Owner managed businesses

Most owner managed businesses grow organically, shaped by the day-to-day demands of running and building the company rather than by any long-term plan for what comes next. Yet almost every such business eventually faces a transition: a trade sale, a management buyout, a handover to the next generation, or an orderly winding-up. The difficulty is that the most valuable planning opportunities tend to sit well upstream of these events, and by the time the conversation begins in earnest, the best of them may already have closed. Qualifying for business property relief, structuring shareholdings to preserve business asset disposal relief, or arranging affairs so that profits can be extracted efficiently on a solvent liquidation all reward action taken years in advance. We work with business owners and their shareholders to identify the right structure early and to implement it in good time, so that the eventual transaction proceeds on the most favourable footing available. Whether the goal is to sell, to pass the company to family, to bring management into ownership or simply to wind down on retirement, we translate technical advice into practical steps that owners can take, working alongside their existing accountants and solicitors rather than displacing them.