevitably be some small businesses that never recover from the crisis. As we continue to track this in the coming months, we will see it decline to pre Covid-19 levels.