The day after I sold the business, what I felt was relief. Ten years of it had been hard from start to finish, the pressure was all-encompassing, and at times I honestly didn't think there was a way out. So there was no sense of achievement that day, only relief. The achievement came a few days later, once I'd had a chance to take a breath. After that I could stop, rethink, and work out what I wanted next, and what I'd learned that I never want to do again.
This week I read about someone who got the same day and felt differently. I think the gap comes down to what the business meant to each of us. I had nothing there I wanted to grow, and all I wanted was to move on. She sounds as though she had a very different relationship with hers.
01 | Forty years to learn the business, no time to learn the day after
A financial adviser described a client who sold the family business she and her husband had built over four decades. The sale itself went well. What caught her out was everything after it: yields, withdrawal rates, broker statements, a whole vocabulary she had never needed, arriving almost overnight. She told the adviser, as reported, that sometimes she wishes she hadn't sold.
The adviser's point was that she had spent decades learning how to run the business and almost no time learning how to live without it. The regret I hear about most is the one about identity. Hers sounds more practical. She didn't know how to do any of this, and everyone assumed she would be fine.
If that lands, the first useful step is small: find out what the proceeds of a sale would actually leave you, before the day it happens, not after. The free sale proceeds calculator is built for that.
02 | The Budget is on 28 October, and the guessing started weeks ago
From where I sit, as a private individual and an ex-business owner, you can see the dread building. Cost of living, prices, tax. People are frightened of what the 28th might mean for them, and most of what is circulating is guesswork.
Here is what is actually settled. The date is 28 October. From April 2027, most unused pension funds and death benefits are set to count towards an estate for inheritance tax, and that was already planned before this Budget. Everything else is prediction. Commentators expect the personal allowance to be reviewed, and the ideas being floated include limits to pension tax relief, changes to capital gains tax such as an exit charge, and changes to lifetime gifting. None of it has been announced.
I can't tell you what will be announced, and neither can anyone writing about it today. What you can do is know your own position well enough to read the announcement quickly on the day and see what it means for you. The Freedom Number takes about 15 minutes and is a sensible place to start.
This is education, not advice.
03 | 2.15 million UK companies, no one lined up to take over
An analysis of the full Companies House register puts a number on something most owners sense but rarely see written down. About 60% of active UK companies run on a single director, which means no internal successor by definition. Among viable single-director businesses run by someone over 60, the analysis counts roughly 174,000 firms with no succession plan in place. Another million-plus companies have directors in their fifties, who get to the same point within a decade.
The analysis frames this as a shortage of ways to hand a business on, not a wave of businesses failing. A plan that never gets written down is often avoidance with a spreadsheet attached, the same thing we looked at last issue.
If any of this landed, forward it to someone else standing at their own fulcrum point right now. That's still the best way this reaches the people who need it, better than anything I can do on my end.