What do you do when your 10-month old business gets hit by Covid lockdowns that knock it flat?If you’re me, you keep on fighting! I set up Professional Panel + Paint in April of 2019. By that time, I’d had 13 years’ working in an expertly run panel and paint business starting as an apprentice. When the owner sold and retired, I took the opportunity to go out on my own.Business was brisk for 10 months – until the first Auckland Covid lockdown. My supposedly retired old boss showed up every day, teaching me the first steps of setting up and running a panel and paint business. Fortunately, he’d been informally mentoring me when we worked together at his company, Boss Panel Beaters, so I’d already been exposed to some of what I needed to know. But it’s entirely different when it’s your own business!Our success during the first months carried us through the first lockdown and we reopened at a reduced level soon afterwards. But the second lockdown later in the year was nearly a killer. Fortunately, help came from our landlord who forgave the rent, making the difference between staying in business and not. Thanks to my former boss and the skill of Prime Strategies business advisor Mark Cooper (who I’ve been working with for 2 years), the last financial year was our first comfortably profitable one since 2019.But Covid is a distant memory and our panel and paint shop is busier than ever, not least because much of our work comes from referral business and regular customers. Lease and large companies particularly like working with us even though we’re small compared to many paint shops. That’s because our quality control is more stringent, our service more personal and we prioritise fleet vehicles to get them back on the road faster. We even go the extra distance as Ritesh Chandra found when he showed up with a scratch on his pristine paintwork. We fixed it immediately and didn’t charge a cent. His Google review said, ‘I never give reviews but I have to for the sincerity of this business even though I've never visited them before! Amazing place if anyone needs an honest business and good workmanship.’When I received the Golden Gun award for Apprentice of the Year, I never expected to have my own business just a decade later. It’s been a wild ride but hard work, determination and a bit of luck enable me to confidently say, ‘If we can survive during Covid, we can survive nearly anything!’If you want to see why we have 87 - 5 star Google reviews and another 82 on birdeye.com, drop into Professional Panel + Paint in Mackelvie St, Grey Lynn.