Most generic financial advice treats personal and business finances as separate worlds. For SME owners and directors, that's rarely how life actually works. The decisions you make about how to draw income, when to invest, how to fund retirement and how eventually to step away all sit in the overlap between the two.
Get that overlap right and you build personal wealth efficiently while keeping the business resilient. Get it wrong, or simply leave it unmanaged, and tax leakage, missed reliefs and unprotected positions accumulate quietly over years.
Our advisers work with directors and owner-managers across SME-sized businesses in the UK. The starting point is always your situation: how the company is structured, what stage it's at, what you're trying to achieve personally, and how soon.
Not every conversation covers every topic. We start with what matters most for you now and build out from there.
How best to combine salary, dividends and employer pension contributions, taking into account corporation tax, personal tax, the annual allowance and carry-forward. For most directors, this is the single highest-value conversation we have.
Director-focused pension structures including SSAS and SIPP, employer contributions, and how the pension can interact with company assets. Where appropriate, the pension can hold property used by the business.
Whether you're selling, passing the business to family, or stepping back gradually, the financial planning around an exit is best started years in advance. Business Asset Disposal Relief, sale structuring and the post-exit investment plan all sit here.
What happens to the business if a key director is unable to work, becomes seriously ill, or dies? Key person cover, shareholder protection and cross-option agreements close gaps that often go unnoticed until they matter.
The Finance Act 2026 capped Business Property Relief at £1m of qualifying assets. For owners with significant business interests, this changes the IHT planning conversation materially and may bring forward decisions that previously sat in the future.
How the business passes, when it passes and who it passes to are decisions worth making deliberately rather than leaving to your will alone. We work alongside your solicitor and accountant to bring it all together.
Our director and owner clients are typically running established SMEs: limited companies and LLPs across professional services, construction and property, engineering and manufacturing, logistics, and creative industries.
Some are in early-stage growth, focused on building wealth efficiently while reinvesting in the business. Others are five to ten years from a planned exit and want to make sure the run-up is structured well. A growing number are post-exit, with significant capital to deploy and a different set of questions about preservation and legacy.
Whichever stage you're at, the first conversation is short, no-cost, and aimed at understanding whether we're the right fit for you.
The advice we needed wasn't really about pensions or investments in isolation. It was about how the business decisions and the personal financial decisions affected each other. Aetas were the first advisers who actually treated them as a single conversation.
Most of our director and owner clients already have an accountant they trust and, often, a corporate solicitor and a tax adviser too. We don't replace any of them. We coordinate with them.
In practice that means tax-efficient planning that doesn't unravel at year-end, succession decisions that align with the legal structure your solicitor has put in place, and a clear shared view of how the moving parts fit together.
If you're also thinking about how financial pressure is showing up across your wider team, that's a different proposition with a different starting point. Aetas in the Workplace is built around a no-cost Workplace Performance Review and is designed for SMEs where the commercial case has to add up.
The Financial Conduct Authority does not regulate Wills, Trusts or Tax advice. Tax treatment depends on individual circumstances and may be subject to change in the future. The value of your investments can go down as well as up, so you could get back less than you invested.
Book a no-obligation conversation. We'll talk through your situation and identify whether there's a planning conversation worth having.
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