Potenza pivots from grocery store to online

After nine years of running the T-burg fresh food market Good to Go!, Nana Potenza was ready for a change. In 2019, without much in the way of a real plan, she sold the Main Street business and proceeded to pivot.

In March 2020 — as COVID first started to impact the county — Potenza officially launched a new business: Nana Potenza Designs. She now offers web design and brand work for small businesses, and to her surprise, it’s going pretty well.

“It’s a funny thing because it started off much better than expected,” Potenza said. “But I keep waiting for it to drop off. Every time I don’t have another project, something pops up. My goal was to have two clients a month, which I didn’t think would happen right away, but it did.”

Potenza grew up in Pittsburgh, moved to Ithaca in ninth grade and has become an integral part of the Trumansburg community. She’s worked for the GrassRoots Festival Organization for the last 13 years, even while running the store, and also served on the

Trumansburg Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors for six years.

Potenza’s many connections to the community have proven valuable in her new venture. Mary Ellen Salmon of Salmon Pottery Gallery & Studio was a frequent customer at Good to Go! (she still misses the breakfast burritos) and collaborated on the yearly Empty Bowls fundraiser with Potenza. Salmon said that Potenza was a joy to work with each year and that, because of this, she was an obvious choice when she needed a redesign of her website.

“I am a total Luddite,” Salmon said. “I am not good with computers, and she was so patient with me. I had a Yelp account but lost the password. She even had to call Google. Other people wouldn’t do that. She worked it through with me.”

Potenza didn’t go to school for web design, but she started dabbling in it five years ago when GrassRoots needed help with its site. Since then, she’s learned while doing and helped many other local businesses and organizations create useful and beautiful websites. She’s turned her passion for supporting others into a job.

“I relate to their struggles and I think they make up the fabric of our community,” Potenza said of local small business owners. “When you support a local business, you know what family you’re directly supporting. You’re supporting other people’s passions. I like helping people succeed.”

Potenza admitted that the most difficult aspect of owning a business with a physical location and a full staff was making a living wage. She kept her job at GrassRoots for financial security but explained that it was a catch-22; she felt she could never put all her focus onto her own business.

The financial challenges she experienced as a business owner coupled with her deep connection to the community influence how Potenza runs her new venture. She specializes in creating websites in two weeks for an affordable price, and she works with the Squarespace platform because she said its sites are user-friendly.

“I paid around $6,000 for my Good to Go! website 10 years ago,” Potenza said. “That’s a lot. And sometimes when you get a website, you have to pay to update it. Empowering small business owners to be able to update their websites and have control over them is really important to me. Especially during COVID, that became extra important.”

The first website Potenza worked on this year turned out to be heavily affected by the pandemic. Silo Food Truck owners Jesse Steve and Katie Foley were working with Potenza before COVID to give their site a refreshed look. Potenza helped them change their logo and color palette to match their high-energy operation.

Silo, often found parked at events and festivals, launched its new website in March and quickly realized its normal revenue streams would be canceled. Luckily, Steve and Foley were able to use the new website for a whole new business model. Silo set up at Liquid State Brewing Company in Ithaca and offered online ordering for pick up, something it had never done before.

“We launched in a new way and we wanted the website to have this fresh, modern, colorful, clean vibe,” Foley said. “It conveys our personality a lot more. And then we needed to educate people on all the different things we were doing. We were at Liquid State certain days and in Ovid other days.”

Silo, like many other food businesses, had to change its offerings, hours and rules multiple times throughout last year. Foley said they worked with a national company to build and maintain their site in the past. She said the former company wasn’t meeting their needs and that she’s been thankful for the newfound ability to easily update and customize the current site.

“If there’s something you’re kind of struggling with, even if she doesn’t know how to do it right away, she has a knack for doing the research and getting to the bottom of it,” Foley said of Potenza. “She has a really good intuitive sense about the story you want to tell and the best way to go about doing it.”

Potenza noted that she misses seeing people frequently at her store, but working with people on their websites functions as a way for her to still be involved, in a much more flexible way, even during this year’s times of isolation.

“I haven’t worked with the same industry twice,” Potenza said. “It’s fascinating. You really get to form an intense connection with people for a short period of time. You really get to know the person and go into their world.”

Visit Potenza’s website at nanapotenza.com to learn more.