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Tom Leathes
Founder & CEO @ Motorway
Tom Leathes is the Founder and CEO of Motorway, a leading used car marketplace in the UK. He studied Geography at UCL and has a diverse background in founding and leading various organizations within the tech and automotive industry. With experience as the Founder and CEO of Top10, non-executive advisor at uSwitch.com, as well as holding directorial positions at Official Space, LoanCube, uSwitch.com, and Acre - Sustainability & Safety Recruitment, Tom has a wealth of expertise in business development and leadership roles.
Highlights
We’ll have a new government very soon. Keir Starmer, Rt Hon Rachel Reeves - there’s an easy and quick lever to support the growth of our tech sector, which no one seems to be talking about: better employee equity schemes. 👇
The UK has had a tax-efficient employee equity scheme for a long time now - the ‘EMI share scheme’. This enables companies to easily grant share options to employees at no cost to them, and those employees then benefit from 10% capital gains tax on the sale of their shares when the company exits.
This sounds great on paper.
The problem with this scheme is that it encourages fast-growth businesses to stay small and exit early - the exact opposite of what we should be aiming for if we want more homegrown global tech firms.
EMI scheme rules have critical limitations for companies with IPO-level ambition:
⏰ 10 year shelf-life: EMI shares expire after 10 years. If the company doesn’t exit in that timeframe, the employee loses them - so the EMI shares have to be replaced with less tax-efficient options. On average it takes ~13 years from starting a company in Europe to IPO. This makes no sense.
🛑 250 people limit: Companies can’t issue EMI shares to new employees once they exceed 250 staff. While headcount isn’t a measure of success, surpassing the 250 mark is when you start bringing in more seasoned people who know how to operate at scale. This talent (all talent!) needs an attractive incentive scheme if they are to leave large, long-established companies to join fast-growth startups.
💵 Limited liquidity: It is high risk to invest 10+ years of your career in a startup with all the focus on a single large exit event. One way to smooth the journey for employees is to enable secondary share sales along the way. This means they can realise some of the value of their hard work at intervals in that journey, eg in funding rounds. For most scale-ups, it is complex and tax-punitive to enable secondary EMI share sales for employees. HMRC are unwilling to bend on this point and I’m yet to be given a good reason why.
So, the EMI scheme is great for small companies, but not so great for larger, high-growth tech companies.
This is easy to fix. We should:
✅ Extend the lifespan of EMI options way beyond a decade ✅ Enable companies to issue them long after the 250-people mark ✅ Offer much more flexibility on employees’ liquidity without impacting their tax benefits
I’ve raised EMI scheme issues with HMRC multiple times in the last few years, as well as directly with senior leaders in the current government at Number 10.
Neither have been open to changing anything.
For a new government focused on growth, making these changes is a simple way to have a massive impact. Let’s make it much easier for our startups to attract, retain and reward the absolute best talent and build more industry-defining UK tech companies as a result.
We launched Motorway Pay exactly a year ago. Since then we’ve handled over £1.2bn in transactions successfully, for hundreds of dealers buying cars our platform. Today, we're taking Pay to the next level...
It used to be very time consuming for car dealers to handle the complex payment flows involved in purchasing from private sellers, especially at high volume. With Motorway Pay, they can do it in seconds, with Motorway handling seller verification, collection of bank details, settlement of finance, fee collection, and transaction confirmation for both the buyer and seller. It's great for sellers too - ensuring they get paid instantly and securely before the car leaves their driveway.
We’re now launching two new features to make Motorway Pay even more powerful:
⚡️ Real-time payments - dealers could previously fund a wallet on Motorway Pay and then release payments when cars are collected. Now they can also pay on the spot, right when the car is collected and inspected
💸 Instant withdrawal - dealers can now add or withdraw funds to their Motorway Pay wallet instantly, with one click
Along with our new Move service to handle collection, inspection and delivery of cars, we’re now able to support every step of the transaction journey with powerful technology that brings speed, security and ease to a process that used to be extremely hard to do at scale.
Super proud of the whole Motorway team for continuing to push the boundaries and build entirely new ways of working for the used car industry - and there’s still lots more to come.
Thanks to Car Dealer Magazine for the write-up!
https://lnkd.in/dfEN2rHy
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Mesh is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Mesh beneficial.
Mesh offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Mesh offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Mesh's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
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