Endeavouring to succeed with active financial planners

Our team has recently been working with a growing Teesside financial services company to help them understand the benefits of a tax-efficient staff incentive scheme which is now helping to attract and retain key individuals.

It’s a system that many companies may not be aware of but it could offer your business useful benefits too.

We’ve worked with Stockton-based Active Chartered Financial Planners to implement an Enterprise Management Incentive (EMI) which has resulted in three directors acquiring shares in the company.

Active, which has grown considerably since relocating from Guisborough to Thornaby nearly four years ago, says it has enabled the company to recruit and retain key individuals.

As well as the EMI, our team has worked with Active over the last five years on a range of property, employment and corporate issues.

Managing Director of Active, Karl Pemberton, said: “After attending an EMI seminar by Endeavour Partnership, it opened my eyes to a really good, tax-efficient way to recruit, reward and retain key individuals.

“As with most things they’re never as straightforward as you think they’re going to be, but Endeavour really helped to put us at ease, as to how easily it could be done.

“EMI’s are complicated and quite under-used as a legitimate vehicle to give employees incentives.

“They’re under-used because people don’t know about them, and I think if people knew more about them, other businesses would certainly use them for their staff.”

Active has grown from a five-man team to a 26-strong firm over the last five years, and Karl says Endeavour Partnership’s guidance during that growth period has been critical.

He added: “Within our industry we’re well aware of shareholders’ agreements, but as we’ve grown as a firm we’ve taken more people on, we’ve added new directors, which ultimately have now become shareholders.

“It was extremely important to us, to get the buy-in and retain key individuals, but it’s more important to those individuals themselves, because the structure ultimately benefits them.”

Endeavour Partnership’s corporate and commercial department, headed by Nik Tunley, has worked with Active on a variety of projects and, as one the North East’s leading legal firms, we work with companies advising on a wide range of company and commercial matters as well as complex transactional matters.

Nik said: “Active has undergone a period of impressive growth and we’re very pleased to have played a part in their development. Issues such as EMI can seem daunting but our seminars give businesses the chance to find out a little more and meet our team who can simplify the process. We’re really encouraged to hear how Karl and his team are using EMI as it is a very successful incentive scheme.”

Karl added: “The key to the individuals within Endeavour is that you don’t feel like you can’t pick up the phone and chat to them, and they don’t make you feel like you’re asking a daft question.

“Like a lot of people, understanding the complexities of law is not everyone’s strength, so to gain clarification on certain matters, to be able to just pick up the phone and have that confidence on the end of a line is worth its weight in gold.

“Irrespective of which department we’ve used at Endeavour, the individual we’ve dealt with has been exceptional, and a credit to the industry.”

You can read more about our work with Active Financial in this month’s Tees Business magazine.

http://teesbusiness.co.uk/2016/06/22/endeavouring-to-succeed/

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