For a counter example: in Germany business subsidies for COVID excluded payroll, which for many service businesses meant it wasn't worth applying. The idea was that payroll expenses could already be reduced by sending people home using the short-time work subsidies, which goes something like this: you reduce an employee's hours by X% and the government pays the business XY% of the employee's salary.
In practice this meant small, founder-led service companies were hit harder because working business owners couldn't take advantage of this and cutting hours also meant not being able to invest as much time in rebuilding or pivoting. Additionally the subsidies also barely covered stocking expenses (e.g. for losses from perishable goods expiring during lockdowns) so the only type of business that really benefited were medium scale companies with enough financial reserves to survive sending every employee home while the subsidies would cover a large chunk of recurring business expenses, i.e. mostly manufacturing companies.
There were also some additional subsidies but they used almost surgical precision to similarly limit who could apply, e.g. solo entrepreneurs without employees (but again, not covering payroll) or companies that had more than X% of employees working at least Y% short-time while also having at least one employee out of short-time mentoring someone in a job training, or a tax rebate for companies paying out "COVID bonuses" to employees (which in practice just translates to giving tax subsidies to large companies paying out bonuses to senior executives in the middle of a pandemic).
In practice this meant small, founder-led service companies were hit harder because working business owners couldn't take advantage of this and cutting hours also meant not being able to invest as much time in rebuilding or pivoting. Additionally the subsidies also barely covered stocking expenses (e.g. for losses from perishable goods expiring during lockdowns) so the only type of business that really benefited were medium scale companies with enough financial reserves to survive sending every employee home while the subsidies would cover a large chunk of recurring business expenses, i.e. mostly manufacturing companies.
There were also some additional subsidies but they used almost surgical precision to similarly limit who could apply, e.g. solo entrepreneurs without employees (but again, not covering payroll) or companies that had more than X% of employees working at least Y% short-time while also having at least one employee out of short-time mentoring someone in a job training, or a tax rebate for companies paying out "COVID bonuses" to employees (which in practice just translates to giving tax subsidies to large companies paying out bonuses to senior executives in the middle of a pandemic).