- As companies do open back up, essentially everybody's looking for ways to protect their employees.

With the 30 employees that we have right now, producing these shields is what's been able to keep them on and more importantly, for us to pay the bills right now.

(upbeat music) My name is Jim Ramella.

- My name is Gerry Ramella.

- I'm Patrick Ramella with Cleveland Menu.

- My father Julius started our company in 1930 and we are primarily, a manufacturer of menus.

We do menus for restaurants, hotels, resorts, casinos and cruise ships.

Needless to say, the COVID-19 has impacted our business slightly in the standpoint, we don't have any customers.

- When COVID hit and things started to shut down, it was like falling off a cliff.

Two weeks ago, business as usual, you know, we're busy, we're traveling, everything and then it was like, no emails, nothing.

So, any conversation, you know, ongoing menus, future menus, whatever it is, it is off the table overnight.

- First, it's how do you help?

Number two, how do you keep your business alive?

Now, we did have 90 employees come March 1st, we're down to about 30 employees now.

- We do have a manufacturing plant and we're very blessed and fortunate that we do everything internally, we don't really outsource anything.

So, we have equipment, we have supply chain and we have technical people that can produce things.

We really regenerated our manufacturing process to now produce these DuroShields.

- So, we began producing these face shields as we did see other manufacturers kinda pivot and begin making, you know, PPE supplies for the healthcare industry.

The nice thing, we kinda looked at our business and we have the clear plastic material to produce these shields, then we have a sales force of ten people who really got behind selling these shields across the U.S. and we're selling them to not only, you know, your hospitals but assisted living communities, grocery stores, hardware stores and then also distribution centers, manufacturing plants, as they look for additional ways to protect their employees.

There was no easy path to selling these, it was all just picking up the phone, calling and truly selling.

So, we were producing roughly 5,000 per day but we can scale that to probably ten to 15,000 based on demand.

- I think that we're really proud of the fact we're making face shields here that is being used as PPE for, you know, heath care workers, hospital workers, essential employees at grocery stores, that's important as society as the U.S., you know, combats COVID.

- And we did just successfully or hopefully successfully receive the PPP loan that, you know, I don't know if we'll get back to 90 employees but, you know, definitely go from 30 maybe to 50 or 60 again and from there, we really need the menu business to pick back up and nobody can really predict that.

- It's adaptability, the fact that Pat and Jim both came up with ideas now that we're able to adapt our production facility to not only help people but also keep our employees employed.

That was huge.