Business on ice: Deep freeze, snow hurt small companies

NEW YORK – When the temperature in New York plunged, so did revenue at Tanya Lim's dog-walking service.

Many of Lim's clients were among the people who decided to work from home because of the cold, so they didn't need her services. On a day when she and her three fellow dog-walkers would normally have had 15 pets to walk, Play Pals NYC had none. One of Lim's staffers made some cat-sitting visits, but all their other appointments were canceled.

"The first week after the holidays usually everyone is back working, but we're not," said Lim, who didn't charge for the cancellations.

The severe cold and snow over the past few weeks hurt many small businesses. Restaurants and retailers were among those that suffered the most because few people wanted to go out, according to Planalytics, a company that analyzes the effects of weather on businesses.

It's true that severe winter weather can be a moneymaker for some businesses like plumbers and heating repair companies. But many businesses found it harder to operate — cities like Philadelphia, Detroit and Charlotte, N.C., had their coldest first week of January ever. Chicago's average temperature was 18 degrees lower than usual, and Atlanta's was 15 degrees below normal.

Even on days when Lim's company wasn't getting hit by cancellations, it was too cold to take dogs on walks of between 30 and 60 minutes. The shorter walks also meant less revenue, as fees are based on how much time a walker spends with a pooch. What helped Lim's overall cash flow was that her cat-sitting business had soared during the holidays while many people were away.

Snow and ice are rare in Charleston, S.C., but they caused the cancellation of events including a conference that Karen Moran expected to cater. Moran, owner of Sweet Lulu's Bakery & Cocktail Caravan, also wasn't able to make deliveries because bridges and roads were closed. She estimates that she lost $10,000 in revenue.

The weather can wreak havoc with a company's products as well as its operations. Soon after Linda Parry Murphy's company shipped bottles of a new fruit and/or herb-flavored beverage called Agroposta to customers, e-mails started arriving: The liquid had frozen and the bottles burst in transit.

It was part of a learning curve for Murphy. Her company, Product Launchers, imports Agroposta from Croatia and had shipped it from Pennsylvania to online customers and executives at Safeway stores, which plans to start selling the beverage later this year. Murphy and her team have now found ways to insulate cold-weather shipments, and the good news is that the shipments to Safeway were just samples.

But, Murphy said, "it was not a great first impression."

A layer of ice in northern Florida brought calls as well as complications to Bulldog Adjusters, whose employees inspect houses for damage so homeowners can file insurance claims. The ice contributed to leaks inside people's homes, but the ice was a hazard for adjusters climbing onto ladders and roofs, said marketing director Rosie Faulkner.

"One adjuster went up there and he said, 'I can't do this. I'm going to slip and fall,' " she said.

The Mr. Rooter plumbing franchise in Tallahassee, Fla., hadn't gotten any calls from homeowners with frozen pipes in nine years of business before this latest spell, dispatcher Judy Matthews said. But it has been so cold that the franchise had about 30 calls for help, either because pipes burst or devices called backflow preventers failed as the temperature dropped.

"We're getting calls in the middle of the night," Matthews said. The manager and six technicians have worked longer hours than usual to make the repairs.

Not even the promise of a hot drink had many of Marine Park Coffee's customers braving the cold. The tiny four-month-old shop in Brooklyn saw its revenue fall by more than a third as single-digit temperatures kept even the regulars away, owner Jhonn Thomassen said. When it snowed last week, with drifts of more than a foot in some spots, he had just 12 customers in the time he expected to have 50.

"It has been a little bit of a surprise. You do associate warm coffee as a way to combat the cold weather," he said. But Thomassen figures a cold snap can give him a chance to do some planning and bookkeeping.