Are you buying a business or selling your business? Are you considering opening a new business? Please give Nas Hanafi a call on (02) 9223 9055 to discuss your strategy and structure, whether you are buying or selling or acquiring or creating a new business.
The first issue Nasir Hanafi at Lion Legal will raise with you is, what structure do you propose to start or acquire the business with? A company? A partnership? A family trust structure? The different approaches are associated with different obligations and consequences, and it is vital that you select the right vehicle with which to run your business.
If you are selling your business, have you extinguished all of your obligations under the sale? These issues need to be covered in the contract for the sale of the business. It should also be noted that the corollary applies if you are a purchaser: you may very well want to stop the vendor (the seller of the business) from competing against you.
Other things also need to be considered, such as the formalities: for example, if you are purchasing a clothing store that you then wish to convert into a café or restaurant, do you have the appropriate development application? Does the zoning allow this? Also, if you intend to sell alcohol on the premises, how do you attain a liquor licence? Again, this is something that Nasir Hanafi at Lion Legal can guide you through.
There are other extrinsic issues to consider: if someone is attending premises to buy your business and you are going to be discussing profit and loss issues, surely you would want to protect your confidential and highly sensitive information via a non-disclosure agreement with your prospective purchaser.
Additionally, in a transfer or a sale of a business, other issues must be considered, such as who owns the website and the phone lines. How do you go about securing the transfer of those items?
As you can see there are a lot of issues and questions that not only must be considered, but which also must be actually answered in the transaction. Often people engage in a transaction with little or no advice, and anywhere from 3 months to 3 years down the track they discover that they do not in fact own a phone line, and they suddenly lose a vital component of their business which their consumers are accustomed to.
Nas Hanafi is happy to discuss the above issues with you.
