Exit Planning
Exit planning is the process of getting your business ready to sell. Often people want to sell their business, but find after a valuation, it’s not worth as much as they would like it to be worth. Wales and West Business Brokers have worked with over 500 M.D.s of small and medium sized companies to help them to achieve their objectives when it comes to selling their businesses, and getting an excellent market value for them.
We provide a complete solution in order to help you get your business sold and work with you to help you achieve the price you want in the time frame you want. We work with lawyers who are experts in business transfers, accountants who can make sure you retain as much of the proceeds from the sale of your company as is possible, and specialists in search engine optimisation to improve your profitability .We work with the best, but also people whose rates are extremely competitive.
Entrepreneur's Relief and Exit Planning
In the 2020 budget, the Chancellor reduced Entrepreneur's relief from £10M to £1M per shareholder, that is 10% capital gains tax instead of 20%, on the gain sale of your company. For many SME companies that will not be a problem.
However, what if your company is worth more than £1 Million?If it is, you can consider transferring, say up to 49% interest in your company to your spouse and or other family members who are involved in the business. This will increase the overall cap of £1M gain taxed at 10%. This is where the planning is required: the spouse and or other family members need to hold the shares and be a director or employee of the company for at least two years prior to the sale of the company.
So, thinking about these moves now may save you and your family some tax in the future.We work with expert tax advisors who are able to help you set up your company in such a way as to allow you to benefit from this.
Our Three Stage Process
There are three stages to our process i.e.
1.Valuation
2.Report
3.Intervention if required
Valuation
We carry out an initial valuation then take your business to market if the value is sufficient for your future plans.
Report
If the value is not sufficient, Wales and West Business Brokers can create a report on the profile of a company that has the value that you desire and look at ways to help you to achieve that over an agreed time scale and outline the costs of the implementation via intervention.
Intervention
Intervention involves creating a plan, in agreement with yourself, with clearly defined objectives to help you achieve the profile of the company that you want using our background in valuing and selling businesses, management consultancy, and search engine optimisation.
We help you, as the seller, to understand how the market will value your business, and how we can help add value to it. It is not as simple as if you want double the amount for the business you need to double the profit. There are a huge number of factors that come into play when valuing a business and it is these that we can help you gain a better understanding of.
Some businesses have the wrong business structure e.g. sole trader when they should be a limited company, LLP, or PLC. Are you right to be a sole trader, or a limited company or would you be better off as an LLP or a PLC? You need to take legal and financial advice on this, and consider changing your company's legal entity if this is more beneficial, but even this must be done in the correct manner to avoid incurring penalties from HMRC. Again, we can help you with this.
Search Engine Optimisation
SEO or, search engine optimisation, can help you dramatically improve the amount of business you gain from your website, and it doesn’t need to cost a fortune. We work with experts in this field who have a proven track record.
You can have the best product in the world, but if no one can find where to buy it from you, you are not going to sell anything.
Using expert Tax advisors when selling your business
When it comes to selling your business, you want the sale to be as tax efficient as possible, and to take advantage of Entrpreneurs’ relief, which is currently only 10% on the sale of the business. We will put you in touch with the right advisors to ensure when you sell your company, you retain as much of the value of the business as is possible.
Exit planning has a very important role to play in all this.