You are asking the business owner to arbitrage his business (place a bet that he can carry expenses until some crisis allows him to gouge).
Why do you want the business owner to arbitrage his business when the people who do arbitrage for a living won't do it for him? If the experts at arbitrage declare it a bad idea, then he probably shouldn't do it either.
Arbitrage is a transaction that involves no negative cash flow at any probabilistic or temporal state and a positive cash flow in at least one state; in simple terms, it is the possibility of a risk-free profit after transaction costs.
Why do you want the business owner to arbitrage his business when the people who do arbitrage for a living won't do it for him? If the experts at arbitrage declare it a bad idea, then he probably shouldn't do it either.
And he's not. That's sensible.