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Covid-19 has pushed us all to work from home. So naturally, people are thinking about where they live, too.

The housing market is exploding in Central Ohio as people rush to move to larger spaces, be they homes or apartments. And that's meant a change of business for Jonathan and Jamie Wilcox, of apartment developer and manager Wilcox Communities.

In this episode of Crisis Management, they discuss how Covid-19 has led their company to adapt where people live, and the kinds of homes they're building for the long haul.

Capital University’s interim president Dave Kaufman doesn’t have a background in higher education, but the former Encova Insurance CEO is leading the university during one of the toughest periods for colleges and universities: the Covid-19 crisis.

Kaufman, who talked with Columbus Business First for the latest edition of our Crisis Management podcast, said his nontraditional background has allowed him to take the best of the business world and translate it into leading the Central Ohio university during a challenging time.

Kaufman retired from Encova at the end of 2019, and joined Capital as interim president in June of 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. Capital announced last year that due to the pandemic, the school would suspend its search for a new president, unable to conduct the in-person interviews needed to do a full search. Kaufman is expected to lead the Bexley university for two years or less.

“It is no doubt with Covid and everything facing us, there’s a plateful of challenges,” Kaufman said. “But I am finding that a lot of what I’ve experienced corporately, I’ve been able to apply that here. I feel good about that, that I’ve been able to kind of help the team move a little more effectively than maybe they would have under someone without the experience I had.”

Kaufman said that in both the business world and higher education, “it really comes down to the same thing, building that trust and getting clarity on shared goals to execute (a vision).”

Kaufman said his leadership offers a new lens, “making we can take a different approach than has been considered in past.”

“That’s what they’re kind of counting on me to do,” Kaufman said.

One of his goals with Covid-19 is to “innovate through it,” he said.

For example, with the improvement in virtual learning, Kaufman said there could be a way where multiple universities could partner and offer a broader array of programs, leveraging each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and sharing costs.

“How do our programs compliment others so you can have a broader portfolio of products and services to package?” Kaufman said. “There’s opportunities to blend things that complement each other. (For instance) I’m at Capital, but I have access to courses at two other universities still being a Capital student. You’re not tied to the geographic location like you were maybe three or four years ago.”

Can meat move from pasture grazed to lab raised?

That’s a problem Dublin-based Matrix Meats is helping companies around the world try to solve.

The Dublin-based start-up received some seed-stage backing late last year and is growing, adding staff and looking for new opportunities.

CEO Eric Jenkusky said the business’ partners already include about 25% of the companies in the nascent cultivated meat segment around the world. That includes clients on five continents.

So what is cultivated meat and how might it help address issues like world hunger and food security?

Jenkusky spoke with Columbus Business First’s Newsmakers’ podcast on those topics and more including why the problem it is solving is a materials science problem not a biological one and how Central Ohio can continue to grow to be a hub for alternative food technology.

Even before starting construction on a $100 million facility, a biotech affiliate of Nationwide Children's Hospital had to adapt to two huge changes simultaneously: Switching into for-profit mindset and securing safety in a pandemic.

Andelyn Biosciences Inc. is building a 185,000-square-foot manufacturing facility for the genetic materials used in gene therapy research and treatments. Eventually the factory could double in size if it adds enough commercial-scale clients.

The company already has grown to 120 employees from 100 at the start of the year, most of whom transferred from the hospital's Research Institute. With more than a decade supporting research and clinical trials, the staff already was flexible, adaptable and committed to quality, CEO Mayo Pujols said.

"So as we’ve transitioned to a for-profit, geared towards commercial company, the I think the add-on for our team has been more of around a mindset of scalability, and the mindset of: It is important to think about it as a business," he said in the latest episode of Columbus Business First's Crisis Management podcast.

That means paying more attention to controlling costs while investing in processes and systems to ready for a much larger production output.

"Rather than just having quality as a mindset and you have to do quality work, we actually put the systems in place to ensure quality is engineered into everything we do.

"We kind of took it a step further and preparation for being a commercial entity, and that’s been new to the team. ... And they’ve done really well."

The onset of the coronavirus pandemic in Ohio coincided with an already planned shutdown to bring in new equipment for larger production capacity within the Research Institute, until the new facility is ready. Before reopening in September, Andelyn had to layer in safety measures such as modifying work schedules to keep employees distant if they can't work from home.

Some employees did contract Covid-19 or had to quarantine because of exposure, Pujols said.

"More recently, we are starting to now see impacts from our suppliers," he said. "And I think we’re not alone.

"We were able to do a little bit of stockpiling, but not probably enough to say we’re out of the woods."

As of January, Nikola Labs Inc. was headed for its best year ever. By April, like many businesses shut down by the coronavirus pandemic, the startup was in "the fog of war."

In the latest episode of Crisis Management, Columbus Business First's podcast about steering a business through the pandemic, Nikola co-founder Will Zell and CEO Brian Graham discuss how Graham succeeded Zell mid-pandemic after two years as COO.

After a more than seven-year mentorship relationship, the two had essentially co-led the company with distinct yet complementary approaches.

Simple Times Mixers’ big problem prior to 2020 was space.

Its first two years of business were spent building its brand and then trying to keep up with demand as it used rental kitchen space.

Last year it finally moved into a home of its own, not just giving it a retail storefront and space for events, but also quadrupling its production size with plenty of space to grow.

Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit this spring and knocked out 75% of its sales.

A year that was intended for big growth — geographic expansion, adding jobs — became one about survival.

How did Tinus and his team get Simple Times to survive the past eight months? How have consumers changed? What does the growth opportunity look like now?

Tinus talked with Columbus Business First for this episode of Crisis Management where he shares those insights and experiences and touts a big reputation win in a national poll this fall.

Cameron Mitchell wasn’t sure he restaurant company would still be around.

The founder and CEO of Cameron Mitchell Restaurants was just as scared as anyone in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic that the event might lead to the end of the company he’s spent nearly three decades building.

Now seven months in, the self-described optimist feels more confident in his business’ survival and hopeful the worst has already occurred. But there still are key questions to be answered — five in his estimation — that businesses, restaurants especially, need answers to in order to feel better about the future.

In this episode of Crisis Management, Mitchell lays out those questions and when he expects to hear answers. He also shares a look at how his business is performing — what’s working and what isn’t — in addition to updates on several new restaurants that were in the works when the pandemic hit.

Columbus Food Adventures thought its business was done when Ohio shut down dine-in restaurants in March.

After all its business was based on going into restaurants. In groups. That’s two things that couldn’t be done then and are still limited today months later.

“In a sense, we were starting from scratch,” said co-owner Andy Dehus. “We just had to completely re-configure everything.”

A business built around tours taking people to food turned into a delivery service bringing food to people.

Months later it’s now delivered more than 2,500 dinners for two to customers from more than 50 Central Ohio restaurants spanning 35 different country’s cuisines.

Co-owner Bethia Woolf said it wasn’t exactly how they expected to spend their 10th year in business but it’s turned into a positive. The Trust Fall delivery service and its new gift box program are expansions that have brought new customers to the business and will give it more diverse sales for when tours can resume.

“One of the real differences is in frequency,” Woolf said. “A food tour is something that you maybe do once or twice a year. ... We do get a good number of repeat customers, but it’s usually spread over a longer time period. But with Trust Fall, we have people who are now regulars who order it once a week. We’ve had some customers who will order it multiple times a week.”

Sales are actually up, though profits are down because the margin is smaller on delivery versus tours.

Dehus said it’s not a replacement for tours, but it’s proven to be a strong business of its own.

In this episode of Crisis Management, Woolf and Dehus discuss building that business in the past several months as well as what they need to see to feel comfortable restarting the tour portion of the business, beyond the taco truck tour it does still offer.

Benji Ballmer would like nothing more than to put himself out of business.

That’s how he’ll know he did a good job.

The founder of Yellowbird Foodshed started his produce and food delivery business in 2014 connecting a handful of Ohio growers with a couple hundred customers.

Today the company is working with 150 growers and food producers in the state and serving 1,500 customers, predominately in Central Ohio.

But his ultimate goal isn’t a successful business, it’s changing the food system, at least in the geography within his reach.

“I’m trying to build a system that will put us out of business,” Ballmer said. “I’m not in this for how big can the Yellowbird be. Can we save the frickin’ planet?”

Yellowbird is having its best year ever. The growth is fueled by the Covid-19 pandemic as customers sought out providers with produce and meat in stock and delivery services that allowed them to side-step the store.

Ballmer’s business hasn’t missed a beat despite that surge in sales — weekly home deliveries, for example, rose from 60 pre-pandemic to a peak of 660 over the summer.

“We were prepare for the pandemic because we were preparing for something else,” he said. “I always thought that the thing that would put us over the hump would be there would be a climate disaster in California, a drought that lasted for four or five years, and all of the stuff that’s coming from out there that’s on our shelves in our grocery stores, as organic would cease to exist. That isn’t what it took. It was a pandemic.”

Ballmer talked with Columbus Business First for the latest edition of Crisis Management. In addition to detailing how the pandemic has impacted his business, he also shared the origins of Yellowbird, how the company has evolved over the years and why he feels poised to hang on to many of the new customers gained this summer.