Accounting, audit and tax advice

Rachel: I’m Rachel Potter. I’m the managing director of Lang and Potter Limited. We do a variety of handcrafted skills in the business. We are upholsterers. That’s our core business, but we also make substrates for that furniture. So we have a joinery department. We do heavy textiles. We pride ourselves on our hand skills and our people are the centre of our business.

A lot of the things that we do can’t be done by machines. We are a family business. So our core values are family – and we look after our people. I’m very proud of what we’ve built and we look after our people and the people are the heart of our business.

My granddad handed the business to my dad with six employees and we’ve now got nearly 200 employees. I hope to continue the legacy that my grandfather and my father have started. We’ve been going for 80 years and I hope that we go on for many more.

I grew up around the business. The business has been there since I was born. It was there before I was born. As kids, me and my brothers played in the factories. We wouldn’t be allowed to do that now, but we’ve grown up around it. It’s always been there. I can’t imagine it not being there. I’d always worked here in the summer – in summer jobs – I had done other jobs, but I’d always helped out. That’s the way it is in the family business.

Succession to me is making sure that the business is in safe hands. I can’t run it forever. None of us can run it forever. But what we’ve built, I’m very proud of and I want that to continue.

Our legacy is in our people and the skills that we give our people. We have trained fathers, sons, wives, daughters. The most challenging parts were HR because I’ve grown up with these people and some of them knew me as a child. So I am having to manage people, come into responsibilities that I’m learning and that’s quite a challenge for anybody.

I’ve learned on the job. I’m not qualified to do this. You know I’ve learned through experience and I think that’s been the hardest thing.

The advice I would give going through a transition is to talk to each other and find out what you want. There’s no point handing over to a sibling or a child that doesn’t want it. And if you can’t have those discussions and they’re difficult, get help because you know that’s what we do, we have advisers. There is no rule book for this. This is all about families. It’s all about emotions.

David: Well, I’m David Potter. This year I’ll have been at Lang Potter for 53 years. I joined on the 1st of April 1973. I joined my father and it was a very small company at that time. It’s been a story of opportunism, risk-taking and very hard work. In fact, very much a slog.

And I think the greatest asset is always the skills in the staff themselves. I mean, I think family businesses have very broad shoulders. Our worth is not just tied up in the bricks and mortar or the stock or the machinery. It’s the skills and the investment in our skill for the future.

Our family tree goes back in Devon for at least 200 years. I’m very much committed to running this business with Rachel, you know, for the benefit of the local community and with the local community. Proud of our heritage and in many many respects, of course, including the heritage and the legacy from the business which my father started.

I’m still enthused about the business. I still want to support Rachel as much as I can and I think I still have something to give to the business as well. And of course, in a sense having put every brick in the wall as this business has grown I’ve got a lot of knowledge which sometimes I think is valuable to people who haven’t been here that long. But yeah, I work because I choose to not because I have to. I’m not motivated by anything else than a desire to have the business.

It’s fantastic to see Rachel take the lead. She’s served a very long apprenticeship. It’s not easy. So, I’m very proud of her.

Rachel is operating in very much a man’s world. So, I think the first quality I see in Rachel is resilience, determination, hard work, very bright, intelligent. I think that, she’s actually doing a better job than I did. So, I think she has more than enough qualities to carry the business forward.

Our family has put a lot of themselves into this. It’s a precious thing if you like, you know, something that we’re very proud of. So, keeping it in the family, you know, I see that as a big achievement.

The advice I give to family businesses about succession is do what I did and sit down around a table with your family and have a completely open, honest, and transparent discussion about it before you do anything. And if you’ve decided that succession is the route you want to take, then take advice, get wise counsel from any number of people, obviously your legal advisers, but also people like PKF Francis Clark who have been invaluable in our process.

Giles: Hello, I’m Giles. I’m a partner at PKF Francis Clark in the business advisory team. I’m head of advisory services for the firm and I help clients on succession matters, moving generations from one generation to the next.

My job is to really listen to the family. It’s not about the numbers. It’s about understanding what each generation wants from the business and for themselves personally. So, it’s really listening. That’s the key role. Understanding what their needs are. Really thinking about how much they care about the business and what they need from it.

I think advising family businesses like Lang and Potter is a unique job. For me being an accountant is not just about the numbers. It’s actually about people and actually caring about the people that are there. Seeing that business move from one generation to the next makes me feel massively proud with David and Rachel and their process on the succession journey.

I think the key bit there was that they talk to each other and hopefully I’ve helped them with that journey and with being able to say what they actually think but leaving it at the door – and I think that is the key to succession.

When you transition a business from one generation to the next. It’s just critical to get your advisers involved. There’s a lot of emotion between the different generations in a business and having somebody there to sort of talk to open up those discussions to deal with a difficult moment is critical, and then that really does help to open up those discussions about the business and the needs of the individuals.

Yeah, successions really important for local businesses in our area. We have lots of family businesses and each of those businesses has various roots for the long-term planning for the business – be it selling or transition into the next generation of the business.

But you know it’s important that these businesses have a route and passing to the next generation is a really nice way for those businesses to move forward to keep that legacy to keep the culture of the business.