LB Corporate Finance Newsletter – May 24

Corporate Finance Guides

The department will soon be issuing guides to assist all staff and clients to understand more about what the Corporate Finance team do, how we can help, and the services we offer.

Our initial guides will cover key topics that are based on the most frequently asked client questions:

• Business Valuation – What is my business worth?
• Succession Planning – How we can assist with selling your business?

We hope these guides will help you to understand more about what we do and enable you to identify key opportunities to discuss these areas, when working with clients.

Succession/Exit Planning/Sale Mandates

If it becomes clear that a business will soon be winding down, we would like to assist our clients with discussing their future plans. This includes how they intend to exit their business. It may be that they’re looking to sell their business, orchestrate a management buyout, or in the simplest of cases, they are looking to retire and close their business down.

When’s the best opportunity to raise this with clients?

Ideally, we get the opportunity to speak to these clients as early on in their journey as possible to give them the right steer, however, the following meetings could also prove effective:

• Part of a pre-year-end tax planning meeting
• An accounts finalisation meeting
• During an informal chat, you could consider asking: What is their future exit strategy? At an appropriate time.

If you are unsure about your approach on this, please do not hesitate to reach out to the Corporate Finance team. Please note: We will be arranging a presentation about the Corporate Finance team For the Dyer & Co team, shortly.

Such conversations have led us to picking a couple of sale mandates, both of which are at advanced stages, recently including Matthew Barnett flying out to Copenhagen to liaise with a potential buyer! We hope these will conclude in successful sales.

Team Member Secondment

Matthew Lo will also be spending some time working with the team having reached out to his line manager showing a keen interest in Corporate Finance.

We have also been supported by Fern Webb and Stefan Summerford this month to help with our ever-growing workload.

Referrals

We have had a bumper month of 17 referrals across all the offices and professional contacts. The nature of the work is also very varied from valuation work to sale mandate opportunities.

Thank you for the support.

Funding

There has not been any movement in Bank of England (BOE) base rate (still 5.25%) and therefore the rates quoted below, are the same as stated in the April Newsletter. There is strong belief that interest rates will start to fall with the next BOE announcement, taking place on the 20 June 2024.

When preparing accounts and collaborating with clients, please let us know if you find the following:

• Interest rates on existing debt looks high
• Debt is not suitable for the client in terms of there being a cashflow issue, or not suitable for their growth plans
• Thie account is up for renewal

If the interest clients are paying across the different types of facilities is greater than the following, please contact us to see if there is a better product for them.

• Invoice Finance loan – above 3% plus base
• Business loan – 9%+
• Commercial mortgages – 7%+
• Vehicle finance/Asset finance – This changes a lot dependent on the asset but anything above 7%

Charity Work

Matthew Barnett also completed his 100km walk for charity this month, although he now finds himself on crutches!! Well done Matthew!

Thank you

The Corporate Finance Team