I am an administrative agent (haengjeongsa — a licensed professional who prepares administrative filings and permit applications on behalf of clients) with an office in Songdo, Yeonsu-gu, Incheon. Here is one story from my work.
The certificate that looked the simplest took the longest.
At first, the company wanted just one certification — one of the bonus-point items listed in a public agency's tender notice. The CEO had written its name in the notes app on his phone and showed it to me: Inno-Biz.
Three months later, what the company received was a certificate with a different name. And the first thing it had to do to get it was something that seemed to have nothing to do with certification at all: putting up a partition in the office.
One line about bonus points in a tender notice
The CEO was in his late thirties. From a unit in a knowledge industry center in Songdo, he ran a company that built business software for public agencies. There were seven employees, four of them developers. The company had been in business for a little over two years.
Until then, it had earned its revenue from contract development for private companies. This year, the goal was to supply public agencies. Its own product was finished, and a few agencies had offered to try it out.
The problem was the tenders. Every notice had bonus-point items, and one of them was whether the company held a business certification. The point difference was small, but most tenders are decided by exactly such small differences. Applications for government policy funding had similar bonus items.
The CEO was in a hurry. Two tenders he was interested in were scheduled for the next quarter. The salaries of the four developers depended on contract revenue: take on more contract work and product development stalled; focus on the product and the contract work shrank. Supplying the public sector was the way to end this tug-of-war.
So he came with the name of one certification written down. He said it was the name he had seen most often online.
The day before our consultation, the CEO emailed me the full text of the two tender notices. Each ran to more than thirty pages. He had highlighted only one page — the one with the bonus-point table.
I read the notices in full, because there was more to check than the points table: eligibility, required documents, and by what date a certification had to be held for the points to count. Even if a certification is listed in the table, it earns no points unless the company holds it as of the bid deadline.
In both notices, the reference date was the bid deadline. The first deadline was two and a half months away; the second, four months. These dates became the end point of every schedule that followed.
Sorting out the names first
The first thing we did in the initial consultation was sort out the names. There are many kinds of confirmations and certifications a company can obtain, and because the names are similar, they are often confused.
I explained them in two broad groups.
The first is business confirmation schemes: startup confirmation, SME (small and medium enterprise) confirmation, women-owned and disabled-owned business confirmation, and so on. These confirm which category a company belongs to, and the requirements are relatively objective.
The second is business certification schemes: Venture Business Confirmation, Inno-Biz (technology-innovative SME) and Main-Biz (management-innovative SME), social enterprise certification, family-friendly certification, and so on. These involve a review of the company's technology, management system, or social purpose, and require far more supporting evidence.
Then we reread the bonus-point items in the tender notices. The qualifying certification was not just one. Venture business and several others were listed right alongside Inno-Biz. The CEO had seen only the first name.
This discovery was the first turning point of the case. The goal was not Inno-Biz. The goal was the bonus points.
The difference between the two groups also shows in the preparation time. Because the requirements are objective, a business confirmation can be completed relatively quickly once the documents are in order. A certification involves a review, so preparation and review can take several months. And most certifications have a validity period — you don't get them once and forget about them; you have to be confirmed again each cycle.
On the first day, I also made one thing clear: no one can promise that any certification will be granted. The reviewing body makes the decision, and even the same documents can lead to different results depending on the guidelines in force at the time of application. What we can say is only whether, based on the materials available now, the chances look good or something needs to be supplemented.
The CEO later told me that hearing this actually reassured him. Every ad he had seen online promised it would work — and that had made him more anxious.
After he had opened the application screen on his own twice
The CEO had already tried twice by himself.
The first attempt was the Inno-Biz online self-assessment. Filling in the items, he got stuck on the requirement about years in business. A company just over two years old did not yet meet that requirement. The screen told him the company was not eligible to apply.
The second was the application screen for Venture Business Confirmation. He stopped at the step of choosing a type. There were several types, and each required different criteria and documents. He said he couldn't tell which type fit his company.
Both times, he had done nothing wrong. It was just that both times, he opened the application screen before knowing what the company had.
Certification is judged on evidence, not on the application form. The application screen is the last thing you open.
The CEO mentioned that before our consultation, two certification agencies had contacted him. One guaranteed the certification; the other offered to write the business plan for him.
Both call for caution. No one can guarantee a certification. And whoever polishes the wording of a business plan, its content must be what the company actually does. When the moment comes during the review for the CEO to explain things himself, a plan written by someone else will falter in his mouth.
So we divided the roles. Diagnosing the company's current state, designing what to prove and in what order, and preparing and organizing the documents were our job. The substance of the plan — what this company is doing and what it intends to do — would be filled in with the CEO's own words. We wrote down what he said, attached the supporting evidence, and put it in order.
Preliminary diagnosis — what does this company have right now?
The heart of certification work is not filling in the application but the preliminary diagnosis and the design of the evidence. So our second meeting was devoted entirely to diagnosis.
I asked the CEO for four sets of materials: financial statements for the last two years, the employee roster and records of enrollment in the four major social insurances, a list of intellectual property held or applied for, and a list of contracts showing the revenue structure.
Once the materials were spread out, the shape of the company came into view.
Most of the revenue came from contract development. The company's own product had no revenue yet. There was one patent application, not yet registered. All four developers were full-time employees enrolled in social insurance. But there was no document showing what these four people did. No organization chart, no division of duties. Seven people were doing everything together in one space.
One thing became clear at this point. The company's greatest asset was its development staff and its technology. Yet on paper, that asset was invisible.
A technology-based certification ultimately has to show that the company is doing research and development. And to show that, the documents must reveal where R&D takes place and who does it.
The diagnosis turned up one more thing. R&D expenses were not tracked separately. Developer salaries and equipment purchases had all been booked as general expenses. In reality, a large share of the company's spending went to R&D, but the books did not show it.
That same week the CEO called the accountant and decided to split the accounts starting the following month.
We did not change past records retroactively. Numbers changed after the fact are hard to explain later. Instead, we took this area out of the core of the evidence for this certification, and decided to build it up as material for the next one.
Redrawing the sequence
Based on the diagnosis, we redrew the sequence. There were four steps.
First, SME confirmation. This is the most basic confirmation. It is often required when applying for other certifications, and it is frequently used in public tenders. The requirements are objective, so it can be completed fastest.
Second, establishing a dedicated R&D department. This is the mechanism that makes the company's R&D activity visible on paper. Only with it in place does the evidence for the next step hold up.
Third, Venture Business Confirmation. It is not blocked by the years-in-business requirement, and it was on the list of qualifying certifications. Once the dedicated R&D department is in place, the range of types one can apply under also widens.
Fourth, Inno-Biz. Apply once the years-in-business requirement is met. The R&D record accumulated by then becomes the evidence as it stands.
When the CEO realized that the fourth step was his original goal, he laughed briefly. "So we get there after all — just in a different order."
Exactly. Certification usually isn't about getting what you want in one go, but about arranging the order so that each step becomes evidence for the next.
Even the first step, SME confirmation, was not simply waved through. Whether a company qualifies as an SME depends not only on size criteria such as revenue or assets, but also on its shareholding relationships with other companies. If there are related companies, their size may be added in.
I asked the CEO whether he held shares in any other corporation, or whether any other corporation held shares in his company. He thought for a moment, then said that early on he had made a small investment in a friend's company.
When we checked the ownership ratio, it was not at a level that would affect a related-company determination. But had he applied without knowing about it and then received a request for clarification, he would have had to scramble for documents to explain it. We put a copy of the investment agreement in the file in advance.
Even the simplest-looking confirmation hides at least one question.
Why we put up a partition
There are conditions for establishing a dedicated R&D department. The key ones are two: there must be staff dedicated to R&D, and the space where they work must be separated from other departments.
The staff were there — four developers. The problem was the space. Seven people worked in one open space with no partitions. Next to the CEO's desk was a developer's desk, and next to that, the salesperson's.
So the work was done. A partition went up on one side of the office, and the four developers' desks were moved inside. It was nothing grand: it took two days and didn't cost much. Beforehand, the work was reported to the management office of the knowledge industry center.
Staff reactions were split. The developers liked the quiet, while the salesperson grumbled that he now had to knock on a door to ask the developers anything.
Next came the paperwork. We drew a new organization chart and put the duties of the dedicated R&D staff into a document. For each of the four, half a page: what they research, and which of the company's products that research connects to.
That document became the backbone of all the evidence that followed.
A mismatch between insurance records and job duties
While preparing the documents, a mismatch surfaced.
One of the four developers was registered under a different job in the social insurance records. He had been hired early on for sales support and later moved to development. His work had changed, but the record had not.
Mismatches like this come back as questions during the review. If a person is described as dedicated R&D staff but another record points to a different job, the reviewer will ask which one to believe.
So we set an order. First, we gathered materials to confirm when the employee actually changed roles — project assignment records in the company messenger, commit history in the code repository, and the like. Then we advised the company to file any necessary record corrections with the relevant agency itself.
What we did was find the mismatch and lay out what needed to be aligned, and in what order. Designing evidence, in the end, is making different documents tell the same story.
Venture Business Confirmation — how we chose the type
Once the dedicated R&D department was in place, we prepared for Venture Business Confirmation.
There are several types of Venture Business Confirmation: one based on a record of investment received, one based on R&D investment, one in which technology and growth potential are evaluated, and others. This was exactly where the CEO had stopped on his second attempt.
The criterion for choosing a type was simple: what can this company show best?
It had never received outside investment. As for R&D investment, although most of its salary spending effectively went to R&D, it had never been tracked separately as R&D expense, so it was hard to show in figures. What remained was the type evaluated on technology and growth potential.
So that was the type we chose. And we built the evidence around three things: the technical description of the company's own product, the content of the patent application, and the correspondence with the agencies that had proposed trial use.
The third was important. There was no revenue yet, but there was outside interest in the product. If that interest was documented, it could serve as grounds for growth potential. Finding the relevant documents in the CEO's inbox took a full day.
We did not use the documents as they were, because each was of a different nature. One agency had expressed its intention to try the product in an official letter; at another, a staff member had expressed interest in a personal email; and at a third, the product's name merely appeared in one line of meeting minutes.
Writing all three with the same weight would have been an exaggeration. So we described each document exactly as it was: the official letter as an official letter, the email as a staff member's opinion, the minutes as a mention. We did not present a non-binding expression of interest as if it were a contract.
At first the CEO was disappointed by this. Couldn't we write it up a bit bigger? I pointed out that the reviewer can check the originals. A sentence written bigger than its source shrinks the moment the source is read. A sentence written as the source says is backed up by the source.
Keep the business plan short, and number the evidence
The business plan took the longest. The CEO's first draft ran to twenty pages: company vision, market size, competitor analysis, a five-year revenue plan.
I suggested cutting it in half. What a reviewer wants to know is the evidence more than the vision: what this technology is, who is building it, who has shown interest — and which documents show each of these.
So we attached an exhibit number to every sentence of the business plan. Next to the technology description, the patent application number; next to the staffing description, the number of the duties document; next to the market response, the number of the agency document. Sentences without evidence were cut.
The five-year revenue plan was cut too. A number without evidence, once doubted, shakes all the other numbers with it. Instead, we wrote concrete goals for the coming year and which tenders those goals were tied to.
The final version was nine pages. Seeing how much it had shrunk, the CEO grew uneasy. "Is it all right for it to be this short?" I told him that because it was short, it would be read.
Before submitting, we prepared one more thing: likely questions, in case the CEO had to explain in person during the review.
We picked five. How is this technology different from existing products? What happens if a key member of the development team leaves? Revenue still comes mainly from contract work — when do you expect revenue from your own product? Which feature of the product does the patent application relate to? What exactly was the response from the agencies that tried it?
The CEO wrote the answers himself. Next to each answer, I added the corresponding exhibit number — so that what he said would not diverge from the documents.
While writing the answer to the fourth question, the CEO stopped. He said it was hard to explain the link between the patent application and the product's features in a single sentence. We decided to add one diagram to the technical description to cover it. Later, the request for supplementation during the review came on exactly this point. Because we had flagged it in advance, the supplement went out within a day.
The affair of the five hundred business cards
There was one small commotion along the way.
On the day the Venture Business Confirmation came through, the CEO sent me a photo. Three days later, another photo arrived: newly printed business cards, with the venture business mark on the back.
But that mark was an image found online. Certification marks often come with rules on how they may be used. I suggested he check.
After checking, the CEO called. He would have to reprint all five hundred. There was laughter in his voice.
Those five hundred cards now sit on top of a cabinet in our office. The CEO left a bundle behind, saying they made good memo paper.
The result
The whole process took about three months: two weeks for SME confirmation, a month to prepare the dedicated R&D department and put up the partition, and about a month and a half to prepare for and go through the review for Venture Business Confirmation. There was one request for supplementation during the review, asking for a fuller explanation of the link between the patent application and the product's features. We added one page to the technical description and submitted it.
The company obtained Venture Business Confirmation, and bid on one of the two tenders the following quarter with the bonus points applied. I won't record the outcome here. A tender is not decided by one bonus item; it depends on each agency's evaluation.
But one thing is worth noting. The organization chart, the division of duties, and the R&D records created this time will serve directly as the foundation of the evidence when the company applies for Inno-Biz in the future. The CEO marked on his calendar the date the company will meet the years-in-business requirement. He also created a form for logging R&D activity and had the developers fill it in every Friday until that day.
Certifications have a validity period and must be reconfirmed before they expire. You spend longer maintaining one than obtaining it. That is why the record-keeping after certification matters as much as the preparation before it.
The certificate that looked the simplest turned out to be something that changed the shape of the company. One partition, one organization chart, half a page of duties per person. None of it had existed before.
On our last call, the CEO said something. While preparing for the certification, he had put into writing for the first time what his company actually does.
Administrative paperwork often makes visible, for the first time, the work that is already being done.
A few things to keep in mind
If you are preparing for a business certification, consider setting the order like this.
① The goal is not the name of a certification but the bonus points or support criteria. If you read a notice's bonus-point items all the way through, you will often find another certification on the list that you can obtain right now.
② Preliminary diagnosis comes before the application screen. Lay out your financial statements, staff roster and social insurance records, intellectual property, and revenue structure, and first check what the company can actually show.
③ Check the years-in-business requirement first. Each certification has its own. If you don't meet it yet, it is better to build up the earlier-stage confirmations or certifications first.
④ Make different documents tell the same story. If the organization chart, the division of duties, and the social insurance records don't match, it will come back as questions during the review.
⑤ Design your records for after certification. Certifications have a validity period, and the evidence for the next stage starts accumulating now.
The requirements and procedures for business confirmations and certifications vary by scheme and may differ depending on the reviewing body's judgment and the guidelines in force at the time of application. Requirements differ from case to case, so they must be confirmed individually with the competent authority.
This case is a fictional story reconstructed for illustration; the people, business names, places, and figures in it bear no relation to any specific individual or event.
