Case notes

The fourth generation to own this Sheffield toolmaker had no family member who wanted it. The obvious buyer was a competitor that would have closed the works and kept the order book.

We valued the business and spent two years with the owners, their solicitor and the staff planning a move into an employee ownership trust. The owners were paid out over time from the company’s profits, and the people who made the tools came to own the business. It took two years to plan and one quiet afternoon to sign. The works still runs on the same site.

Three siblings inherited a farm together. One farmed it, one wanted to build holiday lets, and one wanted to be bought out. Their succession plan predated the 2026 changes to agricultural property relief and no longer worked.

We restructured the farming partnership, put the holiday lets into a separate business so they could be judged on their own merits, and rebuilt the succession plan with the family’s solicitor. Every sibling knows what they will receive and when.

A studio was preparing for its first outside investment. Its R&D tax relief claims had been prepared by a no-win, no-fee adviser and nobody at the studio could explain them.

We reviewed three years of claims. Two stood up. One included work that did not qualify, so we corrected it with HMRC before an investor’s due diligence could find it. The studio repaid the difference and the investment went ahead.

A community trust that runs a food bank and a youth club kept its books in two spreadsheets maintained by one volunteer treasurer, who was about to retire.

We moved the trust onto cloud bookkeeping, set up simple approvals for spending, and wrote a short handbook so the next treasurer could take over without the old one on the phone every week.

Not every story ends well. When a Bradford dyeworks we had acted for since the 1960s could no longer go on, Ruth Shaw sat with its bank until every employee’s redundancy pay had been met in full, before the receivers arrived.

It was some of the least profitable work the firm has ever done. Clement Templeton called it the most important. We tell new trainees about it in their first week.