BUSINESS NEWS
8 • AUGUST 2022
COAST RIVER BUSINESS JOURNAL
Continued from Page 7
Alisa Burke
In 2020, Alisa Burke became a local advocate
for public health measures in Seaside. Her petition
to declare a state of emergency in the city garnered
hundreds of signatures.
Two years later, she’s still advocating for pan-
demic awareness. She runs a Facebook page, Sea-
side Health & Wellness N ews, that shares the lat-
est Oregon Health Authority case data to over 500
members.
As of August, she still hasn’t returned to in-per-
son work.
Burke has been teaching art classes on the coast
for over 15 years. Hosting art retreats made up a
large portion of her income, where she got to spend
days teaching people from all over the world.
When she began seeing the news of the pan-
demic, she announced early on that she would be
taking a break from the retreats.
“I knew pretty quickly if I wasn’t teaching those
fi ve to six retreats, I’d need to creatively pivot to
make up for that income lost in diff erent ways,” she
said.
Burke already had an online presence, off ering
virtual art classes. She leaned into it, and took some
risks.
“This is going to sound like the opposite of like
any advice most business people would give, but I
felt like — ‘OK , this is a hard time …’ I lowered
my prices. Which is something I always wanted to
experiment with,” Burke said.
She started off ering online classes for $5 , and
was able to make more money than before by
attracting customers who had never taken an art
class before.
Burke also expanded her presence on YouTube
and Patreon, a subscription-based platform. She has
over 20,000 YouTube subscribers.
“They’ve grown huge in ways I could never
have even predicted. If it wasn’t for COVID, I prob-
ably wouldn’t have had time to do that stuff ,” she
said.
Even though she misses in-person art classes,
she’s not ready to go back to business as usual.
“Art tends to attract people who are healing,
who have maybe gone through stuff ,” she said.
She said a lot of her clients at art retreats have
ABBEY McDONALD
Jennifer Holen rings up Jeff Wischman’s to-go meal at Nekst Event.
been cancer patients celebrating fi nishing treat-
ments, or people with disabilities.
“I just decided really early on: until I can off er a
space where everybody can feel relatively safe from
COVID — including myself, who has some under-
lying issues as well — I just don’t think it’s right for
me to jump back in,” she said.
Nekst Event
When the pandemic began, Chris and Jennifer
Holen ran the numbers. They asked how many seats
could be causing my
Q: What
rhododendrons to lose color and droop?
A:
BRIM’S
Farm & Garden
34963 Hwy. 101 Business
Astoria • 503-325-1562
For beautiful gardens
& healthy animals
www.brimsfarmngarden.com
Most likely they are not getting enough water.
Rhododendrons like an evenly moist soil because
they are shallow rooted. If they are new plants, make
sure they were planted at the proper soil depth and soak
them well to get them fully hydrated. To get the color
back to a dark green, apply a chelated iron or Epsom salt
drench to the moist roots. Do not fertilize now. You may
not have a good bloom set for next spring if they have
dried out since this is the time of year next year’s flowers
are formed. Look for evidence of moles in the area as
they can create runners under the plants that expose the
roots to air pockets. Stop in or call for mole traps, hoses
and sprinklers.
they needed to fi ll, and how much to charge per seat.
They decided to take a new approach to restau-
rant ownership entirely. In early 2020, they closed
Baked Alaska, their restaurant of nearly 20 years.
“We chose to make that lifestyle change for our-
selves, for our family, for our own mentality. We saw
the writing on the wall. We paid attention to supply
chain issues, staffi ng issues, all these things,” Chris
Holen said. “We saw ourselves going broke … we
decided we didn’t want to do that.”
“So, we decided let’s create, and I quote, ‘a pan-
demic-resistant business,’” he said.
The result was Nekst Event, a to-go, small menu
spot with much more room to social distance than
Baked Alaska. The restaurant specializes in pho, a
Vietnamese soup.
All day long, customers who have already paid
online walk in, pick up their food and walk out.
“We could look empty, but be busy. And it’s
lovely,” he said.
Another unexpected diff erence between the two
businesses is the year-round success of Nekst. With
a mostly local customer base, they’ve seen steady
income instead of the seasonal fl uctuation they’d
grown used to.
Another bonus has been that with no service,
they haven’t needed to hire staff . They handle
everything themselves, with the help of their teen-
age daughter.
Jennifer Holen said they still learn and make
adjustments as they go.
They started the business with the concept of
the to-go only option, then landed on p ho as the
main menu item, then looked back at the num-
bers at the end of 2021. They looked good, so they
opted to close on weekends to spend time with their
daughter.
Then, later in the year when the Astoria Sun-
day M arket started back up, they chose to shift the
schedule back to weekends. As of August, their
hours are 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Fridays and 10 a.m.
to 3 p.m. on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays.
“We don’t want to work all the time. W e did that
for 20 years,” Chris Holen said.
They’ve begun incorporating other services, too.
In February, they started off ering ticketed private
dining events. The fi rst one sold out within three
hours.
They set out to make a pandemic-resistant busi-
ness, and Holen said he feels like they “nailed it.”
“The restaurant business is always such a strug-
gle. There’s so many variables, obviously even
before COVID,” Holen said. “But this, it’s just
perfect.”