Choosing your business structure is an important decision for new businesses.

What suits your business idea and needs now might not be right 5 or 10 years from now. This is why we always recommend keeping the future in mind when deciding which business structure is right for you.

If you end up needing to change your business structure in the future, doing so could be costly, so think about where you want to be when deciding what to do now.

How it Works

When advising you on which structure to choose, we consider factors such as:

The risk profile of your industry

Asset protection

Future entitlement to discount capital gains tax concessions

The admission of future business partners or investors

Compliance with industry legal requirements

Income tax minimisation

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Frequently asked questions

Find out how we can help you start your business on the right foot.

Think of asset protection as a kind of insurance. You wouldn’t drive your car on the road without insuring it first. This isn’t because you think you’re going to get into an accident, but just to make sure you’re covered in case you do. If you’re not covered, then any unexpected accidents can become extremely costly.

The same goes for your wealth. You hope that nothing bad will ever happen that threatens your assets, but you still need to make sure you’re covered against this possibility. And, just like car insurance, you can’t wait until after an incident happens to protect your wealth. You have to act now while you’re financially stable and healthy to help ensure that you stay that way in the future.

Wealthy people and their advisors aren’t just good at building wealth, but also at managing it effectively and protecting it as much as possible. This practice ensures that your wealth continues to grow while remaining safe and secure.

When it comes to protecting your assets, a key strategy is to relinquish ownership over them. This may sound counter-intuitive, but being in a position where you control your assets but don’t actually own them is actually your safest bet. We’ll briefly discuss a few ways you can achieve this here.

One way to protect your assets is by identifying a partner who is less liable than you, i.e. less likely to be sued or face other legal issues. This can be an effective strategy for married couples. If one person in the marriage is in a low risk profession or is a stay-at-home parent, then your assets will be safer in that person’s name.

This way, if the higher risk partner is facing a lawsuit, your assets will be safe because they are not technically owned by the person being sued. All the ownership is left to your partner, although you can still retain some control over those assets. This strategy can also work between business partners if one is less liable than the other.

Legally speaking, a company is its own entity. This means that if a lawsuit is filed against a company, it is the company that is liable, not the people who own it or work within it. Companies typically have limited liability, which means the shareholders are responsible for paying up based on the company shares they own. They cannot be forced to do so from their personal assets.

Companies can offer asset protection to both their directors and their shareholders. However, directors are typically at greater risk than shareholders. So, going back to the strategy above, the shareholders are the ones in ownership of the company, the ones who are less liable. While the director simply takes control of the day-to-day running of the company without owning it.

Trusts can also be used to protect your assets and provide other benefits, such as tax reduction. There are a number of different types of trusts, but the two most relevant to business are unit trusts and discretionary trusts.

When placing assets under trusts, it is usually the trust itself that owns the asset, while the trustee controls it. You still benefit from the assets because the trustee can name beneficiaries and decide how income and assets are distributed to them (depending on the type of trust).

If you are at risk of legal problems, then you can protect your assets by placing them under a trust and retaining control over them as the trustee. Alternatively, the trustee can be a company to provide an additional layer of protection.

As a business owner, you automatically open yourself up to litigation. Lawsuits can come from customers, clients, employees, and members of the general public. You may even be liable for mistakes that your employees make. As such, protecting your business assets is essential as well as your personal assets.

Proper planning and structuring of your business and its assets can help to protect you from disaster. This, again, can be effectively achieved using trusts. Separate trusts can be set up to hold business assets and personal assets, to keep them separate from each other and from the business.