BY MARGARET DAMGHANI
Body Wellness Massage Therapy, LLC
Barbra Galavotti
Website: bodywellnessnc.com
Address: 1428 Aversboro Rd, Garner, NC 27529
How long have you been in the Garner Area?
Lived in the Garner area for 24 years, and started Body Wellness 11 years ago.
What inspired your business?
My passion for people, helping people, educating people on pain management alternatives to medicine.
How did you adapt to changes with the pandemic and closures?
I’m not sure anyone can fully adapt to the changes and especially closing. Being in a “people focused” industry, worry extends to your employees, especially the single parents, and your clients who rely on what we do to manage their pain.
Staying in touch with clients and encouraging them to do self care, while educating them on how to, gave hope they would be encouraged as well. I also stayed in touch with employees to hopefully provide them a sense of “we are going to be ok” and all have jobs to go back to.
What have you had to do to comply?
I had to close my doors to comply with the executive order. This meant $0 revenue flow, however all of the bills still needed to be paid.
How did this affect your employees?
It forced my employees to file for unemployment.
How did you use the award from the Garner Small Business Resiliency Fund?
The fund was helpful and contributed to rent for 1 month. It was humbling knowing our small community was willing to help out like that, especially when all of the bills that needed to be paid, no one reached out including rent, utilities, banking, software companies.....the list goes on.
Not one company reached out to say let us help you. I wasn’t looking for a hand out, but was hoping some of the businesses I know are far larger than my own would have offered for at least a deferment on bills. A very disappointing moment for me so the Resiliency Fund put a little faith back into me that there are still folks that care about what we do for the people.
What does the future look like?
I wish I knew what the future looked like. It is so hard to tell. Although we were given the go ahead to open our doors, the expense has greatly increased due to protocols that need to be in place in order to have clients walk through our doors.
Not to mention, many folks are still hesitant about coming back in. I haven’t been able to bring all of my staff back yet and our operation hours and days have reduced greatly due to the numbers being low coming back at this time. The slow start makes it even more challenging to catch up financially from the loss.