You built real value in a business, and now you are approaching, completing or reflecting on a sale. Your wealth is shifting from something you controlled through the company to something you steward as capital. That is a different discipline, and we have years of experience to guide the crossing.
For most of your working life the answer to "where is the wealth?" has been simple: it is in the company. That single answer is also a single, unmanaged concentration risk, and a sale is the moment it finally has to be addressed.
The best planning happens before completion, not after. In the 12 to 36 months ahead of a sale there is real work to do on ownership structures, trusts, family investment companies and pension optimisation, work that quietly changes the net outcome and cannot be done once the deal has closed.
Then completion arrives, and with it a stranger feeling than most founders expect: exhaustion, relief, and a creeping sense that a series of large decisions are about to be made in a state of no sleep. The first ninety days set a trajectory that is expensive to undo. Our job is to slow that window down and give it a plan.
We work alongside the corporate-finance adviser and accountant you already trust, not around them, and we stay with the capital afterwards, through the point where a founder's wealth becomes a family's wealth and the question shifts from growth to stewardship.
A founder's exit touches tax, structure, investment and family at once. Our Guardian:CONNECT approach keeps those conversations in a single room, so the sale produces one coordinated answer rather than four that quietly contradict each other.
Sort before you allocate
The proceeds, sorted into three jobs before any investment decision is made, so the money that must never be at risk never is.
One coordinated answer
Your corporate-finance adviser, accountant and solicitor, and us, all looking at the same sale, at the same time, with one written recommendation rather than three separate ones.
Structure now, stewardship later
Pre-sale structuring while it still counts, then a clear path into family-office-style oversight as realised capital becomes wealth held across a family.
The short window in which a handful of early choices quietly set the trajectory for the next twenty years.
Why the twelve months before completion matter more than the year after, and the structures that stop being available once you sign.
A three-year engagement ending in completion, and the part Guardian:CONNECT played in keeping everyone moving the same way.
I had a corporate-finance team for the deal and an accountant for the tax. What I did not have, until Herbert & Webster, was anyone whose job was the twenty years after the money arrived.
Whether you are twelve months from a sale or twelve weeks through one, come with the shape of the deal and a question. Leave with a clearer view of the years that follow.