Aligning Business and Personal Interests
The future of a family business and the livelihood of its employees are too important to leave to chance. Despite this, over half of private business owners have not taken any active succession planning steps.
As a result, research indicates that less than 30% of family businesses survive to the second generation, 12% to the third generation and only 3% to the fourth generation.
The failure to implement effective business succession planning can result in significant and often unnecessary tax liabilities for you and your family.
The key to successful business succession planning, whether it is for retirement or in the event of incapacity or death, is to start the planning process as early as possible.
For business owners and directors we work closely with our corporate, commercial and employment teams to ensure a holistic approach to planning to align your business needs with your succession strategy on both a company and individual basis.
We can help you by:
- reviewing the tax implications on the sale of a business or looking at gifting business assets,
- Advising on succession within the business
- understanding what you are aiming to achieve and advising how best to achieve it; whether that is through the sale of a business, the setting up of trusts or family investment companies
- working with you to find the most suitable structuring for you and drafting all the necessary documents so that you can achieve this
- explaining the tax treatment of what you are doing and advising on any relevant reliefs and exemptions
Family Governance
We are able to achieve your aims when passing on the business to other members of your family through listening to you and coming up with solutions to reflect your wishes.
We work with you on:
- setting out how your business or partnership will run down the generations
- creating different share classes for different family members so that they can benefit while you can keep control
- explaining how your shareholders’ agreement interacts with your personal planning in relation to the business governance and succession
- how best to involve non-family members and the differing ways that they can benefit while preserving the family company
- the interaction of taxes between the business and your personal liability
