Amidst COVID-19, our volunteers dramatically stepped up efforts to support fellow veteran and military spouse business owners and entrepreneurs. For many business owners, survival has meant redesigning the airplane while flying it— not an easy feat, and this is reflected in our activities in the last quarter: 1. COVID-19 STRIKES CLOSE TO HOME. Almost all of us on the VBP team are business owners, some for decades. From our vantage, no small business is going to escape the pandemic without making fundamental changes in its SOP. Thankfully, EIDL and PPP funding has given us a couple more months to make critical adjustments. For those borrowers with SBA-guaranteed loans, having the SBA take over our debt service for six months bought us additional time. However, with the recent surge in coronavirus, we have all had to endure fits and starts. Sadly, what we have learned is that some of the smallest companies in our network have not been able to capitalize on either EIDL or PPP, and therefore had to shutter their businesses and/or furlough employees. National surveys show as much as a 25% failure rate for small businesses. We’ll be able to better gauge the situation when government relief funding runs out in September. Based on the statistic that 47.5% of workers are employed by small businesses, and that 40 million workers (a higher percentage than during the Great Depression) have filed for unemployment benefits, our estimate is that almost half of laid off workers are from the small business [...]