Exit planning

One of your most important business exercises?

There are as many as 80-90,000 businesses on sale in the UK at any one time. That’s a lot of competition for vendors wanting to get the right price, and for buyers looking to acquire the perfect business.

It also raises many questions. What’s your business worth? What steps do I need to take to make my business as attractive as possible? Who am I going o sell to? My management team? A competitor?

That’s why we encourage you to consider your exit routes from an early stage.  Help you think about why you’re in business and what your long term objectives are. Tax and financial services planning play a big part in this.

We can help you think about exit planning and how to:

• Start with the end in mind
• Optimise performance
• Polish the business
• Plan for tax
• Create the sale

We’ve been helping clients to sell their businesses for years (and sometimes for many, many millions)! We make sure you do it right: that you pay the right attention to tax and personal objectives and let us work with the relevant legal teams on your behalf.

Benefits

Exit planning is often part of the business plan: start with the end in mind and how you’ll  achieve it. It should also bring comfort knowing you’re heading in the right direction.

Quality assurance

It’s a multi-disciplined matter that often makes the most of the wide range of expertise we have in-house (and sometimes with our external specialist contacts, such as   the hundreds on hand at our  UK200 network).

What we can do?

We can drill down into the figures, so, for example, if you predict a 20% increase in turnover, we’ll critically examine how you’ll do this. If you think your gross margin will improve, we’ll want to know why and how. And we’ll help you monitor against actuals. And we can use best-practice tools to generate actions that will really make a difference. For example, we often use a “Forcefield Analysis” to increase sales; and a Waste Audit to increase profits.

How much is it?

We can agree based on the value of the advice.

FAQs

When should I start planning my exit? ASAP!

What if I don’t think anyone would want to buy my business? That’s always possible; and it may be a case of working out the best way of distributing the assets on the closure of the business. Alternatively, we can work on ways to make the business desirable to 3rd parties.

Should I have a pension? Again, this is something to consider as early as possible, as part of your retirement planning.

What can go wrong? We’ll carry out a risk assessment and a plan to address what we find.