Business View Caribbean | November 2020

82 BUSINESS VIEW CARIBBEAN NOVEMBER 2020 restaurants are reopening and hotel reservations are being made again. But it’s a very fluid situation. Everything was shut down for a few months, then some were cautiously reopened, only to be closed again. At this point, commercial entities are optimistically open again. The airlines are flying but no cruise ships – that in itself is a devastating impact on tourism. Knoepfel acknowledges, “Businesses like restaurants have had to adapt to only doing takeout. They’ve really had it hard. Construction was labeled as an essential service, so we were able to stay open the whole time but my wife owns jewelry stores, and they had to close. Thankfully, she has been doing very well with online sales. As for our business, we had changed our focus to larger commercial jobs and now we’re into smaller residential work – having many jobs with smaller dollar values ongoing at the same time. When it comes down to it, we’re making little money at all just to help the community. Neighbors helping neighbors. It’s nice to engage with people in that way. And we have so many big projects just waiting to take off – people have been hesitant about starting jobs during hurricane season, which ends in early December, so I think we’re going to get slammed with work around Christmas.” JPK is built on a culture of caring, and Knoepfel has made every effort to keep his team employed during the economic slowdown – to the point where he has a lot of people working around his own house at times, just to keep them busy. He admits, “In construction, when you don’t have work for people, you have to lay them off. A construction company can ramp up to 150 people on a job and when that job’s over, you might end up with only three or four employees. But we’re a little different than other companies. By taking these smaller jobs we’re able to keep Managing Director of JPK Development, Jay Knoepfel with Osa Notting