The business-sale client and the proceeds referral

For most owner-managers, the business is the asset. It is where the wealth sits, and for years it has been almost impossible to spend. Then you complete the sale, the consideration clears, and everything inverts. The client wakes up with a bank balance that dwarfs anything they have handled before and no framework for what to do with it.

You have just spent weeks or months on heads of terms, warranties, disclosure, and the share purchase agreement. To you the matter is completing. To your client, a wholly new financial life is starting the moment the funds arrive, and they are rarely ready for it.

Business-sale proceeds carry a distinctive cluster of issues, and they arrive fast.

• Capital gains tax and whether reliefs were structured correctly, which sits with the client's tax advisers.
• What to do with a large lump sum: reinvest, diversify, provide an income, or fund the next venture.
• Estate and succession planning now that liquid wealth has replaced an illiquid trading company.
• Personal protection and pension planning that the owner deferred while everything was tied up in the business.

These are decisions for vetted, regulated advice firms, not for the solicitor who handled the transaction. Your role is to make sure the client knows those specialists exist and can reach them.

The person who negotiated the deal has credibility on the proceeds question that a cold approach never will. You understand the structure, the timing, and the client's circumstances. When you flag that a large sum is about to land and that it may be worth taking regulated advice, the client hears it as informed, not opportunistic.

Timing is everything. Raise it while the deal is completing and the client is thinking about the money anyway, and the introduction feels natural. Leave it until the funds have sat in a current account for six months and the moment, and much of the value, is gone. The referral belongs in the completion phase of the file.

The discipline is the same as ever: you introduce, you do not advise. You are not telling the client how to invest, what to reinvest in, or how to structure their estate. You are observing that a business sale is a well-recognised trigger for taking regulated financial advice, and offering to put them in touch with a vetted, regulated advice firm if they would find it useful.

That keeps you firmly on the right side of the line. The client makes every decision about their money. You have simply connected them, at the right moment, to people authorised to help with the questions you cannot answer.

Because a corporate client will pass through the same completion stage every time, this referral is easy to systematise. Add a proceeds-referral checkpoint to your disposal workflow, raise it during completion, secure the client's consent to be introduced, and record it on the file. That way it happens on every sale, not just the ones you remember.

Referring through a network gives you vetted, regulated destination firms, a tracked and disclosable introduction, and a share of the resulting fee, typically a 60-70% member share, for work you were never able to do yourself. The referral-fee rules present no obstacle here; this is a corporate matter, not personal injury, so a disclosed arrangement is entirely compliant. Your client gets regulated help at the moment of maximum need, and your firm captures value from the relationship it built through the deal.