Services

Corporate Finance

If you are looking to raising finance, HKM LLP can help make sure that your business has the right funding strategy.

New subsidiaries, major investment projects and joint ventures are just some of the areas where we regularly help our clients make the right finance choices. We can help you organise the seed capital to explore new business ideas, the start-up capital to get them off the ground and the development capital to make sure they thrive. We can enable managers to put together an MBO or MBI. (see below) With our wide fund-raising expertise and extensive network of contacts we can put you in touch with investors, banks and venture capitalists. We can help you produce a comprehensive business plan and ensure that it sufficiently addresses the questions of potential backers so as to ensure an early decision on the funding. We can help you explore other alternative and innovative ways forward. We help clients make the right choices when they want to buy or sell a business.

Selling Your Business:
If your business is up for sale, you can be extremely vulnerable. Customers do not appreciate uncertainty and competitors will not hesitate to take advantage. Discretion and confidentially are vitally important.

We can actively, but discreetly, market your business to a national and international network of potential buyers.

We can help you determine a target price, prepare sales documentation and negotiate a deal on your behalf.
We can also structure a management exit programme or earn out agreement to ensure that you are not unduly tied to the business once it is sold.
Our network also helps us to identify potential acquisitions for clients who have given us a mandate to seek opportunities and negotiate deals on their behalf.

Buying a Business:
Once we have identified a suitable prospect, we perform the due diligence work that gives our clients a true picture of the business they want to buy. Our expertise enables them to proceed with confidence.

MBOs / MBIs

MBOs
Buy-outs are now one of the most popular forms of acquisition in the UK economy. A "management buy-out" (MBO) is usually an exciting, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for managers to own a significant stake in their business. But it can also be a major distraction: the managers must resolve many important issues regarding the structure of the transaction and the raising of funds, while attending to the normal running of the business.

Our purpose is to help management through each stage of the transaction. We will work to ensure that the right price is paid for the right business. Our independent advice and support will help avoid the many pitfalls and increase the team's chances of success.

We offer complete transaction management including:

Valuation of the business to access the parameters for negotiation
Feasibility assessment both of the business and the proposed buy-out
Financial Structuring to optimise the terms of the transaction
Tax Planning to advise on corporate and personal tax planning opportunities, share incentive schemes, VAT and the stamp duty
Capital Raising selection of and approach to the best financial institutions for the client's needs, and to help secure the funds required
Negotiation with prospective financial backers and the vendors of the target business
Pensions to advise on the pensions implications of the buy-out and negotiate with the vendors' pensions advisers
Investigation Services to provide the financial institutions with a complete and independent picture of the target business
Completing the buy-out as we have been through the buy-out process many times, we are well placed to project manage the transaction to a successful conclusion

MBIs
A management buy-in (MBI) has all the features of an MBO but carries much higher risk, because the prospective management team has less familiarity with the business. Nevertheless, MBIs are popular: the concept of merging a proven management team with a business that has yet to realise its full potential has many attractions.

We can help to reduce risk by careful analysis of the business's strengths and weaknesses, and by tightly-focused financial investigations.