Why waste a good crisis?

We heard it over and over again all 2020: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

This phrase, credited to Winston Churchill, likely echoed in the brains of today’s young entrepreneurs and resolute business owners. 

While the COVID-19 pandemic claimed the life of some companies, new and legacy, in The Bahamas in 2020, the technology space, as was predicted, was full of winners. 

And there were also some traditional small business owners that dug in through 2020, refinanced their businesses, retooled their models, hardened their resolves, and stretched their necks toward 2021.

Food delivery

Kraven came out of nowhere in 2020 to rescue restaurants from the inherent business risks that came with the government’s necessary COVID-19 protocols.

When restaurants were told they would have to carry on with empty dining halls and restrictive take-out policies, Kraven Food and Beverage Delivery Service was waiting in the wings (no pun intended) with on-demand drivers who took orders electronically on their mobile devices, and employed a contactless delivery service for some of the best non-hotel restaurants on New Providence.

And though Kraven’s business ebbed and flowed with the government protocols that presided over the opening and closing of restaurants, the company can boast that it came a long way in 2020 from a nascent startup phone application in 2019.

“I didn’t think the pandemic would get to the point that it’s at. I thought it was the media sensationalizing it, so I didn’t take it seriously myself,” Kraven’s owner Kyle Albury said earlier this year.

“And then as things got more serious and we got our first case, then more and more communications came out from the government, I realized that there was an opportunity not only for the business, but to open the minds of Bahamians (and let them know) that the service exists.”

Albury said at the end of 2020, he has put 140 drivers to work delivering food to Bahamians who either could not visit their favorite restaurants, or now, out of convenience, didn’t have to.

And restaurants jumped on board to get a piece of what little action remained amidst the pandemic.

“We have a lot of vendors now reaching out to us, obviously because they… particularly some of the dine-in restaurants and even some of the take-away … want to offer the delivery service,” Albury said in March.

The Kraven app now has almost 100 vendors, up from about 30 in March, and it also allows for grocery delivery and even COVID-19 test delivery.

“The biggest things for us in 2020 is the exposure of the brand itself,” Albury said.

“A lot of people didn’t know about Kraven. We only launched the six months prior to COVID-19. The last eight months or so, our name has certainly gotten out there… a lot of it (exposure) is due to COVID-19, but also a lot of the marketing efforts that we’ve done. I think people are realizing the importance of the service.”

He also said his application is only at 30 percent of its capacity, and he has plans to expand the platform in 2021.

“We have a lot of growth,” he said. “We have a lot of plans for next year.”

Discount Distributors also took to the streets this year to make it easier for Bahamians to receive groceries while having to remain socially distant, even employing a fleet of electric vehicles to boot, for an environmentally friendly touch.

Digital currency

It was only a few months ago that Bahamians still aired their disdain for stores that would not carry out a purchase using a debit or credit card if the transaction was less than $10.

Bahamians only knew of tap-to-pay point of sale systems when they marveled at them on a quick trip to Miami, or peered over the shoulder of a person using their mobile phones to make a purchase.

Some commercial banks in The Bahamas still do not offer the safer, easier chip technology for their debit cards.

The Bahamas felt ages behind the rest of the world in the digital payment space at the end of 2019.

But, here at the end of 2020, The Bahamas is the first country to launch a digital fiat currency, the Sand Dollar; and local technology companies that have developed products in the financial space have, in a few short months, changed  the way Bahamians receive money and pay for goods and services. 

One such company, Sun Cash, turned the once painstaking and inglorious process of collecting unemployment benefits into a seamless, simple process during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sun Cash’s head of business development Shawn Smith said their digital wallets and payment processing systems spared thousands of Bahamians from queuing on National Insurance Board (NIB) and bank lines.

In fact, NIB knew the need for this level of technology when it launched its smart identification cards, which were never truly as smart as they could have been, or were likely developed on paper to be.

“Obviously, the government had to do a number of things remotely, specifically national insurance had to make unemployment payments and benefit payments to the citizens of The Bahamas, and it was very difficult to do that through social distancing and physically interacting, so they came to Sun Cash early on in this pandemic and asked Sun Cash to provide a digital solution for them, which we did,” Smith said.

“And we’ve been providing remote payments for unemployment benefits from this entire process started, and we’re still doing that today.”

Island Pay is another financial technology company paving the way in the digital wallet space. The company is also working with NIB to distribute social assistance payments, and allows for the transfer of salaries to its mobile wallet, from the mobile wallet to a bank account, and for the seamless transactions of payment through the use of Mastercard branded debit cards.

Cash N’Go announced recently that it has become one of the first digital payment providers to fully integrate the Sand Dollar into its digital wallet system.

And only last week, Kanoo Pays signed a contract to provide an e-payment system for the family courts.

The Bahamas has taken a huge leap into the digital payment space after lagging behind the region, and the companies involved are poised to grow in 2021.

Brick and mortar

The pandemic, for the most part, kept customers outside of physical store spaces for much of this year.

The biggest winners in the retail space this year were certainly the food stores.

But one “little engine that could” this year was the Tin Ferl pop-up park, where the tiniest of entrepreneurs banded together to make a one-stop space for food vendors who were once dispersed across roadsides throughout New Providence.

Three entrepreneurs launched their food vendor incubator early in 2020 on the grounds of the Dundas Centre for the Performing Arts — which has not been able to operate during the pandemic — and brought stability to food vendors who once haphazardly frequented roadsides, and some money into the Dundas’ coffers.

Tin Ferl faced the business-stopping protocols handed down by government in March, but came back bigger, growing from 20 vendors to about 50, when protocols were relaxed near the end of summer.

One Tin Ferl vendor, The New Duff, was able to sustain its business and grow its following at Tin Ferl, and was therefore able to secure a loan from the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) recently to expand into a storefront.

“The Tin Ferl park really helped to expose us to a whole new customer base that we never really had before,” The New Duff’s Business and Public Relations Manager Lazar Charlton said.

“Being there on the historic Dundas property and on Mackey Street really helped us to spread through the community faster, and thankfully our name is now synonymous with a good product, with really good duff and with a really nice, savory menu line as well.”

Not wasting a good crisis, The New Duff began preparing itself for the return of the tourist market with the opening of the storefront, and the imminent start of the exportation of its duff products.

The government has more than doubled its financial support for the SBDC in fiscal year 2020/2021, to the tune of $55.8 million.

The SBDC used some of this money to help keep numerous businesses afloat during the pandemic while continuing to fund startup companies and help others, like The New Duff and The Nutty Bavarian, to expand their businesses. 

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