Who we serve
Much of your wealth is tied up in the company — and much of your attention too. We help business owners plan the finances in and around the business: putting surplus reserves to work, drawing value out tax-efficiently, preparing for a sale or succession, and building wealth that stands on its own.
How we help
Cash held beyond what the business needs to trade often earns less than inflation for years at a time. We advise on investing surplus reserves in the company's own name, over a horizon that suits the business — and with an eye on how holding investments affects its tax position and the reliefs available to you.
Salary, dividends and pension contributions each play a part, and the right mix changes as the business and the rules change. We help you decide how much to take out, in what form, and what to do with it once it leaves the company.
A sale or handover is often the moment the family's wealth actually arrives. We help you work out what the proceeds need to achieve, how they should be invested, and how to pass the business on in the way you intend.
When the company is the main asset, the family's finances carry its risks too. We help you build savings, pensions and protection that do not depend on the business — so a setback in one is not a setback in both.
The question we are asked most
There is no general answer to this, and anyone who gives you one without asking about your plans is guessing. What it turns on is when you will need the money personally, and what you want the company to be by then.
The trade-off itself is straightforward enough. Money left inside the company has not yet been taxed in your hands, but it is still exposed to the company's fortunes and to its creditors. Money drawn out is taxed on the way, and then it is unambiguously yours. Pension contributions made by the company are a third route with rules and limits of their own. In our experience most owners use all three, in proportions that shift as the business matures.
What complicates it is that the decision reaches beyond the return on the cash. Holding substantial investments inside a trading company can put valuable reliefs at risk — the relief on the gain when you sell, and the treatment of the shares in your estate — so the question is never only about where the money earns most. We look at it alongside your accountant, whose knowledge of the company's position is better than ours.
Tax treatment depends on your individual circumstances and may change in future, and the Financial Conduct Authority does not regulate tax advice.
Towards the exit
A sale is the point at which years of concentrated risk turn into liquid capital, and the questions reverse. Until that day the job is to grow one asset; from that day the job is not to lose the proceeds. Most of what can be done about the second is done before completion rather than after it.
That is a window worth using. How the shares are held and in whose name, what has gone into pensions in the years running up to a sale, what the proceeds are actually for — each is easier to arrange with time in hand than in the weeks after an offer arrives. It is also the point at which the number in the offer letter should be tested against the income it would need to produce for the rest of your life.
We should be plain about what we do not do. We are not corporate financiers: the deal itself, the legal work and the company's tax structuring belong to your broker, solicitor and accountant. Our part is the personal plan around it — what the proceeds need to achieve, how they should be invested, and what you and your family live on afterwards.
The people it depends on
Two or three people usually carry a smaller company, and the finances have to allow for that. If one of them is out for a year, or does not come back at all, the questions that follow are practical: who can pay the bank, whether the remaining owners can buy that person's shares, and what the family who inherit them would want to do with a stake in a company they do not run.
Those questions have ordinary answers, provided they are settled in advance. A shareholders' agreement decides who may buy the shares and on what terms; insurance on the key people gives the company or the surviving owners the money to do it. Neither is complicated to arrange. Both are awkward to arrange after the event.
The same goes for the people you employ. The workplace pension and the benefits around it are a cost the business is already carrying, and they are worth having chosen deliberately rather than inherited from whoever set them up first. We advise on those alongside your own arrangements, bringing in a specialist where a scheme is intricate enough to warrant one.
Concentration and diversification
Building a business usually means holding one large, concentrated asset for years — that is how the value is created. The wealth you draw out deserves the opposite treatment. We invest it in widely diversified portfolios, blending index funds with specialist funds across asset classes, aiming for attractive long-term returns with lower volatility than the typical stocks-and-bonds portfolio.
That way the family's wealth stops rising and falling with a single holding — including the one you built.
The value of investments and the income from them can fall as well as rise and you may get back less than you originally invested. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results.