The initial 'panic mode' of the pandemic has subsided, and Beck Group's Ryan Toth is getting down to business

Editor's note: Small business leaders in Tampa Bay and across the U.S. are grappling with hard decisions that seemed unthinkable just six weeks ago. In the first of an ongoing series, small business owners share their journeys navigating coronavirus.

In early March, a perplexing package arrived at Beck Group's sleek office in Tampa Heights. The design-build firm's CEO, who is based in Dallas, had sent two cases of hand sanitizer to the regional office in Tampa.

"It came to the front desk, and the receptionist was like, 'I’m not sure what this is for,'" said Ryan Toth, Beck's regional director for Florida. "We got an email 10 minutes later that was like, 'Listen, this is a serious thing.'"

For many in the U.S., the novel coronavirus wasn't yet top of mind in early March, but Beck CEO Fred Perpall, whose work has a national scope, was watching closely. The situation began to evolve rapid-fire in the days after he sent the cases of hand sanitizer to the team in Tampa.

A week later, Toth was sitting at a picnic table at Unicoi State Park in Georgia, using the Air Pods Pro his boss gifted him at Christmas to listen to calls as Beck entered triage mode. He and his wife had originally planned to take their kids, ages 10 and 12, on a cruise for spring break; while they debated whether they should go, the cruise line canceled the trip. Instead, they rented a 30-foot recreational vehicle —  Toth jokes that it was the "Cousin Eddie Cruiser," after Randy Quaid's RV-driving character from the National Lampoon's Vacation movies — and headed for the Georgia mountains.

With a campfire lit and his children roasting marshmallows, Toth took calls that spanned hours as Beck laid out a plan for navigating the pandemic. Those plans quickly changed, from having rotating groups in the office to a directive to work from home if at all possible. It's now Toth and a skeleton crew — three or four people who pop in and out as needed — in the Tampa Heights office. On a normal day, there'd be around 70 people there.

Nationally, the volume of Beck's business has dropped 20 percent since the pandemic began. Morale was down, too; Toth calls it a "scotch on the back porch" kind of mood (though he prefers a dark rum and club soda).

"The first week it was like, this sucks, because we were going to have a banner year, " Toth said. "We were set to have the best year on record in 100 years — from a volume and profitability standpoint, we were just jamming on it."

The funk, he says, didn't last long. The leadership team took immediate action, doing everything they could to cut costs. Furloughs are tough, he says, but "we don’t want to be in a position where we should have done that six months from now."

His team has been resourceful; the general superintendent struck a deal to buy face masks from an acquaintance who owns nail salons. They've kept their sense of humor, too: Family-style lunches that were once held in the office are now on Zoom, and the meetings quickly become a competition for the best virtual background.

"The freak out mode, the panic mode, has kind of subsided," he said. "For our business, it's a little easier to get used to this, because we’re still doing design and construction. We have a backlog, and this happened to us during '06-'07 — we had a construction backlog for two, two and a half years, and we didn’t feel the crisis until late 2008."

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