Mactaggart & Mickel is a real success story, and a fourth generation Scottish family business to boot. We recently helped them to modernise their ownership and management structure to meet the challenges of the current business environment.

This process has helped us to distill down the key stages for family companies with ownership/ management issues to work through in finding a solution:

• Plan – modernising your business’ structure takes time and careful thought. Make sure you plan in advance and are not forced into making decisions reactively.
• Understand – don’t assume everyone wants the same thing. Take time to find out about the aspirations and expectations of all those involved and reflect this in any plans.
• Develop principles – work out some broad rules and principles for family ownership, management and transition. Make sure you get all parties committed to these at an early stage.
• Seek advice – this is a complicated and emotive issue and it is not always possible to handle in-house. A skilled advisor can be crucial in identifying the key compromises which will make any modernisation plan a success.

The case study in full, written by our Chairman Tom Craig, can be found here: Mactaggart & Mickel Modernisation.

Disappointingly there were only 4 Scottish companies in the Sunday Times Profit Track 100 this year. The list, which shows the private companies with the fastest growing profits in the UK, contained 9 last year. However, we’ve been lucky enough to work with two of them, both of which have made it onto the list for two years running. To find more about two great Scottish owned and based companies visit the links below:

Wireless Infrastructure Group

Weldex