Exit planning for entrepreneurs

If you’ve recently decided to sell a business you’ve spent most of your life building, you’ll be entering an exciting, but perhaps daunting, new chapter. You’ll have newly acquired wealth to invest which you’ll want to work as hard for you as you worked to earn it.

We can provide strategic advice and suggest practical ways to manage your wealth before, during and after the sale of your business.

Case study: how we helped entrepreneurs Mr C and Ms R

We manage the affairs of two business partners, Mr C and Ms R, who recently sold their consultancy to a US firm for around £12m.

We started working with them before the sale, carrying out a rationalisation exercise in which we tidied up their existing pensions and investments to ensure they were minimising costs and being managed as efficiently as possible, freeing our clients to focus on their business.

When it became apparent that the business might be sold, we introduced our clients to corporate and private client professionals who helped with the transaction and made sure their legal and tax affairs were in order.

Each partner took home £4m after the sale, and we worked with them individually to help them clarify what they wanted to achieve with their new wealth. This involved pinpointing their motivation and goals for themselves and for their families (such as holiday homes and education funds) and then building a detailed financial strategy to fund them.

Both clients are still in employment and will be earning a substantial income, which is all factored into their personal models. They also have a material equity stake in the newly merged firm; this is in US dollars, so we’ve implemented a foreign exchange hedging strategy for them.

Each client has told us that knowing their own affairs were being well looked after enabled them to focus much more on the business and maximising the value of the transaction.