About
Employee ownership deserves specialist advice
Selling your business to your employees is a decision most owners make once. We have spent fifteen years helping owners make it well — and it is all we do.
About
Selling your business to your employees is a decision most owners make once. We have spent fifteen years helping owners make it well — and it is all we do.
Why we exist
In 2011 we made a decision most advisory firms would consider commercially reckless: to advise on employee ownership and nothing else. Not corporate finance with an employee ownership sideline. Not a law firm with an EOT team. Employee ownership, exclusively.
The reason is simple. Employee ownership sits at the junction of company law, trust law, tax, corporate finance and governance — and the interesting questions are rarely inside one of those disciplines. They sit between them. A generalist sees each piece. A specialist sees how they fit together, and where the tension will surface three years after completion.
Since then we have advised on more than 170 EOT and EBT transactions across the UK, for businesses from five employees to five hundred. That is not a sideline. It is the practice.
Our principles
Five things we hold to on every engagement. Each one exists because we have seen what happens without it.
Most of the difficulties in employee ownership are predictable — if you have seen them before. The valuation that stores up resentment. The trust deed that works on day one and fails at the first disagreement. We have seen them from every side: as advisers, as employee trustees, as independent chairs.
We do not sell Employee Ownership Trusts. No funding product, no valuation service to cross-sell, no interest in a transaction happening except that it should be the right one. If a trade sale would serve you better, we will say so — and we regularly do.
Trust deeds, tax clearances and governance are technical. Your understanding of them should not have to be. Clients tell us the clarity of the explanation is what they remember — it is a discipline that comes from explaining one subject for a very long time.
Employee ownership is a commercial decision before it is a legal one. Our advice starts from the business — its cash, its people, its plans — not from the statute book. Fixed fees wherever possible, agreed before we start.
Completion is a beginning, not an end. Many clients work with us for years after the transaction — on governance, trustee matters and the questions that only arrive with time. Specialists stay interested; that is rather the point.
How we work
Co-ownership Solutions LLP is not a regulated law firm, and that is by design. Some members of the team are solicitors; where reserved legal activities are required, we work alongside regulated law firms — including Spencer West LLP — who act on those matters.
In practice this works in your favour. You get advisers whose entire attention is on employee ownership, coordinating regulated specialists where the transaction needs them — rather than a single firm stretching one department across every discipline. You always know who is doing what, and why.
A significant part of our work now comes from businesses that became employee-owned with another adviser — and later found they needed someone who deals with these questions every day. We take that as the strongest endorsement of specialisation there is.
Our experience
The team
Not a rotating project team. Three people, one subject, several decades between them.
Managing Partner
Andrew has worked in employee ownership and worker co-operatives for over 25 years — including eight years at the eaga Partnership, where he chaired the Staff Council and served as an employee-elected trustee. Over the past 15 years he has advised more than 170 companies, from 5 to 500 employees, on their move to employee ownership and the years that follow. He is independent Chair of Trustees for a number of successful employee-owned businesses, and a founder of — and current adviser to — Employee Ownership Ireland.
Solicitor
David is a solicitor specialising in employee buyout transactions and employee share ownership — employee trusts, share schemes, and the company constitution, employment, trust and taxation questions that surround them. He has particular depth in services contracted out of public bodies, having worked on the privatisation of coal mines, transport companies, government computer contractors and local authority services, alongside numerous private company buyouts.
Partner
Norman has helped more than 60 companies transition to employee-owned or worker co-operative structures. His expertise is in finding innovative buyout solutions and raising finance — from employees and from external providers. He is known for his work with the Wales Co-operative Centre and the Baxi Partnership, and for managing the high-profile employee buyout of Tower Colliery in South Wales.
Solicitor
Niall is a solicitor specialising in employee buyout transactions and employee share ownership — employee trusts, share schemes, and the company constitution, employment, trust and taxation questions that surround them. With over 15 years' experience across private practice and in-house roles, he has acted for domestic and international clients on aircraft and asset finance, structured and leveraged finance, real estate finance, and asset-backed lending matters.
Whether you are weighing up succession or already employee-owned, the fastest way to find out if we can help is to ask. It is the only conversation we have.