By: Jake van Beever, Client Adviser, Rothschild & Co
We too often see cases where entrepreneurs have neglected their personal finances in favour of concentrating on business growth.
While scaling a company can seem like an all-encompassing task, taking the time to get your personal finances in order can have major benefits in the long-term.
When starting out, it’s understandable that founders focus on the growth of the business. But as the company scales, you’re likely to start paying yourself a healthy salary. It’s at this stage you should start to think about your wealth in greater detail. Start by making full use of tax-efficient savings wrappers like pensions and ISAs. For many of these allowances it’s a case of ‘use it or lose it’.
As your income increases, tax planning plays a hugely important role in ensuring your finances are being managed effectively. Pre-exit tax planning opportunities are often overlooked in the frantic run-up to an exit, so make sure you have the right tax advice in place because many of the tax planning opportunities are only available before the event.
Establishing a framework
We know it can be difficult to take a step back and assess your wealth as a whole, which is why we often find it helpful for clients to divide their wealth into separate ‘pots’. We break this down into five areas of focus, which we find helps clients better visualise and understand their spending and saving. These five categories are:
· Lifestyle: The lifestyle pot should be assets that make you happy, such as second homes, cars, art or other discretionary spending. This is about emotional rather than financial returns.
· Cash: Your cash pot is your income, salary and dividends, which should be accessible and is used to pay for your short-term spending.
· Nest Egg: Founders should also build a nest egg. This long-term diversified investment portfolio is there to protect your wealth from the impact of inflation whilst providing a source of liquidity.
· Growth: A growth pot includes investments with high potential for growth but that are more likely to be volatile and illiquid. This can include real estate, angel investment and investing in individual company shares.
· Business: Your business pot is any funding allocated to your primary business and other ventures. This is where you have the most risk, but it can be the source of the greatest returns.
Preparing for sale
Although it pays to think early about your personal finances, we often find a liquidity event such as a business sale or partial exit is a common opportunity for founders to take stock.
We often describe this period as moving from a ‘river’ of income to a ‘lake’ of wealth. Unlike the river, which is always flowing, the lake is a finite pool which you must take care to maintain. How you manage your wealth after a sale can have a significant impact on how long it lasts. After all the hard work of building and then selling a business, you want to avoid running out of money in retirement.
Choices you make on day one after the sale can have a major impact on your financial prospects. The first step is to make sure you’ve protected the cash generated by the sale.
You should set up bank accounts before the sale completes, so you have somewhere safe to hold your lump sum when it arrives. It’s important to remember that the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) only protects up to £85,000 per person or £170,000 for joint accounts per financial institution. This means if you keep your lump sum in a single account and the bank collapses, you could potentially lose a significant sum of money.
Think about that transition from the river to the lake. With your wealth now a finite pool, you should analyse your outgoings to see how much money you’ll need to achieve your desired income. Use cashflow forecasting to map out how this spending will impact your wealth. This analysis should also income the returns you expect to receive from a diversified investment portfolio.
Don’t rush into doing anything, let the dust settle and then make sure you have a long-term plan in place for your wealth.
A crucial but sometimes overlooked point is to make sure you enjoy your wealth. You’ve spent years or even decades building your business, take some time out to enjoy the benefits of your hard work. This could involve setting aside money to pursue angel investment opportunities, passion projects or to simply spend more time with your family.
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