Financial Advice for Business Owners

We are here to provide expert financial advice for business owners.

As a busy employer, you need fast access to expert financial advice and financial services to help you both build and protect your business at the same time. You want to make the most of every financial opportunity whilst ensuring your assets are future-proofed.

Business protection

We offer a comprehensive range of business protection services to help you maintain the integrity and efficiency of your operation and workforce.

Business Protection Review: we are here to help you review existing policies, to look at making savings on premiums and fees and to update and enhance the cover and benefits for you and your team.

Financial Planning for Business Owners

Nigel Swan, Head of Pensions

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Our business protection services include:

  • Group protection
  • Shareholder and co-shareholder insurance and protection
  • Partnership protection
  • Relevant life protection
  • Key person insurance
  • Director’s life insurance
  • Critical illness insurance
  • Health care insurance

Support with legislative compliance and governance

We are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and as such offer guidance and support in ensuring you are fully compliant with all relevant legislation.

Business Pension Services

As pension experts, we are here to help you provide the very best pension benefits for you and your employees and to support your through making those choices.

Pension Review: regular reviews are imperative, as fees, benefits and enhancements can change markedly over time and as Independent Pension Advisors we search the whole marketplace to ensure you and your employees maximise pension investments. Services include:

  • Group pension scheme review and set up
  • Auto-enrolment scheme review and set up
  • Defined contribution pension schemes
  • Group personal pensions
  • Pensions salary sacrifice/salary exchange
  • Support trustees and manage investments of defined benefits schemes

Pension Talks: we offer group or 121 pension chats with you as business owners or Directors and for all your employees to build financial knowledge and security.

Pensions, Allowances & Tax Planning

As a company owner, shareholder or Director you may be relying on the sale of your company to provide the money for your retirement, but expert pension advice can help make your money work much harder for you both now and with an eye to your business exit in the future.

We will work with you and look at key areas including:

  • Using full pension contribution allowances
  • Making pension contributions out of the company
  • Utilising company investment accounts
  • Maximising all allowances

SIPP Self Invested Personal Pension

As a business, you can use your pension in several, very tax efficient, effective ways, to the benefit of both you as an individual and to the business.

A SIPP is a pension ‘wrapper’ that allows you to save, invest and build up a pot of pension money and works in a similar way to a standard personal pension but offers you more flexibility with the investments you can choose including:

  • Buying company shares (UK and overseas)
  • Making collective investments, e.g. open-ended investment companies (OEICs) and unit trusts
  • Setting up investment trusts
  • Buying property and land – but not most residential property
  • Making collective investments, e.g. real estate investment trusts (REITs)

SSAS Small Self Administered Schemes

A SASS is a specialised type of employer sponsored defined contribution pension scheme and particularly advantageous and flexible for a family run business or to allow a small number of senior/key shareholders or employees within a company to build up a pot of pension money. This pot offers a good deal of flexible investment options and loan backs which can include:

  • Buying the company’s trading premises and leasing them back to the company
  • Making loans to the company and buying the company’s shares

A SSAS is run by its Trustees, who are usually the same members of the scheme.

Unless you are very experienced in investment management it is highly recommended you use a qualified Financial Advisor to set up and administer both a SIPP or SSAS.

Strategic Investment Advice

With over 40 years experience of working with business owners and Directors, we offer expert investment advice, support and management and services include:

  • Investment Trusts
  • Venture capitalist Investment Trusts
  • EIS
  • Discretionary portfolio management
  • Investment training & compliance

Transferring Business Wealth into Personal Wealth

  • Exit strategy
  • Business sale timing and proceeds as part of lifestyle and retirement planning
  • Inheritance tax planning
  • Wealth transfer
  • Tax planning
  • Investing the proceeds of business sale
  • Maximising allowances and reliefs throughout any wealth transfer process
  • Generational estate planning if business is being sold/transferred to family members

Self employed business owners

Protecting your income

Financial Support

A survey of the financial health of self-employed, part-time and contract workers reveals that if an accident or illness prevented them from working, more than one in ten (11%) wouldn’t be able to last any time without using long-term savings, while 30% would run out of money in less than a month. And 48% said they couldn’t turn to friends or family for financial support, while one in ten said they would be forced to turn to credit cards or payday loans.

Income Protection

Some self-employed people wrongly believe they would not be eligible for income protection if they fell ill and couldn’t work. However, Statutory Sick Pay isn’t available to self-employed workers, and for those workers that are eligible, the maximum that can be claimed is less than a £100 a week.

More than half (55%) have no life insurance, private medical insurance, critical illness cover or income protection should they find themselves unable to work due to illness or injury.

Time off Work

People in full-time employment commonly receive sick pay and life insurance through their employer, but self-employed people need to provide it for themselves. Although many self-employed people and contractors worry about the consequences of an accident or illness preventing them from working, too few are taking steps to protect themselves from any loss of earnings if they are unable to work.

We provide help and advice on a full range of income protection options for the self employed including:

  • Critical illness cover
  • Life insurance
  • Income protection

We are here to work with you to put your safety net in place. 

Salary Sacrifice

Pension salary sacrifice, more than ever before, is the perfect ‘win-win’ for both employees and employers. Pension salary sacrifice is a method of saving National Insurance Contributions (NIC) for both employers and employees.

Find out more about salary sacrifice

Corporate Case Study: Group Pension Scheme Review with JMG Group

JMG Group are one of the UK’s largest insurance brokers. As a rapidly growing company and with an acquisition strategy, there were now several different company pension schemes operating within the one group, all with differing terms, fees and benefits.

Running several schemes at the same time was both very time consuming for payroll and not necessarily offering the most efficient or beneficial options for the scheme members.

As an organisation who very much places its people and their financial wellbeing at the heart of its employee brand, JMG Group asked Ellis Bates to review all their existing member pension schemes and make recommendations for just one benefit-packed scheme it would offer all its current and future employees as they continued to grow.

The remit was to research and present a scheme with the greatest depth and breadth of employee benefits, be simple to transfer members to and to administer internally, and also to represent great value for money for the company.

Equally, JMG Group are working hard to support their own corporate responsibility targets and so it was important that the chosen scheme reflects this and offers good ESG investing opportunities to employees, to better align to both company and individual values.,

Further, the preferred scheme would have to put in place and offer a good online interface both for the employer and most importantly employees so that they could easily review their pension savings and offer ongoing support.

After conducting whole of market research and matching JMG Groups wish list, our Financial Adviser Matt Hawksworth presented our recommendation to the team. giving them a better understanding of the benefits of their new pension scheme and the importance of taking a proactive approach towards their retirement planning.

The preferred scheme was competitively priced and offered a range of more flexible contribution, investment and retirement options for all their employees.

The scheme is now successfully insitu.