When Julius Caesar ruled Rome and much of the Western World, a soothsayer warned him to “Beware the “Ides of March.” Within days, he was assassinated on March 15, 44 BC. A couple of millennia later, the Western World was similarly rocked in mid-March when the COVID-19 virus struck the U.S. and much of Europe, full force.

As business owners, there’s nothing in living memory that compares with the disruption that COVID-19 has wrought. Not the oil shocks of the ’70s. Not 9/11; not even the “Great Recession” of 2008-’09. So what to do?

We asked Mike Paton, an author ...