Six questions to ask before another tax year goes by on autopilot.
The business structure you set up four years ago was right for the business you had four years ago. The question we put to every owner-operator at the start of each financial year is simple: is it still right today?
The structure question most owners stop asking
Sole trader, partnership, company, discretionary trust, unit trust, a company-as-trustee-of-a-trust hybrid — the choice you make at year zero is almost always made with one eye on the accountant’s recommendation and the other on whichever option felt fastest. That’s fine. It’s how most businesses start.
What’s less fine is the slow drift where the structure quietly stops fitting. Revenue climbs. A partner joins. A child becomes a beneficiary. Property gets bought in the wrong entity. A second business line opens up. None of these are problems on their own. Together, they leak tax, complicate succession, and make the next big decision — a sale, a refinance, a generational handover — harder than it needs to be.
The six questions we walk through
1. Has your revenue or profit changed materially in the last 18 months? A sole trader earning $90k and a sole trader earning $260k are in very different tax positions, and the rate at which a company structure starts to make sense shifts with both income and what you take out personally.
2. Has anyone joined or left? A spouse, a business partner, an adult child working in the business — each shifts the income-splitting and asset-protection calculus.
3. Are you buying or holding assets in the operating entity? Real estate, IP, equipment with significant resale value — operating-entity assets are exposed to operating-entity creditors. They usually belong somewhere else.
4. Are you planning to sell, transition, or bring in an investor in the next 5 years? Small business CGT concessions are very valuable and very fiddly. Some structures qualify cleanly. Others don’t, and the cost of fixing it the year before the sale is much higher than the cost of fixing it now.
5. Has your personal estate plan changed? A new will, a separation, a blended family. A trust deed written before any of that may quietly be distributing income to the wrong people on your death.
6. What did your accountant raise at the last meeting that you didn’t action? The honest answer to this one usually tells us where the conversation should start.
When a change is worth it — and when it's not
Restructuring is not free. There are stamp-duty exposures, CGT roll-over qualifications, deed amendments, ASIC filings, bank covenants to renegotiate. We weigh the all-in cost of the move against the annualised benefit over five to ten years. Sometimes the answer is yes, do it now. Sometimes the answer is: park this until the sale, then capture the concessions in one move. Both are valid; what’s not valid is drifting another year without asking the question.
A 60-minute conversation can save 18 months of cleanup
Most of the costly fixes we see were avoidable. The owner just hadn’t sat down with someone whose job is to look at the structure with fresh eyes. We do that as a 60-minute conversation. You bring the most recent tax returns and a rough picture of what the next two to three years look like. We bring the questions and the structuring map.
Talk to us. If you’re due a structure review — or you’ve never had one — book a free 20-minute conversation and we’ll tell you whether a full review is worth your time. Book a Conversation.