Riley Taylor, president of Taylor Linen Services, Andalusia, AL, says he was weeks away from signing a contract to build a new plant adjacent to a closed textile mill when COVID-19 struck in February 2020.

“We were two weeks from ‘jumping off into a mess,’” says his son Reid, who serves as sales manager for this family-owned commercial laundry about an hour’s drive north of Pensacola, FL.

Riley recalls that the company was close to finalizing a deal to build a 60,000-square-foot (5,574-square-meter) plant near a defunct AlaTex plant that had thrived from the 1950s to the late ’70s by ...