A local law office wants to assist Central New York restaurants and other qualifying small businesses to prepare for the next round of Paycheck Protection Program funding. The first roll-out of the program had its flaws and the Marrone Law Firm is holding a webinar this Friday to discuss new eligibility rules to consider when applying.
CEO Anthony Marrone says the pandemic continues to be extremely difficult for small businesses
“Particularly what I see in the restaurant industry where they’ve got revenue down across the board almost 70 percent compared to last year (2019). So we wanted to do this specific webinar targeting restaurant owners and service industry people just because they seem to be suffering disproportionately, potentially to a lot of other small businesses.”
Marrone adds the new funding is intended to keep most employees of businesses on the payroll. However, some of his clients are temporarily closed and will need to determine how many employees they are willing to bring back. Some are restaurants in Orange Zones in Syracuse limited to offering take-out only.
“I think that especially if you’re in an Orange Zone it’s going to be tough to figure out if I’m only going to bring back a percentage of my staff; maybe I don’t take the full loan amount that I’m eligible for because the way that they’re calculating eligibility is based on last 2019 payroll.”
Marrone adds his law firm is available to assist any small business or restaurant owner and he says the webinar will help them weigh their options and assessing if they qualify. His team developed a template that business owners can utilize to ease the application process and transferable to varying PPP lender’ applications.
“The template is going to help do a few things, it’s going to create a short-cut to figure out if you’re eligible in the first place because there are some new rules about eligibility that weren’t in place the last time and then it’s going to give you the output of how much money you should be able to borrow under this new program. Again, these are forgiveable loans, so the idea is that, even though you’re signing a loan and signing a promissory note, these amounts would be forgiven by the government, if you follow certain rules. So, it acts almost like a grant, rather than a loan, as long as you follow their rules, which we’ll be covering on Friday.”
He says the process should be slightly easier for business owners who participated before. The Obtaining and Maximizing PPP 2.0 webinar will be held this Friday at 10 AM. Pre-registration is available by clicking here.
