She and her husband closed their store on March 25 last year. On March 18, the prime minister had announced restrictions on gatherings and the lockdown was in place.

A week later, Fiona and James Lester realised the virus threatened their whole future: "I said to my husband 'I think we are done. I don't think we can come back from this'."

They were wrong. A year later, business is booming - she says that what seemed like a busy day before COVID-19 now seems like a normal day. They have taken on an employee.

The hard knock of close-down forced them to rethink, and to do things they had meant to do but hadn't quite got round to, like creating a website for online shopping.

To their surprise, customers cooped up in their homes, started ringing for products, so she and James would go round to the closed shop, get the goods and he would then deliver them. It was another enforced innovation.

"He would knock on the door, leave the product and step away, and have no contact. We had 20 deliveries a day," Mrs Lester said.

Their business, the Markets in Wanniassa, sells craft supplies for knitting and crochet plus Australian products like jam.

"The best thing that could have happened for the business was a pandemic," she says.

"Craft supplies went nuts because people realised that crocheting and knitting was good for mental health. I had known that since I was four but the rest of the world has realised that crafting is a good coping strategy."

Although they didn't know it at the time, their business was well-placed for the pandemic because much of their product comes from inside Australia and even in and around Canberra. "We had all the people here, knitting the jumpers and making the jams."

Those businesses which have survived have done it by being nimble.

Cosmorex Coffee, for example, gave customers a bit of leeway with bill-paying whereas the big companies were rigid: no money, no product, according to Daniel Moscarito, one of the company's managers.

"The biggest thing I learnt in COVID is that you would think that the biggest guys - the national and international companies - would support their customers but they didn't while we were able to help," he said.

The family firm based in Fyshwick laid off five casual staff as the epidemic hit a year ago. "It was very stressful time. We had a heap of products, with the orders cancelled immediately."

The company imports green coffee beans and roasts them for individual customers and for coffee shops. Mr Daniel said that the pattern of trade has changed as coffee places near big offices have declined but those in the suburbs have got busier with the shift of work to home.

And trade has moved online. "I don't think we'll ever go back to the way it was," the coffee roaster said.

There are companies which went under because of the epidemic but, overall, there are about 800 more small businesses in the ACT today than there were a year ago, according to Graham Catt, chief executive of Canberra Business Chamber.

There are 31,000 businesses operating in the territory, all but 36 of them employing fewer than 200 people - so small businesses are the bedrock of the privately-owned part of the economy.

"A year on from COVID-19, the outlook is much better than we could have expected. Business is in a much better position than we expected," Mr Catt said.

The businesses which had been hardest hit - and often remain down and maybe out - were in tourism and hospitality.

The big issues now, according to Mr Catt, are border closures, particularly at short notice, and snap lockdowns.

"Every time we go through that, there's a hit to confidence," he said.

But, he added, "We are starting to think about economic growth."

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