With few businesses going under these days, times are not great for a company that relies to an extent on the failure of others to win work. As Begbies Traynor pointed out in its statement ahead of its annual shareholder meeting, corporate insolvencies in the UK fell by 12 per cent in the first half to just over 8,000, compared with nearly 9,000 last year.
Most of the country will be quite happy with the state of affairs; after all, how many employees welcome being summoned for a “town hall” meeting to be told by a stern-looking administrator that their jobs are on the line? Not many.
Yet this year’s version of Begbies Traynor is a different beast to previous incarnations. Today, the company boasts