A product launch is always a fantastic opportunity for a company to celebrate their success.
However, this year it’s a bit different, you won’t be doing a hard launch on a stage at a fantastic business exhibition with 100s of your potential customers in front of you. You are going to have a soft launch in a magazine that your customers will read and hope that the phone rings.
But this year you’ve read this article in this magazine, and instead of following in the footsteps of a significant number of your peers and competitors, or indeed your own business last year, you’ve realized that your product launch also represents the point at which a significant failure arises often without anyone really noticing, or even worse caring. This year you’re going to do something different, you’re going to pick up the phone and have a conversation about Research and Development Tax Credits with an expert.
It’s one of those, “unknown, unknown” moments that exist everywhere in business, but after being around for 20 years Research and Development Tax Credits should no longer be one of them, but it is, despite a plethora of “experts” popping up all over the space, shouting about it to accountants and to businesses alike. Alas, thousands of businesses continue to miss their right to claim this most generous of tax reliefs.
We are but one of those experts, but we do have some substance behind our claims, we’ve been operating for 7 years now (out birthday was 1st September) and have supported nearly 200 companies to claim more than £16m in R&D Tax Credits claims.
But back to your new product, it’s taken you a while to get from concept to launch, along the way you’ve had Eureka moments and more abject failures than perhaps you would care to mention in polite company. You’ve and you’re team have no doubt had several more ideas during the same time period and may be one or two of them are still going through the product development process (despite everything Covid threw at you in 2020) and your hoping to launch it in 2021 to a live audience.
Well the good news is those failures are great news for your cashflow, they clearly weren’t at the time, but they are now. “Why” do I hear you ask? Well, normally your failure would go hand in hand with a scientific or technological challenge that you were trying to overcome. After all, we don’t set out to fail, it just seems to happen naturally! Something that you thought would be straightforward, turned out to be a massive obstacle in your path to success.
We celebrate your failure as much, perhaps more than we celebrate your success. It sounds strange and we are in no way some sort of strange voyeur watching your business with a voodoo doll and giving it a prick every now and again just to see what happens. We celebrate your failure because we know that the failure while difficult in the short term, will open up the opportunity for you to claim Research and Development Tax Credits, whether you are paying tax or not they can boost your cashflow.
The over-riding fundamentals for a successful claim for R&D Tax Relief are:
There has to be a project (developing a new/improved product)
There has to be an advance in science or technology (you probably aren’t going to launch a new product that is worse than what you already have, or than the market already has)
The advance has to be achieved by overcoming some form of scientific or technological challenge (the only way to overcome these is by learning and adapting through failure)
The solution to the challenge cannot be readily deducible by a competent professional operating in the field.
If you look back through your new product development, you’ll no doubt see it littered with failures and the one or two products that do make it to the point of launch didn’t get there by some fluke, they got there through overcoming every single technical or scientific challenge you were presented with.
Now you just have one final hurdle to get over, and that hurdle is of your own making, you just have to talk to an expert to confirm that you can claim. Go on, dare you, go to your browser, type in www.calendly.com/simon-bulteel, or if you are reading the online version click on the link. Book a Find Out in Fifteen Minutes discovery section with our Director, Simon Bulteel and start your next journey, we promise it will be worth it, just to know, for sure! Speak to you soon.