Central New York businesses need to take a long view when it comes to dealing with the economic fallout from the Corona virus epidemic. The losses in the stock market indicats how the disease is impacting the economy. There are already abrupt closure of businesses and big reductions of people gathering in public sending shock wave to bottom lines.
Rob Simpson, Centerstate CEO President is hearing a lot of concern from businesses around Central New York. He calls the the impacts of the coronavirus unprecendeted and warns business owners.
"I think from the business stand point, we do need companies to be able to think down the road just a little bit. This is more than just a one or two week disruption. This is going to have longer term and more profound impacts, so we need people thinking about it planning for something that looks like a more sustained period of economic disruption," said Simpson.
He sees Centerstate’s role as finding best practices to help employees of different businesses work at home, while also finding the best ways to keep workers safe that can’t work at home. Simpson believes the area can weather the storm, if there’s not a lot of panic.
“We hope that businesses will refrained from taking drastic and rashed actions in the face of what is a pretty high level of fear and paranonia particularly smaller businesses like restuarants and retails which have real fear about being able to make payrolls in a week or two weeks or three weeks,” said Simpson
He said there has to be public sector assistance for small businesses and employees who get laid off or cut back. He’ll be looking for support from more than just local and state-level governments.
“It is going to be increasingly important for us to work with our public sector partners inorder to mitigate the short - term, mid - term and long - term disruption to our econmic system,"
Simpson said in this time of disruption, he has already heard from a number of business leaders asking how they can help, showing that some are mindful of the greater community good.
