Steve Crooks (MSC Associates)

Businesses need the money that they are entitled to from HMRC?

This seems to be one of the Governments best kept secrets. It is estimated that £1billion per annum of R&D tax relief is not being claimed each year – is your company or some of your clients in this position?

If you are an SME organisation and your business is involved in research and development (there is a broad definition of this) and you meet the qualifying criteria you are entitled to R&D Tax Credits. Unbelievably only 10% of qualifying SME organisations have applied this tax year!!

If you are not one of these organisations you may know of some that are through your own business network. We run a referral scheme where we pay up to 10% of our fees on successful completion of a claim (once we have paid by the client).

Either way - it would be good to hear from you.

So, what do we do?

After an intitial discussion with the client, given that they qualify to make a claim for R&D Tax Credits, we manage the entire process for them. We ....

• Work closely with our clients to ensure that the claim is relevant to them and their business
• Collate all relevant material
• Format the claim in a way that is acceptable to HMRC
• Submit the claim and handle any associated queries
• Offer a quick, efficient, tried and trusted service
• There is no risk for our clients as we operate on a ‘no win - no fee’ basis

And we have a 100% successful track record delivering for our clients.

I am a qualified Electronics engineer by trade and spent the early years of my career working in the Aerospace and Defence sector with GEC, Marconi and British Aerospace before moving in to precision measurement where I was a systems engineer with Renishaw Metrology.

Taking a huge leap of faith (for all involved) I moved in to food retailing with Somerfield Stores where I worked as a business analyst and then food manufacturing where I worked for Unigate St. Ivel as a project manager. At Unigate St. Ivel I led a project to select a forecasting, planning and scheduling software package and implemented it in to the six chilled product factories.

Following this I joined one of the top management consulting firms (Capgemini) as a senior consultant rising to executive level during an 11 year career. I worked on and led many change programmes during that time and developed skills in business development, bid management, sales, negotiation, account management, project and programme management, change management, coaching and mentoring. Scarily I have over 30 years of business change experience across many sectors and businesses and have worked as a consultant, business advisor, mentor and coach.

I am the Founder and Managing Director of Langstone & Co and a business adviser of long standing. The business has been established since 2009 and operates as an independent organisation that works with clients to enable them to achieve their business goals by operating more effectively and efficiently.

Langstone & Co provides flexible Interim Management, Consultants, Mentors and Coaches who work with customers from across the Public and Private sectors including Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SME’s) and Third Sector  organisations. Langstone & Co also provide a bespoke facilitated innovation service for SME's called InnovateSME which enables them to focus on business issues using a range of innovation techniques.

At the beginning of 2012 I went in to a collaborative venture called MSC Associates with Mick Merrick and Chris Pinches. The initial focus of this business is to work with clients who qualify for R&D Tax Credits using a tried and trusted process to ensure that a claim to HMRC is managed professionally and quickly to conclusion. Typically this takes in the region of 2 to 3 months and the lowest rebate we have achieved to date is £20,000.

In the little bit of spare time that I do have I enjoy being with the family, playing golf, walking, looking after our small holding, Bar-B-Q's and following all sorts of sport.