ABSTRACT
Under the COVID-19 pandemic condition, small businesses are developing in difficult economic and social conditions. Some small businesses were unable to overcome the crisis threshold and were forced to withdraw from the market, most tried to change the situation positively and keep their business, despite the difficult working conditions. The issue of timely determination of the crisis conditions of small businesses, their objective assessment, sustainable development, and the development of an effective anticrisis strategy is still acute. In our view, such a strategy should always be present in the development plans of small businesses, accompanying their long-term development. The anticrisis plan will allow small business minimize economic losses as much as possible. Drafting a document containing an anticrisis strategy requires the use of a special methodology for forecasting crisis phenomena and the formation of proactive anticrisis measures. The main goal of the research is to establish an effective system and tools for anticrisis regulation of small enterprises, the practical implementation of which provides the possibility of sustainable development of small enterprises. Based on this target orientation, the main stages of the anticrisis strategy are determined in the paper, and the SWOT analysis matrix is used to diagnose small companies in crisis conditions. A systematic approach to analysis is the basis for choosing small business stabilization strategies. Based on the systematic analysis, small enterprises are given the opportunity to establish an aggregated model of sustainable development, where the main stages and sequence of overcoming the crisis are presented. Diagnosing the external and internal environment of a small enterprise precedes the development of an anticrisis strategy and involves conducting a static and dynamic analysis of its development. The methodology of anticrisis strategic analysis developed by us allows to determine the cause-and-effect relationship of factors and indicators affecting the development of small enterprises, includes the identification of the main areas of sustainability of the development of small enterprises, local and integral assessments. The innovativeness of the above-mentioned approach lies in the fact that it can be used in the conditions of various characteristics of small business crisis research, and in this sense it has a universal-pragmatic character. © 2022 Bull. Georg. Natl. Acad. Sci.