Hi, I’m Yalda Harris with the Corner Café. My husband and I have owned the café for approximately two years now. And being a small business owner during time of recession as we’re going through right now has been a little bit tough, but what we’ve done is really decided to step back and look at what the customers need and go from there.

We’re open seven days a week, of course. We’re open for breakfast and lunch, but on top of that, we do a lot of caterings. Now, the caterings don’t necessarily have to be right off the menu. Depending on what the needs are, if there is a special event such as a banquet or a reception, people give us a call and let us know exactly what they would like. So it would be something that’s completely not on the menu, but because we make everything fresh or from scratch, we can do that. So that’s been one of our biggest advantages.

And also the other thing we did, because we are only open for breakfast and lunch, we have opened up the café in the evenings for special events. If our people want to rent out the space and they want us to cater it, of course that’s even better and we’ll definitely do that and we have done that and we’ve had a lot of success doing that.

So, ultimately, in times like this you’ve really got to step back and decide what works and what people need and be really receptive to that and be willing to make the changes and the sacrifices you need to make so that, one, you can succeed and also you are providing a service to people and what they need.