Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to the Dealmaker Uncut podcast, where we speak to some of the UK's most exciting entrepreneurs and hear their investment journeys. We'll discuss the challenges, successes and lessons they've learned along the way with expert deals commentary from Jonathan Boyers, head of Alvarez and Marcel Corporate Finance, and me, Chris McGuire, executive editor at Business Cloud. Welcome, everyone, to the latest episode of the Dealmaker Uncut podcast, powered by Alvarez and Marcel. My name is Chris McGuire. I'm the executive editor of Business Cloud and we've been trying to get today's guest on the show for months. Our people have been talking to her people and we finally secured her services. More about her later. As always, I'm joined by the man himself, Jonathan Boyers, who is the managing director and head of Avrohom, Marcel's corporate finance practice in the uk. He's got a fresh haircut, freshly back from Milan. Welcome, Jonathan.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: Thanks, Chris. Very excited about what we've got planned for today.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: It's going to be hugely exciting as well. Before we announce who it is, I hope I don't disappoint our listeners when we announce who it is, but we won't. We've got to introduce our thank what media who produce the Dealmaker Uncut podcast. They're the kings and queens of video creation and they turn our ramblings into the hit podcast, which is currently riding high in the podcast charts. Wait for this. In France. Jonathan, how impressive is that?
[00:01:18] Speaker B: Very impressive, Chris.
[00:01:20] Speaker A: And we did quite well in Sweden as well.
[00:01:23] Speaker B: Shout out for all our continental listeners.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: Well, I was rather hoping when you were in Italy this week, you would have been banging the drum for the podcast.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: People were talking about it all the.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Time, everywhere I went, but in their own language. Okay, that's good to know, Jonathan. First part of the show, we're going to be interviewing our special guest. After them, Jonathan's going to be leaning on his 35 plus years of experience of working in the corporate finance sector to answer listener questions. So, Jonathan, let's put our listeners out of their misery. Who are we speaking to today?
[00:01:51] Speaker B: Well, today, Chris, we're joined by Beth Horton, and as you said, we've tried to persuade Beth to come along and join us for a while. And so it's great that she's here. She's the head of Palatine Private Equities Impact Investing Fund, and obviously she's passionate about sustainability and that whole area. So welcome, Beth.
[00:02:14] Speaker C: Thank you. That was a big buildup, but I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for asking me.
[00:02:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I was Imagining there might be that TV program who's coming through the keyhole now? It's Beth Horton.
So Beth, I should just mention as well, actually, you've just won the big one, Business Clouds Inaugural Northern Leaders Sustainability Champion. So well done to you.
[00:02:34] Speaker C: Thank you. Yeah, no, that's a great evening actually. I really enjoyed going to that awards. What I really loved about it was that such a diversity of winners. So there's business people, community people and also educators as well. So real diverse of winners and I loved hearing all their stories from the night.
[00:02:50] Speaker A: Absolutely. And you're wearing green for the occasion today as well. Before Jonathan asks you about all your deal making activities over the years, I'm going to take you back a bit, if I may, to your childhood. I think we should be playing some like Radio 2 Music in the background. You grew up in Bolton, where so many great people have grown up and you were recycling before recycling was even a thing. In fact, I think you wrote to McDonald's at the age of 8. Just describe what you were like as a child, Beth.
[00:03:17] Speaker C: Yeah, I suppose I was that really annoying child for my parents that I was always really into or really concerned about the environment. So even before recycling was a thing, we had piles of paper and cans and glass in the house and we didn't have bins back in those days. So my dad would drive me to the local recycling unit where I'd recycle them all. So I was always really obsessed with recycling and making sure that we were living environmentally friendly lifestyles. And you know, you mentioned the, you mentioned the letter. So when I was eight, I'd heard that McDonald's were cutting down the Amazon rainforest and McDonald's was, I was a big fan of McDonald's. McDonald's came to the UK when I was quite young, so it was a big deal. So I wrote to McDonald's to say, well, I was disappointed to hear you're my favorite restaurant. And even before, even though this was before CSR and those departments existed in organizations, they actually wrote back to me and said they weren't cutting, you know, they were concerned about the environment as I was and they invited me to go to a restaurant and I had a tour around my local McDonald's behind the scenes as well.
[00:04:19] Speaker A: So my, my oldest daughter is 24 now. When she was a similar age, she wrote to Nike to protest that their working conditions that she'd seen on the television as well. I think that's such a good thing to have.
If we went through the keyhole of your house. Would we see lots of recycling? Is it something you really live, eat and breathe now?
[00:04:36] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, it's so easy now. Right. You've got no excuse not to recycle. So, yeah, no, absolute. Absolutely recycle. I try and do, you know, make sure that the products that I use in the house are environmentally friendly as well. So, yeah, I try and try to do that as well in my personal life.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: When you were 21, you were. Your father, who was a businessman, sadly died at the age of. He was 55.
Would it be fair to say that your beliefs around sustainability, a lot of that stems from your father?
[00:05:08] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I think it was more social, really. So my dad had his own business and he was born in Lee, so he built a business off in Lee, and he was always really ahead of his time, really, in terms of how he looked after his employees and what he did in his local community. So he felt really responsible to support local charities. He'd always sponsored the local kids, football and rugby clubs. And I think I used to go to work with him when I was a youngster and I think he really demonstrated that business can be a force for good in a community. And so I think I've always had that belief that businesses, it's not just about making money, it's about making a difference as well.
[00:05:46] Speaker A: Let's hear it for the dads out there, everyone.
[00:05:48] Speaker B: So, Beth, should we turn to your route into sort of investment and the current role that you're doing?
You started off as a SAP consultant, which is not the obvious route into private equity. Do you want to just talk about that?
[00:06:05] Speaker C: Yeah. So when I left university and I was a computer scientist with a computer science degree and I joined an SAP consultancy, it was actually private equity backed, so Phoenix backed it. I didn't realize I was going to be in private equity one day, but private equity backed, SAP consultant, and it was when ERP systems were sort of just being implemented. So I got to work on really global SAP implementations. So I worked in Asia for a year. I worked in the US and then all across Europe for multinationals like Diageo, Raytheon. Lufthansa. So it was a really interesting career and I got to travel quite a bit, but the travel after 10 years got a bit too much. So that's when I decided that there was time for a career change.
[00:06:49] Speaker B: And so you did an mba, is that right before you joined Palatine?
[00:06:53] Speaker C: Yeah. So, as I said, I'd had quite an international career, but my heart's always been in Manchester. So I really wanted to get back to Manchester. So I decided the best thing to do would to do. I did a part time MBA at Manchester Business School. So I worked as a consultant four days a week and did a week at the business school.
And then as part of that I got an internship at Morgan Stanley Investment bank. So I left my job as a consultancy, went to do my internship for three months and then had to come back to Manchester to finish the mba. And at that time I realized that I had quite a lot of spare time because I'd been used to working full time and doing the mba. So I contacted a couple of pea houses and said, I'll work for free for you guys, you teach me a bit about private equity and I'll do some research for you at Manchester Business School.
And so I did those two internships, one at what is Enterprise Ventures but it's now Mercia, and the other at Palatine. And at the end of that they both offered me a job.
[00:07:50] Speaker B: Excellent.
[00:07:51] Speaker A: Jonathan, can I ask a question about that? Because I think it's fascinating because I, when I was the editor of the Chorley Guardian, I used to take people on work experience and I said, look, I'll give you all of me and I can't pay you. And they all jumped at it and now it's almost sort of frowned upon. You can't take people on like unpaid roles as well in your job. And Marcel, I mean, do you get people, you know, like the Beths of the today's generation contacting you, saying, I work for free, Jonathan, just to be working with a podcast sensation like yourself?
[00:08:20] Speaker B: Yeah, we obviously we get lots of people who are keen to join us, both full time and part time and on internships. A number of the people that we recruit, we do actually recruit from an internship. In fact, let's say at graduate entry type level. Almost everybody that joins us comes through internships.
[00:08:39] Speaker A: It's interesting.
[00:08:40] Speaker B: We do pay people.
[00:08:41] Speaker A: No, it's fascinating. Let's talk about Palatine as well. Now as you know Beth, we're very big in Sweden and France, so I'm going to provide a bit of background about Palatine Private Equity Co founded 20 years ago this year, can you believe it? 2005 by Gary Tipper, Man City's biggest fan, Ed Fazakely and Tony Dicken with a mission to be different and that they were based outside of London and that didn't mean that you couldn't raise funding. Just tell us a bit about Palatine. When you joined it, what was it like and what was it like working in private equity, because there's a perception of what private equity is.
[00:09:13] Speaker C: Yeah, I suppose, yeah. So back in 2000, I joined them 2006, so they had visibility of the first close of the fund, which is why they could take me on and pay me now. And so I joined them just before the final close in 2007. Yeah. And the ambition was to invest into the regions of the uk. So I don't know if you know where Palatine comes from. So now tell me. So, Palatine, we're named after Palatine Road in Manchester, and that was where Factory Records was founded. And Factory Records was founded on the basis that you didn't have to go to London to get a record contract. And so we took their name and the premise was that you didn't have to go to London to get a private equity deal. So that's how we came up with our name. Yeah. And, you know, it's gone from strength to strength, really. So from our first fund raised in 2007, we are on our fifth, a traditional private equity fund. We've raised two impact funds now. And last year we closed our first growth credit fund as well. So when we've gone from when I first joined, There was four of us and now there's 50 of us as well.
[00:10:18] Speaker B: Yeah. And Palatine have been one of the private equity funds that have really championed the north of England as an investment community. There's Palatine, North Edge, but very, very experienced. I mean, I remember it when you team there when they were in their early twenties.
Really, really experienced. And it's been really interesting to see the firm develop as it's grown and particularly as it's sponsored your fund, the sort of impact investment fund throws. Impact investing has been in the news recently for lots of different reasons. It became very.
Almost every fund had some requirement to invest in esg. It would just be useful if you could. Can you just tell us a bit about how that's working with you?
[00:11:10] Speaker C: Yeah. With the Impact fund. Yes. So. Well, we look at ESG and impact quite differently. So we would say ESG is how a company delivers its goods and services and impacts about what a company does as its main purpose.
So we do ESG across all of our funds. So all of our funds have the same methodology for esg, but within the Impact fund, we also have the criteria that we have to invest in companies that deliver social or environmental change. And when we first raised our funds, raised it back in 2017, the first one, the Impact space, I suppose it was struggling to prove that it could generate returns alongside the impact.
And a lot of people in the sector are saying, wouldn't it be great if a really professional, experienced and proven private equity house could come into the impact space and prove that we could do impact and returns alongside each other? Because what that does is it unlocks a lot of money. Private equity is predominantly pension fund money. Pension fund managers have responsibility to their pension fund holders to generate returns for them. And so. But by going to market to say we want to generate market rate returns exactly the same as any other PE house, it meant that we could go and get that pension fund money for our, for our fund.
So that was premise. Back in 2017, we raised 100 million for that first fund and we did 11 deals in that. In that fund and we've exited four of them already. And the four, really four successful exits and they've proven that we can actually do returns alongside impact. And we raised our second fund in 2023, five deals into that now as well. So, you know, Touchwood, we've established the fact that you can do that.
[00:12:55] Speaker B: Well, you were very quite cutting edge when you set that fund up. Obviously there's more competition now, isn't there?
[00:13:01] Speaker C: I don't think there is in the lower mid market, actually. I think there's a lot more of the larger funds have raised impact funds. So the KKRS, the APACs, Apollos, they've all got impact strategies now. But actually in the space that we're in, there isn't a lot of competition. So when we're looking at deals, more often than not we're up against traditional private equity.
[00:13:22] Speaker B: Yeah. And I suppose one of the things I was just mulling over when we were preparing for this session, that there's just recently from America with Donald Trump, there's been some sort of change of tone that's been coming from the us and I suppose in impact funds over there might suddenly be wondering whether their purpose is still supported by the government, if you like. And I was just wondering how you felt about that, whether, I mean, almost it's an opportunity that the whole continent that may no longer be as keen on impact investing. I don't know what you think.
[00:13:56] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I think from an ESG perspective, I suppose it is disappointing that there's been a lot of rhetoric out of the US and some of those, you know, larger companies are saying, actually we're not going to look at diversity and inclusion anymore and we're not going to look at environmental. But I think we've never really embraced ESG because it is the right thing to do, but it's also the right thing for businesses because it creates more sustainable businesses in the long term as well. So, you know, I think back in the day when we first started and Palatine's been doing ESG for 15 plus year now, so we were really pioneers, I suppose, in this space, in the private equity space sector. Back then we had to convince people to do esg. So we'd be saying if you switch to LED light and you're going to save X on your electricity bills, or if you look after your employees, you're going to have less churn, you're going to have less absence in your employee base. We were using business. The reason to do it is because it makes your businesses better. And then I think we had five years where everybody wanted to do SG and it was because it was the right thing to do. And I think we're going back now to where we're going to have to justify it again, where we're going to have to say if you decrease your energy costs when energy prices rise, you'll be a more resilient business because you won't have that dependency.
[00:15:15] Speaker B: I think a lot of the emphasis, I would say there's the noise about esg, but businesses should look at things like diversity because it's good for the business. It means you get good decisions made better. About 40% of our corporate finance team at A and M are female, for example. And I think that diversity, we're not doing it for any other reason other than it's better for our business to get that diversity. And a lot of these initiatives are followed because they improve your business, not because in some way they're viewed as good.
[00:15:53] Speaker C: Yeah, no, exactly. I mean, if you've not got a diverse or welcoming business, you're excluding 50% of the workforce. So you're not going to get the best people if you're excluding vast amounts of the workforce because you you not an inclusive organization. A lot of tech businesses that have come out and said, oh, we're not doing it anymore, a lot of the people in those organizations will be neurodiverse, so they need support in some ways and they'll be some of their best programmers within those organizations. So a lot of the time it's not just the right thing to do, but it makes you a better business as well.
[00:16:28] Speaker B: So in the impact fund you must occasionally get people trying to who sort of badge themselves as impact, when in fact there's nothing that much impact about them. How do you deal? Do you come across that much.
[00:16:41] Speaker C: I mean, we have to be really strict in the impact function. So our investors invest because they want to create social. Well, some of them invest because they want to create social environment change. Others just invest because they see it as a really good investment opportunity, actually. But yeah, I mean, we do get some businesses that we're like, yeah, that's probably not. Doesn't fit an impact fund. So we have to create KPIs around the impact. We have to, and we report those back to investors on a quarterly basis. So we have to demonstrate to investors that we are creating social and environmental change. So quite often we have to really dig into some of our companies that come and see it. So for example, we had a bamboo clothing business a few years ago now and bamboo is really sustainable because it grows very quickly and it uses a lot less water than cotton. But when we dug into actually the process to turn bamboo into clothes, it's actually very chemically driven process and there is a way to do it environmentally friendly, but you can't do it at scale or you couldn't do it a couple of years ago at scale at least.
So, yeah, we couldn't invest in that business because although the bamboo growing stage is very environmentally friendly, actually turning it into clothes isn't. So we've got to be really careful what we invest in and make sure that we're not doing anything that would harm either the environment or, or society.
[00:17:58] Speaker A: Beth, can I ask you a question, if I may? Can I just say I feel like I'm in the company of greatness? Because obviously you are a former deal maker of the year. Jonathan has won it four times as well, you know, so I'm the odd one out.
Talking about impact investment, impact funds. What's the attitude of investors? I mean, are investors desperate to throw money at stuff? I watched Dragon's Den yesterday and Deborah Meaden, one of the Dragons, she was looking at a potential investment in India and she said, look, I only make one flight a year and I don't fly domestically, so I'd be no good to you because I'm not paired to fly to India because of the environmental impact of it. What do investors say to you?
[00:18:36] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we have some really nicely aligned investors. So we have the church commissioners, for example, so that's a really nicely aligned investor. We had the environment agency in our first fund and we have quite a lot of the local authority pension funds as well. So, you know, a lot of our investors are aligned with our mission, so. And Very supportive investors and very knowledgeable investors actually as well. So we're, we're lucky that the investors that we have, but I said some investors do it because they think we can outperform the market with an impact strategy because we do have a lot of global issues, environmental issues, et cetera, and we can invest in those strategies. And actually we've got experience of investing in those strategies now as well. So we have a range of investors.
[00:19:24] Speaker B: Well, one of the things that clear to see is that you are in a small minority in the private equity community of senior female private equity investors. I just curious what your experience of being in that position is and how that feels sometimes.
[00:19:44] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I think back 17 years ago, the industry looked very different actually. So there wasn't many women in private equity. I suppose I've always been in male dominated industries. So I came from the tech industry, which is very male dominated, into private equity. So in some cases I haven't really known any different.
I haven't, I don't think I've experienced any, any sexism within private equity. I don't think I, I don't think I notice it, I don't acknowledge it and so I don't let it stop me.
But, and I also think, you know, women can use it to their advantage. So when you're in an industry that's very male dominated, you stand out and you, you're visit more visible than some of your male colleagues. You get invited onto panels and podcasts and things like that and you know, you can use that kind of thing to your advantage as well to accelerate your career and make sure that you stand out.
[00:20:33] Speaker A: Have you seen a change, Jonathan, because your wife Ruth has acquired a number of companies as well. So in terms of that deal sector space, are we seeing it, are we seeing more women rise to the surface now?
[00:20:45] Speaker B: So I was reflecting on this again before we did the session and I was what I have observed is a lot more female founders of businesses. So over the last five years, I would say there's a lot more females are involved in setting up new businesses.
When I look at. And I was challenging myself because when I think of the CEOs of businesses that I've been selling a lot, I would say there's not as many. And I think that's partly because I'm often selling businesses that people founded, created when men created 20 years ago. And so I'm often selling businesses that men have been running for a long time and they've matured and they're being sold Whereas when I look at the earlier stage community, there's a lot more women coming through. So I think that we will see more and more female CEOs those. But I think it is still feeding through.
[00:21:50] Speaker C: I know, I agree. I say exactly the same thing in the private equity industry, you know, we've been quite good at hiring more diversely at a junior level, so managers and maybe directors, but I always call it a structural issue. So we have got to then support those people to get through to partner level and that's going to take, you know, five, 10 years. That doesn't happen overnight. You can't just recruit someone to partner. But it's about supporting that younger generation now to come through the industry and to get, get to that senior level. And I think that's the same as what you're saying with companies.
[00:22:20] Speaker B: Yeah, and in our own business we, you know, we've set a new business up and we've recruited about, say I've said that already once, about 40% of our people are female, but we will need to nurture them and sponsor people through the high performers. So that, that goes all the way through to MD and into senior leadership.
[00:22:41] Speaker C: I think we're about 50% a female actually at Palatine. So not on the investment team, but across all our, across all our business actually. We're quite unique, quite different in the private equity industry, having a lot of women.
[00:22:53] Speaker A: I read a report yesterday and it was from EY actually and it was called Super Scalers and a super scaler, I think it's called Super Scalers. They're defined as female founded businesses that have reached a turnover of 50 million or more.
[00:23:06] Speaker C: I saw that.
[00:23:06] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And there's only ever been 80 in the UK and I looked down some of the names. Claire Roberts, previous guest on this esteemed podcast, is one of them as well. And I just was curious actually Jonathan, and yourself as well, Beth. In terms of if you're dealing with somebody who's exiting a company or maybe buying a company, you know, and you have this image of like testosterone charged, like you know, banging of the banging of the fists and stuff like that and trying to close a deal, do you find any difference in terms of if it's a, a male or female? In terms of when it comes to.
[00:23:43] Speaker B: Making a deal, you can never really predict. I think personally, I think that you're better at being collaborative even when you're negotiating a deal.
It's better to be win win than win lose. Occasionally negotiations are hard and everybody's all sorts of different People are capable of adopting hard positions. I think women are a bit more collaborative than men, just naturally.
But I don't think it's always easy to predict how a deal will go from the early stage. I don't know if you found anything different.
[00:24:19] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I think personally I'm quite a win win type person as well. So I think women can be more collaborative than maybe fist pumping men. I think that's probably an image that private equity has had like 20 years ago, maybe. I think, you know, I think it's moved on a lot over the years. And so I think, you know, the best way to, to get deals over the line is to be honest where your line is and say, this is where my line is and, you know, I can't move from that and, you know, try and come up with a compromised situation.
[00:24:48] Speaker A: One thing I think is fascinating about you and you find you modest to say as well. Like I say, you know, for Dealmakers of the Year, Northern Leaders, Sustainability Champion of the Year, you know, the war's just, you know, sort of roll off the tongue. You started life at Palestine having been this SAP consultant, earning good money, being really senior, flying all over the world. You went to Palestine at the bottom of the pile, the bottom of the list. Fast forward 17, 18 years, however long it's been, you're now right at the top of the tree as well. And yet you've spoken about imposter syndrome.
[00:25:18] Speaker C: Well, I think, yeah, I don't know if imposter syndrome. I did a change mid career, so I changed my career middle, you know, mid career, did a change. Sorry. And so I had to learn again. So, you know, I'd been an SAP consultant, as you said, managing big teams and had to start at the bottom at Palatine and work my way up again. And so that was tough, actually at times I was, you know, people do MBAs and they think I'm going to get a big pay rise and have really glamorous job. And I took a pay cut and I moved from sort of Paris every week to Morecambe. So it was a different experience for me. And there were times when I was thinking, you know, is, have I done the right thing? I think what really helped me accelerate my career because I joined Palatine when I was in my early 30s was ESG. So it was just coming through. You know, there wasn't anyone else at Palatine that really wanted to take it on. I suppose, you know, there was the founding partners and me. So I was the obvious person to take it on. And that Kind of, you know, we came up with a strategy. I worked with an outside consultancy and Francis Wells, who still advises us on impact and esg. Now we came up with a strategy and a methodology to put it into private equity and to roll that out across our portfolio.
And over time, we started to win awards for ESG and it started to become part of our usp. So Palatine strapline is positive equity. And we rebranded around positivity and sustainability.
And so not only for me personally, it really accelerated my career, but it also know, made Palatine stand out as well in what is quite a crowded private equity market.
[00:26:58] Speaker B: When you talk about imposter syndrome, Chris, I think imposter syndrome, lots of people experience that at all stages of their career. Even quite senior people in all walks of life will feel that. And I suppose one of the things I realized quite only in the last maybe five or six years is that just authenticity and being yourself is one of the most powerful things that you can probably do, certainly when you're in a relationship business. And so if you can feel like actually that's one of the best things you can do, it helps you address imposter syndrome. Cause you should just be yourself.
[00:27:39] Speaker C: Yeah, I think I'm a very competitive person, so I'm always striving to be better. So I'm always like, how can we make this process better?
When I was a consultant, I sometimes I used to go into businesses and they'd be like, well, we've done it like this for 20 years, so we want SAP to bend to this process. And then, you know, you go into other businesses and they'd say, you know, how do we. What's best in class? How do we make this better? How do we make this process more efficient? And they were the more fun businesses to work with. So, you know, take that into myself. So I'm always thinking, how do I do this? How do I do this better? How do I make better decisions? But also within Palatine, we sit down every year, we could say, look, we've won loads of awards for our sustainability strategy, so that's great. But we sit down every year and say, how do we make it better? What are we going to change this year? How do we stay at the forefront of it? And we try and do that across the whole business as well.
[00:28:31] Speaker A: We're going to go for a quick break. When we come back, Jonathan and I are going to discuss what we really think of you, Beth. And then I'm going to ask Jonathan some questions in a section called Ask Ask Jonathan. But we're going to go for a quick break.
[00:28:42] Speaker B: Thanks. Thanks, Ben. Great.
[00:28:54] Speaker A: Welcome back to the second half of the Dealmaker Uncut podcast. We've just interviewed Beth Horton, head of Palatine Private Equity's Impact Investing Fund and a former deal maker of the year like yourself. Jonathan, what did you think about.
[00:29:08] Speaker B: So I thought that was really interesting, Chris. Beth's obviously been one of the foremost female private equity investors and has led a trail really, for impact investing.
It has started to become more common there, but she's been at the forefront of that for a long time and there won't be many people who know more about that area than she does. So I think really, really interesting to, to, to have that, that discussion.
[00:29:38] Speaker A: And I think one of the things that I, I found interesting was that, well, really that she was willing to start from the bottom when she made that career change in her like, late 20s, early 30s and to go into Palestine and effectively offer her services for nothing. Now she's at the top of the tree and she'll say herself that she did say esg, if you like, was what made her as well. But you can see she's driven and she's hugely passionate and she's just a force for change. And the other thing I think is really, really interesting is that, you know, I'm always conscious that we ask a female deal maker a question about what it's like to be a female deal maker. But she said that actually she never felt found it an obstacle. In fact, she actually probably used it as an advantage as well. And I know this is somebody who hosts a lot of events trying to get females on panels in certain sectors. It's really hard because there's not a big pool to choose from. There are starting to, starting to see more names. So, no, I don't think it's the last we're going to hear of Beth as well. And the thing about Beth is when she knew she's on this podcast, she listened to every single episode. She said she's not slept as well all week, but so no, really, really pleased, really pleased by that. So this next section is called Ask Jonathan. And it's when we ask Jonathan any question that they come up with. So the first question is how have the changes to business property relief had an impact on the deals industry, especially from families and entrepreneurs? It's probably worth explaining as well for them that don't know what the deal property relief involves.
[00:31:05] Speaker B: So this was the change that happened in the budget that was a little bit unexpected that the when the Chancellor effectively brought, well, they brought agricultural property into this caption and they changed the rules so that the relief for business property would only be 50% when it comes to inheritance tax. So essentially business property becomes taxable.
And that means that where people would have passed the shares in companies down through the generations. So from a family business, when somebody passed away, the shares may be passed to the next generation. That could previously be done effectively tax free.
And these days now under the new rules, there will be tax to be paid and sometimes that will be very substantial tax.
What we've already seen is a number of families who would have previously have intended to not to sell the business and to keep to pass down at least to the next generation.
We've seen them thinking about selling and so we've now got several disposal mandates that we're just starting up where families have taken the decision to sell their business, which is quite a big change for a lot of people. People who might have thought they would never sell their business are suddenly thinking, thinking actually this is something we might need to contemplate doing.
[00:32:41] Speaker A: And feel free to send your questions to Jonathan and he'll always answer them. That's all for this episode of the Dealmaker Uncut podcast, powered by Avras and Marcel. Final shout out to what media and the star of the show, Jonathan. Thanks, Chris, and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. You know, as I mentioned before, we were big in Sweden. We're now biggish in France. Obviously the UK is our is our happy hunting ground as well. Tell your friends, tell your family. Follow us on social media as well. So that's all for this episode of the Dealmaker Uncut. Thank you for tuning in to the Dealmaker Uncut podcast. We hope you enjoyed today's conversation and found it insightful. If you like what you heard, be sure to subscribe and tell your friends. We'll catch you in the next episode of the Dealmaker Uncut podcast.
