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Our last two blogs have considered points you should consider when drawing up a contract of employment for a senior/key employee. This month we look at the issues that can arise when one of your employees hands in their notice or has left and you are concerned that they may be acting in a way that could damage your business …

What do you do if an employee-shareholder is leaving your company and you want to buy back their shares? The first point to make is that before any employee acquires shares you should first have clearly set out the rules for the buy-back should they leave …

Upcoming seminars for 2014:

Wednesday 17 September 2014 – Exit Planning Workshop

For many of you the decision to set up your own business will not have been driven by the desire to maximise your income or build a company that you can eventually sell at a profit. Perhaps you were …

An important element in preparing for our Sharemark flotation later this year is choosing a share incentives and options plan that best fits our firm’s culture and needs. We are a small company, but with ambitious plans, so we need to be able to motivate and reward individuals whose contributions will be fundamental to our success …

Our focus is now on developing a sales and marketing plan for our home territory of Oxfordshire. This will be the model for our franchises as we scale up our business ahead of our Sharemark admission. The decision has been made to focus this sales and marketing plan …

Drafting the Articles of Association is one of the most important legal issues when setting up a company, but there is a way you can make it easier for yourself. When you brief your legal adviser, you are likely to have the same key objectives in mind that most business owners do…

The most common arrangements are;

Life policies that pay proceeds to surviving business owner(s) on death (and perhaps on critical illness).
Cross option agreements that give the surviving business owner(s) the right to buy the shares from the deceased’s family using the policy proceeds – a ‘Call Option’…

What makes a successful business? A great concept definitely, an entrepreneur with passion and energy almost certainly, but perhaps most important of all – a highly focused and motivated management team to drive it forward.

You don’t have to be a Dragon’s Den entrepreneur to conclude that an important way to achieve this is likely to be by providing equity incentives to key team members…

Articles of Association can be long or short form. Until recently, the norm was the latter – 5 or 6 pages setting out key issues and incorporating the statutory ‘Table A’ – a set of standard default Articles. For companies incorporated after October 2009, Table A was replaced by a simplified set of default Articles known as the Model Articles…