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A little harsh. Presuming his children don't want to carry on the business (if, indeed he has any) then he's left with two choices: 1). Sell the building and b
by corford 10y ago
A little harsh. Presuming his children don't want to carry on the business (if, indeed he has any) then he's left with two choices:
1). Sell the building and business together. Given the location, the sale would inevitably be to a party that has zero interest in the bell making business and they'd dispose of the business (or just shut it down) as soon as they received the deeds for the building.
2). Split the sale in to building and business. Doing it this way at least gives Alan Hughes some control over who the business goes to (and enables the sale price for said business to be within range of a potential buyer in the same line of work/industry).
- keithpeter 10y agoA world away, but it is quite routine now for public sector organisations to sell centrally located and high value buildings and use the proceeds to finance a new building in a lower value location. For example: a number of further education colleges, many London based art colleges, and Birmingham City Council's disposal of Baskerville House some years ago and Newhall House soonish.
- toyg 10y agoI think it would be more honest to realize the sale of the building, inject most of the resulting cash in the business (which, after all, would be only just), then try to sell on a healthy business with a good runway for any new owner (or the workers, or creditors, or whoever). That doesn't seem to be the case here, since he's clear the business will just close unless it gets bought - where is the real estate cash going, then? I'm probably a bit harsh, but real estate in London has turned plenty of good men evil, so to speak; this wouldn't be the first nor the last time it happens.
- maxerickson 10y agoPotato potato? If he owns the building and the business, what difference does it make how he sells them? If he injects some hypothetical large amount of real estate cash into the corporation, he will probably want to get at least the value of that cash in the sale of the corporation.
- toyg 10y agoHe is the heir to a 400-year-old business his family bestowed on him. Shouldn't the moral and ethical priority be to keep such business afloat and bestow it on the next generation in turn? (Not necessarily of his family.) If that were the case, injecting any real estate windfall in the business would be the right thing to do regardless of his personal ROI. Let the business put to good use the money, which is money the business itself accumulated in hundreds of years looking after the building. Get someone else in charge, be an absentee owner, and let it run. Of course, if you treat it as a business like any other, such imperative does not exist. That, I think, is where his insistence that he's not a particularly good or interesting person comes from: he knows he's killing a piece of history for his own short-term economic benefit. His insistence that "it's just business" is a way to deflect the moral implications of his actions.
- maxerickson 10y agoSo do it for him. Set up a non profit. Collect the funds necessary to be an absentee owner. Buy the business. Run it for posterity's sake.
- toyg 10y agoIf only I had a building to sell in central London...
- maxerickson 10y agoEnthusiasm for running the business for posterity is probably more important than having a building to sell.
- toyg 10y agoI don't disagree, but I'd probably have more enthusiasm for it if I were sitting on a pile of real-estate cash.