Blog
Rayner my parade! The importance of specialist advice.
Jemma Brimblecombe
6 September 2023
Death of a founder = failure of the business?
Death is a traumatic event for the deceased’s family, friends and those involved in their business. The untimely death of business owner or founder can leave a business in shambles. Combined with a lack of succession planning or inadequate planning this can have significant unintended repercussions. Recent studies suggest that a founding entrepreneur’s death wipes out, on average, 60% of a firm’s sales and cuts jobs by roughly 17%. Also, these companies have a 20% lower survival rate two years after the founder’s death compared to similar firms where the entrepreneur is still alive. A recent Legal & General survey which found that 59% of businesses believed that they would have to stop trading in less than a year after the death or critical illness of a key individual.
12 July 2023
Plan early when exiting a business
Two out of five business owners in the UK are planning to sell, wind up, or crystallize assets within the next year. According to a recent poll conducted by Censuswide, 40% of the 504 surveyed business owners with revenue exceeding £5 million expressed their intention to exit within the next year. Additionally, 23% of UK business owners have expedited their plans to sell or wind down their businesses in the past 12 months.
4 August 2021
HMRC no longer reviewing Family Investment Companies
Good news – The “secret” specialist HMRC unit set up in 2019 to examine the tax avoidance risks has been wound up after finding no evidence of correlation between the use of FICs and non-compliant behaviour.
16 April 2021
Business LPAs - How to safeguard against a future incapacitated partner, director or shareholder?
As a business owner/shareholder, what would happen to your business if you were unable to make decisions – would someone be able to authorise payments or enter into contracts and keep the business running?
16 June 2020
Company Succession Planning: Death of a sole director – now what?
Company succession planning is critical to ensure that a company can continue to run in the unfortunate event that a director (or shareholder) dies. If there are other surviving directors, they are able to step in and run the company, but what happens when a sole company director dies?