It was David Mering’s turn to share. On a conference call in March 2020 with a group of independent advertising agencies, he looked a bunch of other CEOs in their virtual eyes and confessed that COVID-19 put Mering, the Sacramento-based branding company he founded in 1985, in a chokehold. It was tough to admit. Other owners had shared minor updates, nothing catastrophic. But most of Mering’s clients came from the travel industry, so the agency (whose motto is “We move people”) found itself at the mercy of a pandemic. “You can imagine, when everything went into lockdown, we were hit