Corporate Structure and Growth

Corporate Structure and Growth

GTC Lawyers can help you to set up your company in a way that maximises its potential and minimises legal risks. The first two years of a new venture are generally the most crucial to its development. During this time, you set up your corporate structure, build your team and fund your company’s growth. At GTC Lawyers, our team of legal experts can help you do all of this and more.

Lawyers for small business

As a business that has grown very rapidly, GTC Lawyers understands the excitement and the challenges you are facing. We love working with small and medium businesses and our team of entrepreneurial lawyers is based all over Australia, meaning that you can be sure of finding the right solicitor at an affordable price.

Legal services for start-ups and small businesses

Some ways our lawyers can help to grow businesses and start-ups include:

• Drawing up shareholder agreements – Shareholder agreements should ideally be drawn up when a company is formed but they can also be a vital tool at any stage in growing a business. They protect shareholders and set out in detail how the firm will be managed and can be crucial if there are disagreements slater on.
• Share Option Schemes – These are a way for young and fast-growing firms to reward their employees. Share option schemes give team members a stake in the future success of the company, by giving them the opportunity to invest in stock within the firm at some point in the future. There are many ways in which options can be triggered so there is a lot of room for creativity in ensuring your business gets the right employee share scheme for you and your staff.
• Business and employment contracts – It’s really important to protect your business by ensuring you have the right employment contracts. This means well-drafted, plain English agreements that you and your employees understand.
• Personal Guarantees – Directors of fast-growing firms are often forced to give personal guarantees to secure bank funding. However, this can mean that you end up with personal liability if things don’t go according to plan. Creditors can decide who personally they want to target when recovering a debt. Therefore, it’s vital that you understand what you’re signing up for.
• Intellectual Property protection – Patents, trademarks, plans and other intellectual property (IP) rights are essential to the success of any growing firm, particularly in the technology sector. The legal team at GTC Lawyers can help you put the right legal protections around the IP you’ve created, ensure clarity about who owns the copyrights, and helping you to exploit your IP whether through licensing or other legal methods.