Business structuring is something most people know is important and needs to be addressed.

And they would all be right.

So let’s do it properly, and get it right from the beginning.

The objectives of our business structure advice are three fold –

• To provide the very best opportunities, including future flexibility, to minimise tax
• To create the barriers that assist in your asset protection
• To provide you with a workable structure, that fits with your industry, your customers and your suppliers, that gives your business credibility, all the while ensuring things are not so complicated you spend all your time dealing with the associated admin.

Sure you can trade as a Sole Trader, but honestly, no real businesses with ambitions of growth and prosperity operate this way. It is more for side ventures, maybe to test the waters or not much more than hobbies. Maybe you would go down this path where you are just contracting (which is arguably the worst situation to be in, you don’t have the rights and benefits of an employee, but you have no control, security and you aren’t creating an asset for your future).

Putting a Sole Tradership aside for all but the very smallest endeavours, we then consider Partnerships, Trusts (in all their forms) and Companies.

We also consider a combination of the above.

A partnership of Trusts, each with Trustee Companies is a popular way to go. It combines all three types of structure, so it is on the complex side. But it comes with a number of significant potential benefits, in particular from a tax minimisation point of view.

In fact, arguably it is one of the very best structures where unrelated parties are coming together and they all want the best possible chance of paying no tax at all when they eventually sell out of their business at a large profit!

But there is most definitely no one size fits all. We even have differing structures for our differing business interests. So tailoring each structure element to your various business and investment interests is paramount in our view, and advice we clearly follow ourselves.

Now you may be thinking “I can just change things later if I need to”.

Well to an extent you would be right in that it is easier to restructure today than it was in the past. But we can assure you –

• Restructuring an existing business is an administrative nightmare, you do not want to have to do it if you can avoid it
• Restructuring very often still comes with tax consequences, even with the new tax roll-overs the Federal Government has created in recent times
• Stamp Duty, a State based tax as opposed to Federal income tax, is still usually payable even when the income tax consequences can be managed
• Almost without exception there are substantial costs, both known and hidden, to restructuring

So again, we say, let’s get it right up front.

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