Brexit - moving a UK business to Ireland

rc27

Hi,

I joined this forum after finding this thread through google searches.

B2B into Niche business is my game, operating the last 10 years from just outside London.

I believe Ireland now has a major advantage over the UK and below I will explain why, I am very interested in setting up in Ireland and I have provided some examples of opportunities which I see have already been broached briefly on this thread:

The markets we have been serving for the last 10 years are small to medium sized resellers dotted all over Europe. 60% of our trade was EU mainland. 30% US and 10% UK.

Our operation involves two sales developers that work from home and a fulfilment centre.

We have been working remotely from the products for the last 6 years, it has worked well.

The issue we see is our clients are small to medium sized clients and these new hurdles has prompted many clients to ask if we are going to move our fulfilment within the single market for ease of purchase.

A lot of our clients are EU based ecommerce stores, the decision to work with us was based on ease of purchase, low order volumes and good communications.

Right now just this month we have sent 6 EU orders out to various countries within the EU, we have produced the correct documentation, it is not difficult it is the same as the documents you produce for non EU shipments. None of the parcels have arrived to the clients, some are heading back with little to info on the reason why, some are just in limbo as there is major issues with shipping right now, for various reasons.

We are not sending any more orders out at present and have many to ship, we used UPS/Parcelforce & DPD and all have thus far failed to deliver.

The above is just what we are experiencing right now but if you are my customer right now I believe you are thinking about relaxing your interest in our range, exploring new supplier opportunities inside the single market or even contemplating circumventing us and buying direct from our suppliers as you no longer see the value in working with a UK supplier.

A lot of SME business has always looked to the UK for supply chain and traders in England have always benefitted from having the ability to deal with the EU.

This change is going to cause a major shift and I cannot explain it fully but to me it feels like ROI is about to become the HK of Europe and a trade hub between UK and Europe.

Sure you read about a lot of big companies basing themselves in ROI and its already hugely attractive for big biz, I am not interested in any of that, I am just a small business man who thinks this change is going to have a massive impact on ROI SME.

We were taught to find business overseas, not focus on UK and take advantage of the close proximity and single market the EU provided.

So this is why I have joined Boards.ie, I want to move my company there and take advantage of a unique situation:

Every client we have would purposely do more business with us if we made that move.
Every supplier they had they could potentially advise us of and we could instigate business on their behalf and import into ROI
Every UK supplier who will 100% lose business from the EU as they will have to make each shipment worth their time, this means they will increase order volumes and pricing.

I am looking for like minded people who share the ideas above about the opportunity at hand, it does not matter if 100/1000/10'000 people share that idea, the size of opportunity is so big for SME ROI to capitalise on, there is no where enough people in ROI to fully handle the loss of business the UK will have in SME as a result of this change.

Forgive my long introduction, I am genuinely excited and feel this is an opportunity which cannot be ignored.

BR

Ray

paddylonglegs

rc27 wrote: »

Hi,

I joined this forum after finding this thread through google searches.

B2B into Niche business is my game, operating the last 10 years from just outside London.

I believe Ireland now has a major advantage over the UK and below I will explain why, I am very interested in setting up in Ireland and I have provided some examples of opportunities which I see have already been broached briefly on this thread:

The markets we have been serving for the last 10 years are small to medium sized resellers dotted all over Europe. 60% of our trade was EU mainland. 30% US and 10% UK.

Our operation involves two sales developers that work from home and a fulfilment centre.

We have been working remotely from the products for the last 6 years, it has worked well.

The issue we see is our clients are small to medium sized clients and these new hurdles has prompted many clients to ask if we are going to move our fulfilment within the single market for ease of purchase.

A lot of our clients are EU based ecommerce stores, the decision to work with us was based on ease of purchase, low order volumes and good communications.

Right now just this month we have sent 6 EU orders out to various countries within the EU, we have produced the correct documentation, it is not difficult it is the same as the documents you produce for non EU shipments. None of the parcels have arrived to the clients, some are heading back with little to info on the reason why, some are just in limbo as there is major issues with shipping right now, for various reasons.

We are not sending any more orders out at present and have many to ship, we used UPS/Parcelforce & DPD and all have thus far failed to deliver.

The above is just what we are experiencing right now but if you are my customer right now I believe you are thinking about relaxing your interest in our range, exploring new supplier opportunities inside the single market or even contemplating circumventing us and buying direct from our suppliers as you no longer see the value in working with a UK supplier.

A lot of SME business has always looked to the UK for supply chain and traders in England have always benefitted from having the ability to deal with the EU.

This change is going to cause a major shift and I cannot explain it fully but to me it feels like ROI is about to become the HK of Europe and a trade hub between UK and Europe.

Sure you read about a lot of big companies basing themselves in ROI and its already hugely attractive for big biz, I am not interested in any of that, I am just a small business man who thinks this change is going to have a massive impact on ROI SME.

We were taught to find business overseas, not focus on UK and take advantage of the close proximity and single market the EU provided.

So this is why I have joined Boards.ie, I want to move my company there and take advantage of a unique situation:

Every client we have would purposely do more business with us if we made that move.
Every supplier they had they could potentially advise us of and we could instigate business on their behalf and import into ROI
Every UK supplier who will 100% lose business from the EU as they will have to make each shipment worth their time, this means they will increase order volumes and pricing.

I am looking for like minded people who share the ideas above about the opportunity at hand, it does not matter if 100/1000/10'000 people share that idea, the size of opportunity is so big for SME ROI to capitalise on, there is no where enough people in ROI to fully handle the loss of business the UK will have in SME as a result of this change.

Forgive my long introduction, I am genuinely excited and feel this is an opportunity which cannot be ignored.

BR

Ray

Welcome Ray, there is a wealth of experience on boards and the entrepreneur section. There's alot of info online re setting up a ltd company in Ireland, in my experience, working with an accountant has made this the smoothest way to deal with it.

I hope you get good info from these pages, people are generally interested in helping out, even if there are some salty comments from time to time, don't get too wound up and you'll be fine

rc27

paddylonglegs wrote: »

Welcome Ray, there is a wealth of experience on boards and the entrepreneur section. There's alot of info online re setting up a ltd company in Ireland, in my experience, working with an accountant has made this the smoothest way to deal with it.

I hope you get good info from these pages, people are generally interested in helping out, even if there are some salty comments from time to time, don't get too wound up and you'll be fine

Nice1 Paddy, I am a forum contributor in a few places and I know my post was an excited one but right now I am excited and it feels like there is about to be a massive shift in trade for SME. I am content to research and check a lot for the next 6 months at least, partly because of the current virus issue preventing travel but also because I only ever set one company up and I am now under no illusions that I need to make steps to wind the business down, something I have no idea how to do. so 2 steep learning curves ahead for me.

We also build niche products in the UK so we would need to find a small scale electronics set up. Just 3 of my growing list of needs.

I have done a fair bit of research on formations etc.

Gloomtastic!

Welcome to Boards Ray!

I've moved your posts from your original thread because I believe it warrants it's own thread.

The Gloomster!

For your business to survive, you need to move pretty fast. That's when mistakes can happen so you need to move carefully. There is a government department dedicated to helping companies, like yours, to come to Ireland. Enterprise Ireland should be able to help you but because they're manned by civil servants, their definition of fast may be months as oppose to your days/weeks.

Have a look on here and see if there's anything relevant.

https://www.enterprise-ireland.com/en/Start-a-Business-in-Ireland/Startups-from-Outside-Ireland/Are-you-Eligible-/

Any questions, just ask...........

SPC1759

I Brexited part of my business from the UK in 2016 and never looked back.

IDA Ireland is the inward investment counterpart of EI. It was a great help with local introductions, confirming the best location and other supports to get us started - and remains supportive to help us grow.

Best of luck!

PickYourName

rc27 wrote: »

I am looking for like minded people who share the ideas above about the opportunity at hand, it does not matter if 100/1000/10'000 people share that idea, the size of opportunity is so big for SME ROI to capitalise on, there is no where enough people in ROI to fully handle the loss of business the UK will have in SME as a result of this change.

Forgive my long introduction, I am genuinely excited and feel this is an opportunity which cannot be ignored.

BR

Ray

For what it's worth, I think you're on to something.

I've been following Brexit pretty closely since the referendum and once it became clear the UK was leaving the Customs Union it was obvious to me there would be opportunities there.

As you say, if you're used to exporting to other markets, the "red tape" isn't that complex, but there are three huge problems (1) for low value items the extra costs can mean it's not viable (2) it's a huge step for anyone not used to it and (3) for business-to-business, there are additional costs for the importer too and many just won't want to know.

As of last year, there were more than 100,000 UK companies that exported to the EU but nowhere else, so there are a lot of companies impacted.
If they have a presence in the EU, the problems largely go away.

I haven’t worked out yet exactly what kind of opportunity exists and how it would be structured, but you’re definitely not the only one with similar thoughts.

rc27

How developed is the business of fulfilment in ROI? - So to confirm fulfilment, 3PL services, pick and pack type operations.

In the UK we have all kinds of fulfilment providers, most are targeting the B2C business and push the API integration and techie things like that.

We have used the same fulfilment partner for the last 6 years, we do not work on anything other than an internal code, it is a very primitive system from what I can tell but it has worked for us and definitely provided us more time to develop business.

Our business is more B2B, so typical months in the last 3 years would involve about 18 orders per month and most would be 1 carton containing multiple items.

We never utilised our fulfilment providers shipping other than Royal mail in low value orders, we would just get the total w/d of goods, number of parcels info from the fulfilment company and we would create shipping labels and email them over to be applied onto the goods.

You may be wondering where the fulfilment provider made money, we pay our provider £1 per item on our technology range, so if a company orders 25 units of 2 products, 20 of 1 and 5 of the other, say the 20 unit line was packed in a carton of 20 units, we would pay the fulfilment company £20 for that single pick and £5 for the picks x 5 of the other SKU.


Everything about our fulfilment centre and operations is low tech but very effective, I am sure we are paying over the odds but in 6 years we never changed fulfilment centres and we proposed the pick fee of £1 on tech items to prevent continual discussions on increasing rates etc.

I am hoping there are similar fulfilment operations in ROI and maybe a few such companies are members of this forum?

Another thing we use for easy mail management is UKPOSTBOX this is a service which provides us an address for correspondence, we then have all of our mail scanned and can view it online, we can then save copies, shred etc.

Another thing we would need is small electronics builder, difficult to explain this one but in

andrewfaulk

rc27 wrote: »

How developed is the business of fulfilment in ROI? - So to confirm fulfilment, 3PL services, pick and pack type operations.

In the UK we have all kinds of fulfilment providers, most are targeting the B2C business and push the API integration and techie things like that.

We have used the same fulfilment partner for the last 6 years, we do not work on anything other than an internal code, it is a very primitive system from what I can tell but it has worked for us and definitely provided us more time to develop business.

Our business is more B2B, so typical months in the last 3 years would involve about 18 orders per month and most would be 1 carton containing multiple items.

We never utilised our fulfilment providers shipping other than Royal mail in low value orders, we would just get the total w/d of goods, number of parcels info from the fulfilment company and we would create shipping labels and email them over to be applied onto the goods.

You may be wondering where the fulfilment provider made money, we pay our provider £1 per item on our technology range, so if a company orders 25 units of 2 products, 20 of 1 and 5 of the other, say the 20 unit line was packed in a carton of 20 units, we would pay the fulfilment company £20 for that single pick and £5 for the picks x 5 of the other SKU.


Everything about our fulfilment centre and operations is low tech but very effective, I am sure we are paying over the odds but in 6 years we never changed fulfilment centres and we proposed the pick fee of £1 on tech items to prevent continual discussions on increasing rates etc.

I am hoping there are similar fulfilment operations in ROI and maybe a few such companies are members of this forum?

Another thing we use for easy mail management is UKPOSTBOX this is a service which provides us an address for correspondence, we then have all of our mail scanned and can view it online, we can then save copies, shred etc.

Another thing we would need is small electronics builder, difficult to explain this one but in

Not sure about pricing, but I have one customer who pulled their UK fulfilment back to Ireland post Brexit as the UK based partner was not delivering a service at all..

They now use a company called Parcel Planet who are based in D12, and are in the process of setting up a UK operationa also

rc27

PickYourName wrote: »

For what it's worth, I think you're on to something.

I've been following Brexit pretty closely since the referendum and once it became clear the UK was leaving the Customs Union it was obvious to me there would be opportunities there.

As you say, if you're used to exporting to other markets, the "red tape" isn't that complex, but there are three huge problems (1) for low value items the extra costs can mean it's not viable (2) it's a huge step for anyone not used to it and (3) for business-to-business, there are additional costs for the importer too and many just won't want to know.

As of last year, there were more than 100,000 UK companies that exported to the EU but nowhere else, so there are a lot of companies impacted.
If they have a presence in the EU, the problems largely go away.

I haven’t worked out yet exactly what kind of opportunity exists and how it would be structured, but you’re definitely not the only one with similar thoughts.

Appreciate the feedback and I agree with you 100%, it is difficult to understand the whole opportunity at hand but from a B2B perspective and just looking at something like the Gifting industry which is a mix of small to medium to large companies.

The losers look like the SME as those EU companies want low quantity, bigger range, ease of ordering, if you have to stick a customs agent in between that, it makes life very difficult. That is just one industry though and the question is, how many industries are affected from this and how big of an opportunity exists. I already know for my biz I need to be inside EU but the opportunity to develop ROI biz is too tempting if you understand the issue and this is something that has put a fire in my belly, I think it is a very big opportunity.