BUSINESS IMPACT OF THE QUAKE : Quick Thinking Helps Small Firm Cope

Joel Ritch’s San Francisco office was intact when he arrived Wednesday, but his business was a mess.

His firm, Professional Messenger, like many San Francisco small businesses, does not have a contingency plan for emergencies. Instead, he has operated by “instant, knee-jerk reaction.” The office was without power when Ritch, president of the firm, and two employees entered the brick building south of downtown Wednesday morning. Ritch immediately rented a portable generator to restore some of the power in the offices. By later in the day, one of seven telephone lines started working.

On Thursday, nearly as soon as power had been restored, Ritch and his staff found themselves out on the street: Police and fire officials ordered them out as they closed a building next door because of suspected structural damage.

Ritch loaded important files and a telephone into a car, and operations director Debra Steckel made arrangements for the firm’s answering service to take calls and forward messages to the Paradise Lounge across the street.

A bus stop then became the operation’s center for Professional Messenger, which has a staff of about 10 workers and contracts with about 20 messengers who operate on bikes, motorcycles and cars, serving firms in the entire San Francisco Bay Area.

Messengers, who on a typical day get directions by walkie-talkie or two-way radio, swung by the bus stop for their orders.

“We have no idea where our drivers are,” Steckel said. “This is a very complex operation. Now it’s a nightmare.”

Meanwhile, Ritch began considering longer-term concerns.

With no offices, he attempted to reach the landlord of a building that the firm had planned to move into in December to see if they might set up quarters earlier there.

Other options included going to Ritch’s home. “We could rent cellular phones and pagers for all the messengers,” said Ritch. “We could even do it right here in the street.”

The firm was able to remedy its problem at least for the near term, when, after an hour of discussion with officials from the city’s Building Inspector’s Office, Ritch and his staff were allowed to re-enter the building, but the building’s owner must immediately obtain a structural engineer’s report that the building could survive the crash of its neighbor.

Ritch was also trying to develop a plan to provide service from San Francisco to Oakland, which has been made extremely difficult because of the collapse of the Bay Bridge, which connects the two cities. “We’ll hire people to ride the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) to get across the Bay. On each side, messengers will meet them at the station and go from there.”

Ritch said that two or three days without doing business will wipe out profits for perhaps two or three months. If his firm is forced to close six days, “It would kill us.”

“When you’re young, you don’t have an emergency plan. But we’re also adaptable,” Steckel said. “This is the kind of business where we’ve got an emergency every day. We just have to come up with a new solution for this one.”