Interview Highlights

• Succession is really a key challenge for lots of business owners.
• When it comes to thinking about perhaps retiring or passing on the reins is how do they do that?
• How do owners realise the value they've built in their business, but while also maintaining the legacy so that their business can keep going into the future?
• Continuing succession is really important, particularly in Wales because there is an ageing ownership population.
• Often business founders are really not sure about the different routes they can take to effect succession.
• One of the most common routes to management succession is through a management buyout, where a number of the existing management team step up to take ownership in the business and take the business through to its next growth stage.
• Employee ownership is another route where a larger group of employees may decide that they want to step up and take ownership of the business.
• one of the big misconceptions that founders and shareholders make is they don't actually believe that their management team or employees can actually afford to buy the business off them.
• There's often a taboo about talking about retirement and transfer of ownership, but we always find that it's great to have those conversations early, understand what their aspirations are, particularly if there's family members that you also want to transfer to.
• One of the things that we see that works really well is where owners begin to step away from the business gradually.