5 Things Santa Cruz Businesses Should do Before Closing Their Doors

In Santa Cruz, business closures aren’t just commercial events. They reshape streets, weaken community identity, and take away places where people gathered, argued, laughed and made a living. That is the quiet urgency behind Guest Commentary: Five things local businesses should do before closing their doors, written by Ryan Coonerty in the Santa Cruz Sentinel. It is not a sentimental plea to “save small business.” It is pragmatic advice rooted in lived experience here.

Coonerty argues that most businesses surrender too early. Entrepreneurs, especially those exhausted by payrolls, deficits, and rising costs, forget how many options exist between struggling and shutting down. The first step he advocates is the simplest and the hardest: ask for help. Accountants, turnaround consultants, or industry peers can see blind spots that exhausted founders cannot. Many Santa Cruz shops fail not because their products are bad, but because their margins, inventory, or debt structure became unsustainable long before anyone intervened.

Coonerty’s second suggestion will strike some as radical but shouldn’t: transition to employee ownership or cooperative models. This region was built on community idealism, not faceless corporations. Some of our most resilient enterprises are run by the people who spend their days on the shop floor. The third step is to tap public resources. Santa Cruz County and California have programs, financing tools, and forms of technical assistance that many owners simply never look for. Pride is often more expensive than interest rates.

The fourth recommendation may be the most relevant to our era: re-evaluate the entire business model. If foot traffic is dying, move online. If inventory ties up capital, pivot to services or subscriptions. If customers are aging, rethink the brand. Treat the business like a living organism, not a monument to how things used to work.

Finally, Coonerty says closure should be the last step, not the first reaction. A business becomes part of a city when the lights stay on long enough for the community to remember it. Santa Cruz loses more than revenue when a storefront empties. It loses memory.

As Thanksgiving arrives, take a moment to consider Charles Schulz’s advice: learn from yesterday, live for today, look to tomorrow, rest this afternoon. Santa Cruz businesses have endured pandemic winters, fires, storms, and the whims of tourists. But endurance is not the same as isolation. Read Coonerty’s article. Let it remind you that there is often another path forward, and that the community you serve wants you here next year too.