VETERAN SPOTLIGHT:
Bob Coco goes camping at Newfound Lake A FORMER NAVY OFFICER FINDS SUCCESS IN BUSINESS — DESPITE COVID
Bob and Anita Coco enjoy their new life at Newfound RV Park and Campground.
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In the midst of every crisis lies great opportunity. — ALBERT EINSTEIN
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n the winter of 2020, Bob Coco was having his best business year ever. Then came March.
When COVID struck, his successful skate-sharpening business came to an abrupt halt. “We went from six days a week at full speed to nothing, zero,” he says. “That was a shock.” Both his retail store and his international online business had to be shut down. It was a business that Coco started when he retired from his service as an officer in the Navy in 2003. He knew he wanted to work for himself, so he took the skills he had learned sharpening skates for himself and his ice-hockey-playing friends and made a business out of it. He opened No-Icing Sports Hockey Pro Shop in a 600-square-foot store in Hudson. “Well, it just took off,” he says. “I had this little niche. Nobody did what I did, and nobody did it as well as I did.” Within a year, he moved to a bigger store. Two years after that, he moved to a bigger store. Along the way, he went online with Skate Rescue Service, sharpening skates for people as far away as Australia. Life was good, until it wasn’t. “After COVID, we maybe had one customer a day in June, July and August of 2020, if we were lucky,” Coco says. “You can’t keep a retail store open under those conditions.” With sports shut down across the country and no certainty about when the industry would come back, even his online business had to be shut down. With his businesses suddenly shuttered, stuck at home with nothing to do — it was a terrible time for both him and his wife, Anita. “We weren’t making enough to pay the bills,” he says. He turned to Philip Rentz, a Business Development Officer at Service Credit Union, who facilitated a loan from the federal Paycheck Protection Program that he used for rent and utilities. His landlord also gave him a break. “That helped get us through,” he says. By then, Gov. Chris Sununu had opened the state’s campgrounds, one of the few businesses that could safely operate at the time. After months of being at home, Coco and his wife decided to take their camper and head to a campground that was a short walk from
