In this business growth show Stephen Drew discusses how structures in the UK make it a reasonably easy place to set up a business.

Business growth show: Setting up shop in 24 hours

it’s very easy for people that want to use the UK as a starting position, either because they see the UK as a good market for their services or products that they want to sell into, or because they see it as a good natural position to build a platform for expansion into the rest of Europe, then the UK offers a very friendly environment to do so. Why would that be? Because it’s very easy to actually get a business established in the UK. If there’s a legal structure, an inbound business wants to set up as a limited company and often that can be formed within 24 hours. There are other structures they may wish to use, which again are quite easy to get into place. The employment position and the regulations around that are fairly easily-understood, now there are certain requirements that people have to go through and often the law is different to their home territory. But with a little bit of advice and guidance it’s relatively straightforward to make sure you have appropriate structures around how you can build your people and your teams. Operating a bank account, again, subject to going through the initial take-on procedures, is relatively straightforward to get that into place. And the other matters that a business that’s coming to the UK that needs to sort out, again with the right sort of guidance and advice, is relatively straightforward, and it’s for those reasons that the UK ranks quite well in the league table in terms of their ease of doing business in that territory compared to other jurisdictions. So for a business that’s spotted an opportunity in their chosen market within the UK, really they can have a fast track approach to getting that business up and running fairly quickly, so they can actually start to concentrate on what matters in terms of building revenues and growing profits.

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The process of restructuring and merging will vary depending on if you are a partnership or a company . Giles Murphy of Smith & Williamson explains further in this TV show.

Impact of restructuring and merging

In some ways there should be no difference. If you’re a people business, whether you’re structured as a company or a partnership shouldn’t have that much of an impact. However, there are various idiosyncrasies of a partnership which mean that the partners are both owners and the workers within the organisation. So in terms of engaging with that group, you are talking to both the shareholder and the employees in one go. The key one in any professional practice will be the comparable levels of profitability because in practice it’s going to be very difficult to get the higher profit firm to engage with a lower profit firm and to encourage them that actually by adding them together everyone will be better off. So the starting point would also always be to look at the comparable levels of profitability.

There are more TV shows discussing restructuring and merging by Giles Murphy on Inside Finance.

Cyber risk has become hugely topical now really because governments are starting to understand the importance of it. Someone said to me recently there are only two types of companies, those who know that they’ve had a cyber attack and those that don’t. But everybody’s had them in some form or other. It has become a very important to governments, including the UK government and it really needs to now come onto the agenda of boards. Boards need to be looking at it but it’s not just an IT issue. People have thought about it as an IT issue having a cyber attack. But it’s much more complex now and the old idea of corporate espionage, for want of a better term has moved into this space. Companies are very much at risk now of having their information stolen effectively, and that can be corporate secrets of any kind. So the risks are much higher than they ever were, and it’s not just corporates, we see it in other areas such as the forces, the concerns are growing there. But it’s certainly raising … the profiling of this is growing. It’s becoming more and more important and government is certainly concerned that this is where everybody’s at risk.