#76 Tax, Trusts & Consequences: Getting ahead of what can go wrong with Michelle Tickner

TRANSCRIPT: THE bizval PODCAST
Guest: Michelle Tickner, Director — Tax Planning & Consulting | Sentinel International
Host: Graham Stephen, CEO and Co-Founder, bizval
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelle-tickner-a885303/
Company: https://sentinelinternational.co.za

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[00:01:17] Graham Stephen: Welcome back to the bizval Podcast. Today, we’re getting into a topic that sits behind almost every transaction, dispute, or exit that we see, but often it only gets attention when something goes wrong — and that is tax. I’m joined today by Michelle Tickner, she’s a director at Sentinel International Advisory, and someone who has spent decades at the coalface of tax planning, dispute resolution, and structuring. Michelle, it’s wonderful to have you on the podcast today.

[00:01:47] Michelle Tickner: Thank you for having me, Graham, and I look forward to our chat.

[00:01:53] Graham Stephen: Fantastic. Michelle, as I said, we’re going to start just a little bit with your background, kind of your story into tax. I mean, tax is not something most people, when they go around the classroom in grade 1 and say what do you want to be when you grow up, not many hands go up when the teacher says who wants to be a tax advisor. But we’re going to go into your background, a little bit about how you got into where you are now. We’ll talk a little bit about what you’re doing at Sentinel, and some of the pitfalls that you see along the way, and then we’re going to have a bit of a rapid-fire section at the end. So, Michelle, let’s start right at the beginning. You’ve been in tax since the early 90s. What brought you into that in the first place?

[00:02:40] Michelle Tickner: Yeah, so Graham, I definitely didn’t put my hand up for tax after I left school. I actually first went to study BCom Accounting, and at that stage, I had no idea that I would develop a love for tax. What I did know was that I was good at problem solving, because when I did my aptitude tests before going to university, it was actually suggested that I study mechanical engineering. But in the early 90s, girls didn’t actually go and study engineering, so I thought best I just go into the accounting group. And growing up, I was quite focused and driven through sport. Many people don’t actually know that I also did gymnastics and Cecchetti ballet, and that I took part in provincial and national competitions every year. So from a very young age, I was very disciplined and focused, and that actually stayed with me throughout my career.

[00:03:47] Graham Stephen: Yeah, I mean, that’s super interesting. A lot of the guests we’ve had on the show, I mean, I believe you grew up in Bloemfontein, and we’ve had quite a few guests who grew up there. Sport has been a big part of their growing up experience, and I think you touched on something there about being disciplined and focused. So maybe let’s go back to that, your early growing up years. Growing up in a town where, I guess, there’s not much to do — I’m joking, my wife is from Bloemfontein too — and the other part about Bloemfontein, which maybe some of our international guests may not know, is it’s known as the City of Roses. Growing up in Bloemfontein, being involved in sport, maybe share some of those early experiences that grounded you and shaped you.

[00:04:40] Michelle Tickner: Yeah, I suppose I don’t always tell people that I’m from Bloemfontein and that I studied at the University of the Free State, because apparently if you live in Cape Town, there’s only one university, and that’s UCT. Other universities or not universities. But I’m actually grateful that I got to grow up in a city like Bloemfontein. I didn’t go to one of the girls’ schools there, I just went to the closest school to where we lived. I cycled to school, or walked to school, and my friends grew up with me since sub-A, or Grade 1. I was actually part of the first class at Fichhardt Park High School that completed matric, because it was a new school. So we were the first group that actually went through to Grade 12. I grew up quite protected, not much to do. Did gymnastics most days, many hours, as well as ballet. Didn’t have time to go out to parties or such. Very protected. But I loved it.

[00:06:06] Graham Stephen: Yeah, I think there’s something to be said about growing up in Bloemfontein. It’s a city, but it’s almost like a big town, right? And we see a lot of that — there are very few distractions, so there’s a lot of focus on relationships, a lot of focus on doing something to a point of excellence. I can relate to that gymnastics story. My daughter is a gymnast and a dancer as well. It keeps you busy, so it also teaches you focus. And I suppose later in your career, those learnings around relationships, around focus, around problem solving, and sticking out the sometimes-boredom and the hard times, shapes you as a person.

[00:06:51] Graham Stephen: I want to move on a little bit from there. So you spoke about getting into tax and accounting almost by default. As you say, in the early 90s, it wasn’t that easy for a woman to just say, hey, I’m going to go study engineering. So you picked the accounting and tax exposure. But after studying, what happened from there? How did you go from having done your degree in accounting to getting into tax advisory?

[00:07:19] Michelle Tickner: So, it didn’t actually happen immediately, because I wasn’t sure that I actually wanted a career in accounting, and I then decided to go and study tourism. I actually completed my tourism studies in 1997, and then I realised that with that qualification, I could just go and work behind a reception desk. And I wasn’t going to do that, so that pushed me back into accounting. I worked at an audit and accounting firm from 1997 until about 2002, when I moved to Cape Town and joined another audit firm there, but I actually worked in their tax department. And then, only after attending a presentation where Deborah Tickle was the speaker at the event — she was the head of tax at KPMG Cape Town at that point — did I actually realise that I wanted to work in tax. I went on to study the HDip Tax and HDip International Tax. And it was always in the back of my head that I wanted to work for Deborah Tickle. I was lucky enough to join KPMG in 2006, and I had the opportunity to work with Deborah Tickle.

[00:08:47] Graham Stephen: We often talk about people who influenced us along the way, and obviously Deborah was quite an influence on you. In South Africa, at least, everyone thinks you have to go and become a chartered accountant if you want a career in finance or tax, and it may have been the case 20 or 30 years ago. But we’re seeing more and more that that’s not necessarily the case, and actually sometimes it’s better to follow a different path — the HDip Tax and what have you. The CA isn’t the silver bullet to career success. Maybe you can touch on those two things. One is your choice not to go the CA route and then go into the tax route. And then, the actual influence that Deborah had — what was it about that talk that was so inspiring to you?

[00:09:43] Michelle Tickner: So I think it helps if you are a CA, but you don’t have to be a CA. Most people that work in tax actually have a legal background or a law background — I think it’s more beneficial if you have a law background to go into tax. But even if you don’t, there are other ways of obtaining tax qualifications. You can study through UNISA and do a postgraduate in taxation there. So you don’t have to follow the legal, law, or accounting route to work in tax. And I also think you could be an engineer, for instance, and work in tax, because engineers are good at problem solving, and if you’re good at problem solving, you can actually work in tax as well. And so when I met Deborah, I just loved the way she held the audience together when she presented her topic. She was so knowledgeable, and everyone knew who she was. That was quite inspirational for me as a young woman. I just felt, I wish I could be like Deborah one day — successful, confident, and really know my topic.

[00:11:16] Graham Stephen: And I think it’s easy to look back now, but I guess back in the early 2000s and late 90s, there weren’t a lot of senior female role models across the professional spectrum. It’s not as ubiquitous as it is today. Seeing someone like that who had been successful — and at that stage it was a lot harder in a male-dominated environment — I guess there was a resonance with that, Michelle?

[00:11:46] Michelle Tickner: No, for sure. But I must say, I do notice that there are more females working in tax than males now. I think females are just better at managing admin skills as well, and I think that’s quite helpful when you’re working in tax.

[00:12:07] Graham Stephen: Yeah, I think also maybe there’s a degree of flexibility there which exists, you know, if you think of the chartered accountant route or the audit route and that. And also that sort of problem solving across domains — in the tax world, you’re not just looking at one set of rules, you’re looking at rules across business, across law, across jurisdictions. That’s something which is quite challenging, but also interesting at the same time, right?

[00:12:46] Michelle Tickner: No, for sure, it’s definitely not boring.

[00:12:50] Graham Stephen: So I want to talk a little bit about that. A lot of people have this perception that tax is just about rules, about the law. They take a very compliance view about tax. As long as my tax returns are in on date, I’ve done my VAT, I’ve done my employees’ tax, I’ve done all of those sorts of things. But it goes a lot deeper than that. Can you share a little bit about how you moved the needle from tax being just a compliance function to being an advisory function? How do you see that?

[00:13:27] Michelle Tickner: Yeah, so basically I started my journey in the tax compliance department at KPMG, as a junior consultant. And at the end of my journey with KPMG, I was a manager of the tax compliance department. But I always knew that my long-term goal was to move into the advisory side of tax — especially working with ultra-high-net-worth individuals and high-net-worth individuals, trust and estate planning. Because I really enjoy helping families structure their wealth preservation and making sure their assets pass to the next generation in the most tax-efficient way possible. And that’s why I was grateful when I got the opportunity in 2012 to actually leave KPMG and start my own practice within Sentinel. At the time when I left, I had 110 tax compliance clients. And I was basically busy for three months of the year. So for the rest of the year, I had time off to focus on my family, and especially my son, who was then a toddler. But it was also very daunting and stressful at first, because I only had 110 clients, and I wasn’t sure if I would actually make this work and make a success of it.

[00:15:12] Michelle Tickner: But I was very lucky in that in the first year, I actually grew my client base to about 200 individuals. And that was basically my bread and butter for the first couple of years, and it gave me an opportunity to start moving into the advisory or consulting side.

[00:15:36] Graham Stephen: What does that look like, Michelle? I think everyone understands tax compliance — you’ve got your provisional tax once a year, your year-end, and it’s a very intensive period for a few months of the year. But it’s quite rearward-looking in a way, right? You’re thinking about what do you owe and have you paid enough. But let’s talk about tax advisory. What does that actually mean? What does it look like from a day-to-day point of view?

[00:16:08] Michelle Tickner: Yeah, so basically, at Sentinel, my day-to-day activities involve sitting in a lot of management meetings at Sentinel, but also a lot of client meetings. The client meetings are mostly focused on estate planning. We do a lot of living estate duty calculations for clients. And then we also advise on tax residency. So it’s almost like you first have to do the living estate duty calculation so that the clients can see where they are currently, get a shock, and then realise that they need to do some estate planning. And yes, tax compliance is historical, and it’s also not very sexy. It’s a lot nicer for me to be in meetings, interacting with clients, and actually solving their problems.

[00:17:14] Graham Stephen: Yeah, and I think you’ve touched on a few things there. This is kind of where it intersects with the valuation piece. We see this with a lot of valuation clients — it’s about looking into the future, not looking in the past. And I guess this is where the two worlds intersect. The implications of what you do now for something that’s going to happen five or ten years down the line, whether it’s an exit, a death in the family, or a shareholder leaving, has significant implications. And that’s why planning in advance is so important. And the more valuable your business and the higher net worth you are, it’s not about tax avoidance or tax evasion — it’s about making sure that your affairs are structured appropriately so that there are no surprises down the line when you need to pass things on to your family or your legacy. But why is it that so many people treat this as an afterthought? Why do people postpone this and think, I’ll deal with it when I sell my business, not five or ten years in advance?

[00:18:39] Michelle Tickner: Yeah, so I think many people actually think that tax advice is expensive. And as a result of that, it’s just a nice-to-have rather than a necessity. But an early conversation is really important. If I can use an example — if you have the conversation about how to structure your shareholding from the beginning, when your business is worth nothing, then at least you have the opportunity to think: should I use a trust? How do I preserve that growth of that business for future generations or for estate duty purposes? And a lot of people actually don’t do that. A lot of them just want a quick fix when things have already gone wrong. And then it’s not so easy to fix. You can fix it, but that’s not a fix that’s going to get rid of all your tax issues at once.

[00:19:51] Graham Stephen: Yeah, I think nowadays the world has got a lot more complex. It’s not a guarantee that your kids are going to be living in the same country as you. There’s immigration, there’s people spending part of the year in an overseas jurisdiction, and all those sorts of things. If you went back 40 or 50 years ago, your kids would live in the same town as you, so these things weren’t necessarily as critical. But now the world’s a lot more complex. Governments across the world are cooperating more, double tax agreements, there’s a lot more to think about. So it’s not just about minimising taxes — it’s about making sure that all those things line up, you’ve thought through the permutations, and if something happens, both positively or negatively, whether it’s a death, or a sale of a business, you are properly set up and there are no surprises down the line, right?

[00:20:49] Michelle Tickner: No, that’s very true. It’s also important when you plan to know where the family are living, where the children are planning to move to. Because you can’t just look from a South African perspective, you have to have an international perspective. Some jurisdictions, for instance, don’t like trusts, and they don’t like their residents receiving distributions from trusts. How do you structure the trust distributions differently? How do you get inheritances to them rather than a trust distribution? So it gets very complicated, and it also gets very interesting.

[00:21:39] Graham Stephen: Yeah, and I guess those laws aren’t static. What might be a set of tax laws now may change in five or ten years, so it’s not something you can do once and put in File 13 and forget about. It’s probably something you have to review every year or every couple of years.

[00:21:58] Michelle Tickner: That is for sure.

[00:22:05] Graham Stephen: Michelle, one of the things I want to talk about is the common pitfalls and mistakes that people make, whether they’re business owners or employees, when thinking about tax planning. Let’s get practical. You’re a business owner or a high-net-worth individual. What are the top three or four mistakes that you would want people to avoid when it comes to tax planning?

[00:22:33] Michelle Tickner: Well, firstly, I’ll go back to doing proper planning, because we see a lot of business owners who are solely focused on growing their businesses and making them profitable, but they actually don’t think about how they should have structured things from the beginning to make it tax efficient from an estate duty perspective as well. And when they start thinking about these things, their businesses are worth millions already, and now it’s more difficult to plan and to reduce the estate duty tax implication. So it’s still possible, but it isn’t actually a magic fix. A lot of these business owners think, oh, well, let me just do a Section 42, and that’s going to resolve all my issues, but it doesn’t, actually. People don’t understand it. So I would say, do proper planning. Spend an hour in consultation with a tax advisor. Speak to them, see what they think, so that you can actually put things in place earlier rather than later.

[00:23:55] Graham Stephen: Yeah, I guess the point is, particularly in the modern jurisdiction where things like capital gains tax are really important, where estate tax exists — if you go back 30 or 40 years, a lot of those wealth taxes didn’t exist, or if they did, they had a fairly minimal effect. But globally, there’s been a push towards wealth taxes. If you look at what’s going on in the UK at the moment with business property relief, it’s becoming more prominent. So the implications of getting it wrong are bigger than ever. And as you say, when you’re building a business, if you do the planning when your business is still growing and the value is lower, you’ve got a lot more choices down the line. Once that value’s already there, there’s often not a lot you can do about it. So let’s talk a little bit about some of the mistakes perhaps in trusts and cross-border structuring. What are some of the pitfalls and the things that people don’t always think about in that space?

[00:25:03] Michelle Tickner: Yeah, so we’ve seen a lot of people who set up local or offshore trusts, but they don’t actually know that there could be an ongoing South African tax consequence for them, just by the way that they fund these trusts, whether by way of a loan or a donation. There are anti-avoidance rules in our tax legislation, and those rules will attribute income back to the financier of the trust, and people don’t realise that. Many people think if they have an offshore trust, they will only pay taxes on it once they receive a distribution from that trust — and that’s not true. So we see a lot of that. We actually do a lot of voluntary disclosure applications specifically for people falling foul of the attribution rules, especially with offshore trusts.

[00:26:08] Michelle Tickner: We also see that people have all these offshore structures in place, but the tax costs and the administration costs are so high that it’s actually not worthwhile having those structures in place. So we have actually advised people to close down trusts. Although we are in the trust space, we are not trust salespeople, if that makes sense.

[00:26:39] Graham Stephen: I guess on the trust side, there’s almost a threshold in terms of your net wealth where the costs of running some of these complex structures are not worth the upside. So this notion of, oh, just set up a trust and you’ll be fine, is not always the best advice. You need to understand where on that scale you sit, and whether it’s actually the appropriate structure. Because I think you’re absolutely right — there are a lot of advisors out there who will sell a trust because they make money off it, but it’s actually not in the client’s best interest, right?

[00:27:11] Michelle Tickner: Or in the beneficiaries’ best interest. The main objective of the trust is for the trustees to look after the beneficiaries.

[00:27:22] Graham Stephen: And do you see the tax authorities — and this is maybe a direct question — becoming more sophisticated? Because a lot of South Africans perhaps think they’ll take a chance and get away with it. We do work cross-border, and when you work with HMRC in the UK or the IRS in the US, they are actually enforcing a lot of these rules. Do you see tax authorities becoming more sophisticated in how they’re monitoring and trying to find gaps in people’s planning? And in the world of AI, the authorities have a lot more tools at their disposal. How would you think about that when you’re sitting in front of a client advising them on their tax structuring?

[00:28:15] Michelle Tickner: Yes, we sit in many meetings where we still get the question: but how would SARS know? Still today, when everyone has signed up for CRS — common reporting standards — the banks are reporting to SARS, the banks are reporting to other authorities, the deeds office is reporting to SARS. Apparently the overseas deeds offices are also reporting to SARS. So there’s this global database of what people own, of where people live. As you know, you can’t open a bank account without doing your FICA, proving that you live in Cape Town, South Africa, or in London. So that information is out there.

[00:29:18] Graham Stephen: What you’re saying is, don’t take a chance. It’s a bit like your digital footprint.

[00:29:21] Michelle Tickner: Yeah, don’t take a chance — SARS will know.

[00:29:29] Graham Stephen: So maybe moving from there — you’ve spoken about some of the things that people get wrong: they take a chance, they don’t plan in advance, they don’t understand the leverage effect, they don’t understand the implications of trusts and the costs associated with that. Michelle, can you share one or two cases or situations where it went horribly wrong? Maybe you were brought in on the tail end to try and resolve it. I think sharing a story like that actually helps people contextualise why this is so important.

[00:30:08] Michelle Tickner: Yeah, so recently I met with a client and I assisted her with a tax immigration. She also got a notice from SARS for an outstanding tax bill of almost a million rand, and she wasn’t actually sure where it was coming from. When we started investigating, we discovered that she was involved in a family trust, and that the family trust had actually made a distribution to one of the beneficiaries of that trust — which was not her. But the accountant who completed the tax return had entered the incorrect tax reference number in the trust tax return. He disclosed her tax reference number, not the other beneficiary’s tax reference number. And this has had severe tax implications for her, as SARS had just used the information that was provided on the trust tax return and pre-populated it to her tax assessment, because everything is linked today. So whatever you complete on your trust tax return will flow through to your individual tax return — it’s pre-populated. And SARS has now said that that is a final tax assessment, which means that she cannot object to this incorrect assessment. Which has caused a lot of headaches. We are actually now at a stage where we’ve engaged a tax lawyer to assist, because SARS is now taking civil judgment against her.

[00:32:07] Michelle Tickner: So it’s just important to know that whenever someone completes your tax return, even if it’s the trust, you need to check that all the information is actually completed correctly. You can’t just rely on professionals to complete the correct information. Check it. Make sure that it is correct. So that you can make the changes before it goes down that rabbit hole where you’re trying to fix something with SARS, and it’s going to take months to resolve.

[00:32:47] Graham Stephen: I guess the lesson there is, as much as you need to work with professionals, when it comes to tax, you can’t completely outsource that to the professionals and then wipe your hands and say, oh well, I’ve consulted the professionals. You need to be vigilant. And I guess for the ordinary person in the street, there’s probably a degree of keeping things simple too. If your structure looks overly complex in terms of the size of your estate and your wealth, don’t just assume that it’s right. Ask questions of your advisors, and make sure you understand, as a client, how it impacts you. Because how could that situation have been avoided? I mean obviously it was diligence up front, and not just handing it off to the professionals. You, as a client or a taxpayer, have a responsibility to understand what’s being done on your behalf, right?

[00:33:51] Michelle Tickner: No, very true. And also make sure that your details are always updated with SARS, because the notifications went to her but to an old email address, so she never actually received the notification. So it’s very important to keep your details updated with SARS as well.

[00:34:11] Graham Stephen: Yeah, I think it’s often not complicated stuff that goes wrong, but stuff that we as taxpayers tend to forget about. And in this world of technology where these things are triangulated very quickly, it’s easy to just forget. So those are the things, I guess, in your proactive planning when you’re sitting with your advisor or your tax consultant — almost have a checklist of things that you go through in that annual review. I’ve got a trust, I’ve got this, I’ve got that. It’s almost keeping things simple and basic — like you would set up a meal plan if you’re going on a diet, you’d do that same thing with your tax advisor at the beginning of every year, right?

[00:34:51] Michelle Tickner: No, for sure. So we basically do that. As trust officers, we actually have a point on the agenda every year where we check specific tick boxes about the family — where do they live, what other structures do they have, does it still work, and so on.

[00:35:17] Graham Stephen: Absolutely. Michelle, a couple more sections I want to just quickly talk about. We spoke earlier on about Deborah and how she was such an influence on your career and your decision to go into tax. Bringing it back to people and partnerships — I think we met a few years ago at a KPMG family office planning event where we connected. And in the world we operate in, it is a lot about relationships. It’s working with other advisors, other lawyers, other fiduciaries. Can you just talk a little bit about how important finding the right partners is, and the importance of partnership in this world? Because tax touches on a bunch of things. It’s not just the tax laws — somebody selling their business, somebody thinking about family planning, all of those sorts of things. How do you think about which advisors and partners you want to work with?

[00:36:16] Michelle Tickner: Yeah, so we work with many colleagues in the industry. We usually don’t pretend that we know everything, and that’s why we like to have a strong network of tax consultants, lawyers, and fiduciaries. And we’ve built these relationships over many years, and they are grounded in mutual respect. So when we choose advisors to work with, we look for strong technical skills, integrity, and practical thinking. And we also look at how they treat clients, because relationships are a core skill in our business. We don’t have customers or clients — we have relationships. And Sentinel actually means guardian, and we guard our relationships with our lives. So it’s very important to see how the relationships will work with the different people that we partner with. We make sure that the client actually fits into that specific relationship or personality.

[00:37:37] Graham Stephen: I think that’s so important, because there’s lots of advice out there, and it doesn’t mean you should be working with everyone. Are the associates and people you’re working with and referring your clients to — do they fit into that same ethos? And I think, from a bizval perspective, we’ve got a very similar approach as well. We’re very selective in terms of which partners we want to work with. The human relationship is important, and particularly in the world of AI and technology and all of that, it comes down to people at the end of the day. It comes down to explaining things in a very pragmatic and simple way. And then, importantly, acting in the client’s best interest at all times. The sad reality is not all advisors operate in that way. Often they operate in their own best interests and not the client’s. So I think we share that in terms of a value system and how we work with clients. And ultimately, if you’ve got that, you’ve got a business that’s built on trust and mutual respect.

[00:38:54] Graham Stephen: Before we wrap up, I just want to give you a couple of minutes just talking about what you do at Sentinel specifically, what you focus on, and where you add the most value. If anybody’s listening in here today and they’re thinking, well, maybe I should have a chat with Michelle, now’s your opportunity to tell them why.

[00:39:20] Michelle Tickner: That’s great, thank you, Graham. So Sentinel is a medium-sized fiduciary company, and we have offices in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban, and Cape Town. Our core business is acting as independent trustee, and we also manage the trust administration. And flowing from the independent trusteeships, we actually also do trust accounting, tax compliance, and individual tax compliance as well. We do some accounting and tax work for small companies, but they’re mostly investment companies linked to the trusts that we look after. So I work in the tax planning and consulting department.

[00:40:13] Michelle Tickner: And we basically get involved with pre-cross-border structuring, we do some cross-border beneficiary planning, and we attend to tax residency matters. So how it works is our trust officers will usually pull us into a meeting when they have their trust meetings, especially if the family is thinking of either moving abroad, or setting up a business abroad, or just thinking of putting up a structure overseas to hold investments. Then we get pulled in, we look at the jurisdictions, we help with the planning, we make sure that if there’s a trust involved that the beneficiaries are living in jurisdictions where they can receive trust distributions. If they can’t, then we plan around that — we would rather set up a company. So it gets quite interesting, but it can be complex as well.

[00:41:23] Graham Stephen: Fantastic. So basically, you make sure that people plan their tax and their estate and their structures appropriately, particularly when it comes to trusts. And there’s an annual review as well, where you continually evaluate whether those structures and that tax advice are still relevant and up-to-date, because we’re living in a world where tax laws essentially change every year. All countries are like that, so it’s an ongoing process.

[00:41:57] Michelle Tickner: No, for sure.

[00:42:08] Graham Stephen: Okay, to close off, we’re going to do what we call our rapid-fire section. I’ve got five questions for you today. First thing that comes to mind. What is the biggest misconception when it comes to tax and tax planning?

[00:42:20] Michelle Tickner: I think that tax planning is only for wealthy people. And that’s not true.

[00:42:28] Graham Stephen: Absolutely. Tax impacts all of us, and the implication for everybody is always leveraged compared to what you’re doing now. Estate taxes especially are talking about compound value as opposed to just 15% VAT on a transaction. That’s why it’s so important. What is the one thing that business owners ignore that they shouldn’t?

[00:42:57] Michelle Tickner: I think they should make that appointment, do some tax planning, so that they can actually look at this structuring from day one, and then come up with a plan. If it’s not an immediate plan, then they can have a plan that can be implemented at a later stage.

[00:43:10] Graham Stephen: So it’s a bit like, don’t just go to the doctor when you’re sick. Go and have an annual checkup, so that you can preemptively see if there’s something going wrong, or you need to adjust in your diet, your health regime, your sleep, or whatever it might be.

[00:43:34] Michelle Tickner: Yes.

[00:43:35] Graham Stephen: What’s the best piece of advice that you’ve personally received, Michelle?

[00:43:40] Michelle Tickner: I think it’s that you don’t have to know everything, as long as you have a strong team. And you trust your team. Then you don’t have to be the strongest technician in the room.

[00:44:03] Graham Stephen: I think that’s so important. I had a mentor once who said to me — if you don’t know the answer, and you’re a junior reporting in a board meeting, and the CEO says to you, well, what’s the answer? — a lot of people feel under pressure to make something up. Often the best thing is to say, I don’t know, but I can find out. Or, I don’t know, but I can refer you to somebody who knows the answer. I think that’s so powerful.

[00:44:31] Michelle Tickner: Totally agree.

[00:44:31] Graham Stephen: If you weren’t in tax, what would you be doing?

[00:44:39] Michelle Tickner: I think I would still be in something where I have to solve problems. Maybe in sport or coaching, I would imagine.

[00:44:50] Graham Stephen: Not in engineering, yeah.

[00:45:04] Graham Stephen: The last question to you is, what’s one habit that you’ve picked up or learned or nurtured over the years that you think has made you effective in your career?

[00:45:11] Michelle Tickner: One must always be prepared. Never walk into a meeting unprepared. And I always say, future Michelle will always be grateful for the actions of past Michelle. So that work that you’re doing over the weekend to prepare for something — future Michelle will be grateful for the actions of past Michelle.

[00:45:35] Graham Stephen: I love that. It’s about learning from history and planning accordingly, and that applies at a micro and macro level. Michelle, it’s been absolutely wonderful to have you on the show. I think there’s a clear theme that’s come through from today: it’s about being prepared. Tax is really not the problem, until it is. And this notion of if you get it wrong down the line, the impact is often more significant. So plan ahead, think about it, go and consult a professional. The few thousand rand you’re going to pay for a consultation is going to be a lot less than having to suddenly pay 20% capital gains tax on a R20 million exit, right? So do that in advance. How can our listeners get hold of you, Michelle?

[00:46:40] Michelle Tickner: So the best way will be to either email me at michelt@sentinelinternational.co.za, or they’re welcome to give me a call on 082 410 2076. And my office is in Newlands, so if they want to pop in, they’re welcome to.

[00:47:01] Graham Stephen: Fantastic, Michelle, thanks for joining us again today. And to everyone listening — if you’re thinking about a transaction, a restructure, or just getting clarity on what your tax planning and estate planning looks like, this is definitely one area that’s worth getting in front of, and now you know who to call if that’s you. So, we’ll see you again on our next episode, and thanks for joining us today.

[00:47:25] Michelle Tickner: Thank you, Graham.

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