Monthly Archives: August 2016

Business Blog No 26 – Succession and Exit Strategy

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When you start planning to start your own business, you should be also planning how you will exit that business. Starting your own business is perhaps your biggest financial investment, along with your home, and you will want to ensure that the return on this investment is maximised. Will you sell your business through a business broker when the time is right? Will you plan to hand the business onto your children? Will you have a successor ready to take over when you are ready to exit? Or will you simply close the doors and leave it all behind? The ironic thing is that recent surveys indicate that less than half of surveyed SME owners have a succession or exit plan in place.

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Your exit strategy is a key issue because you want to maximise the value of your business and get the timing right and make sure you don’t have to delay your retirement. An interesting statistic is that the average age of a SME owner is 56! Our ageing population means more and more businesses will come up for sale meaning by pure supply-demand economics, business sale prices will fall. This is particularly relevant as more baby boomers head towards retirement and are looking to exit their businesses.

Before exiting your business, you need to document processes and formalise customer, supplier and employee relationships and ensure that the business is not dependent on you for it to succeed. The business’ profits need to be sustainable in a potential purchasers eyes. Nobody will be interested in buying or running a business which collapses following your exit if you are in reality the business.

It is generally accepted that it takes 3 to 5 years to have a business ‘sale ready’ so don’t delay developing your exit strategy. You want to be ready in case an unexpected offer to buy your business materialises.

Due Diligence

Any potential purchaser of your business will undertake a due diligence process which will cover all aspects of your business to ensure it is legitimate and sustainable and that the numbers presented stand scrutiny. From that due diligence process, a potential buyer will put a value on the business most likely a profit multiple ratio depending on the industry type, scale of business, concentration of customers and key suppliers and the risk profile of the business. Profit multiples used to value a business are falling in recent times illustrating that it is a buyers market when it comes to business sales.

Another option is to put a board in place prior to putting your business up for sale. A board can add value to your business and also make it more saleable and can present an opportunity for you to stay involved as a board member if the new owner so desires (and you too)!

So ensure you have your succession and exit strategy in place as a foundation for business success.

Ross – Virtual/Part-Time CFO

Business Blog No 25 – Casuals and Redundancy

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Casual hours to count towards redundancy payouts

Last week, the full bench of the Fair Work Commission resolved that periods of regular casual employment will now be counted towards redundancy entitlement calculations. The advantage to employers in ‘casualising’ their workforce is slowly being eroded away, and this latest decision is another step in that direction.

The decision means that workers who start as casuals before their positions become permanent, either full-time or part-time, will have their full length of service recognised in the calculation of their final redundancy pay out.

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An appeal by the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union was upheld reversing a decision made earlier in the year which allowed a ship building company to only count the period of permanent employment in the calculation of redundancy payments.

To be included in the calculation of years of continuous service, the period of ‘regular and systemic casual employment’ must be part of the period of employment from which an employee is being made redundant. There can be no break between the period of regular and systemic casual employment and the transition to permanent employment.

The decision does not apply to employees who were casuals when their employment was terminated however.

If you are in this situation, you should talk to your Industrial Relations advisor to ensure you are calculating redundancy payouts correctly.

Ross – Virtual/Part-Time CFO

Business Blog No 24 – Startup Tax incentive

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Did you know that on July 1st, 2016 some new tax incentives came into force for start-up investors?

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These are new tax incentives are a key part of the federal government’s $1billion innovation agenda to encourage innovation and investment in early stage entrepreneurship in the start-up sector. This is designed to encourage early stage investment and funding in such entities which have limited access to traditional sources of funds at the development phase of their start-up journey. It is estimated that over 4000 early-stage companies are missing out on equity finance each year. To address this, the government is targeting $1 billion to be raised in the early years of the new tax incentives.

The key points of the new tax incentives are that they offer up-front tax offsets of 20% to a maximum $200k, plus 10year capital gains tax exemptions for eligible investors in eligible entities.

A startup entity that qualifies for such treatment for investors is defined as an Early Stage Innovation Company (ESIC). This basically means that the entity has been incorporated less than 3years ago, has income of less than $200k and costs of less than $1million for the financial year ending June 30, 2016, and is developing new or significantly improved innovations with the purpose of commercialisation.

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If you think you might be eligible for such incentives as a startup investor or want to use the legislation to encourage investment in your startup, speak to your tax accountant.

Ross – Virtual/Part-Time CFO

Business Blog No 23 – The Cloud

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Cloud computing is not new. We have all used eBay, Google, Facebook, Gmail etc. which are all cloud based. The problem is that the word ‘cloud’ is a misnomer and perhaps makes us feel that our data is in ‘outer-space’ somewhere. All cloud hosting companies actually run huge physical servers in big data centres across the globe to store the data.

Just like plugging into a grid to get access to what a company or individual wants and needs, ‘cloud’ is a subscription based pay as you go service where you don’t own the infrastructure or software but rather subscribe to access it. There are various versions of the ‘cloud’ including Software as a Service (SaaS), which means using cloud based software solutions, and Data Protection as a Service (DPaaS) which means replicating and backing up data to the cloud or to a third party disaster recovery provider.

Being in the ‘cloud’ does have many ‘silver linings’ such as allowing flexibility and giving you access to the latest technology from anywhere there is an internet connection. A start-up can also access the same technology as a big corporate. A key advantage of moving to the cloud is the cost savings from no longer needing to purchase hardware infrastructure and software licenses; instead you pay a regular monthly subscription fee. This also converts a capital cost to a deductible expense. Going to the cloud can also facilitate efficiency improvements and cost savings freeing up resources. It also enables easy sharing of data and financials and is a real time one view of the truth.

There are risks of going to the cloud and these include the risk of data loss, security risks and access issues being out of your control. So good data security and backup procedures remain key. It is however argued that cyber security risks are actually reduced by sitting in the cloud as the companies that provide cloud services invest more money in security than individual companies would and they have specialists managing the cyber-security matters. Privacy Laws may come also into play. A solution to this is for customers’ personal data not to be stored in the cloud, allowing only business process tools to sit in the cloud.

A key step before moving to the cloud is to firstly assess what the real business requirements are and what are the objectives of your IT needs and your IT budget itself.

Look for a cloud service provider who has achieved the internationally recognised ASAE 3402 certification and that sound SLA’s (Service Level Agreements) are in place with these providers and that issues of locking-in and transferability are covered. Naturally get some customer references to validate the providers claims.

It might mean dipping your toe in the water with things such as Microsoft Office 365, Cloud-based Antivirus software, payroll systems or accounting software eg MYOB. A staged approach of moving to the cloud and ensuring adequate training for staff ensures your business won’t be overwhelmed by taking on too much at once.

From our survey earlier in the year, a surprising result was the apparent slow uptake of cloud based IT solutions. For the vast majority of the survey respondents, IT systems are still kept in-house.

From my perspective, cloud solutions are the future and are great productivity and cost saving opportunities. Converting your in-house software platforms (and the associated reduction in necessary infrastructure costs and maintenance) to a cloud based solution by a subscription model is recommended. Beware of IT support providers who advise clients to avoid going to the cloud due to their own self interests. To take the mystery out of cloud computing, just remember all our personal emails have always sat on a server somewhere in the “cloud” until we retrieved them and that hasn’t seemed to have bothered us…

Ross – Virtual/Part-Time CFO