SAN ANTONIO — Local businesses are working to recover from pandemic-related shutdowns. But one local company is overcoming additional obstacles from the national, to the local, to the personal.
“This is one of the tools that was stolen out of our van” Tanner Schafer said, holding up a large battery-powered caulking gun.
Tanner has a lot of passion for his work. You can’t watch him change a windshield without getting a detailed explanation of everything he’s doing.
“He tries explaining all of it and it shows his passion for it and it shows why he’s been able to you know, get up at 5 and get home at 8 o’clock every night,” said Tanner’s brother and co-owner of Omni Auto Glass Noah Schafer.
Tanner and the rest of the staff at Omni Auto Glass have been working such long hours to try and catch up after a string of incidents that have set their family-owned business back.
The company, started in 2016, had spent the first few years of its existence as a mobile service working on customer vehicles on site. In 2019, they moved into a new location with a garage just before the pandemic hit.
“At the time it was a really good idea for us,” Noah said. “This new shop we had was instantly, you know, almost unusable.”
In early 2021 as vaccines were starting to be distributed and business was starting to pick up, the family was hit with a series of coronavirus infections.
Once the family was done quarantining, as they were getting ready to start back up, Texas was hit with a devastating winter storm and rolling power outages.
“We couldn’t leave the house, we couldn’t drive in the snow, we had no power.”
Then toward the end of last month’s winter storm, the apartment many of the family shared off TPC Parkway was lost in a fire. The one consolation was that the company’s van, which was stuck in the garage underneath, managed to survive.
“We were so relieved. I mean, when we saw that the van was intact, I mean that’s our way of business,” Noah said. “When we open it up and see $8,000 of equipment gone it was just absolutely heartbreaking.”