The Ministry of SMEs and Startups said on the 31st that it will send a "crisis Alrim Talk" to small business owners and implement one-stop comprehensive support to proactively manage their management crises and help them recover.
Recently, many small business owners, whose operations have grown more difficult with closures and rising arrears rates after COVID-19, have been so focused on their livelihoods that they did not accurately grasp their own crisis situations and ended up at a dead end, or struggled to access support policies dispersed across institutions.
In response, the Small Enterprise and Market Service, regional credit guarantee foundations, and 17 private banks will collaborate to send the first "crisis Alrim Talk" on the 31st to small business owners in crisis.
The "crisis Alrim Talk" proactively provides necessary information, including tailored policies such as management diagnostics and specific counseling methods, by selecting small business owners among policy fund and guarantee recipients and bank loan borrowers who are deemed at risk of management crisis.
Small business owners who receive the "crisis Alrim Talk" can check their enterprise's competitiveness, survival prospects, and growth outlook through the online "My Store Management Diagnosis (Small Business 365)," and can receive one-stop counseling and support on government assistance dispersed across multiple institutions through the 78 "New Start Support Centers" operated nationwide by the Small Enterprise and Market Service.
At the New Start Support Centers, in addition to existing closure and recovery support, various external programs are also provided in linkage through in-person and phone counseling for small business owners, including debt adjustment by the Credit Counseling & Recovery Service (CCRS) and policy inclusive finance by the Korea INclusive Finance Agency (KINFA).
Going forward, the "crisis Alrim Talk" is expected to guide about 100,000 to 200,000 small business owners annually on a monthly or quarterly basis.
Choi Won-young, director general for small business policy at the Ministry of SMEs and Startups (MSS), said, "Starting with the dispatch of this crisis Alrim Talk, we will strengthen the comprehensive support system by organically linking it with support programs from government ministries," and added, "We will work to ensure that small business owners do not miss support opportunities due to a lack of information."