Most of the calls we get on group structure don't start with structure — they start with a tax bill, a banking refusal, or a parent company that suddenly can't see what the subsidiary is actually doing. The structure was usually fine on paper.
The pattern we see
A typical mid-market group running between Estonia and the UK accumulates entities the same way it accumulates customers: opportunistically. Each entity is created to solve one problem — local invoicing, a hire, an FX account, a tender requirement — and the group structure becomes the sum of those one-off decisions. Two or three years in, three things tend to be true:
- The intra-group services agreements either don't exist or no longer match the actual flow of work
- The reporting layer is reconciled by hand every month by someone who is now indispensable
- Nobody in management can produce a single page that shows where the cash actually moves
What works
The groups we see operating cleanly tend to do three unglamorous things: they pick a single hub entity (usually the Estonian OÜ for cross-border work) and route service flows through it deliberately; they put a real intra-group services framework in place before they need it for an audit; and they invest in a reporting layer that closes the same way every month, because they treat the close as a discipline, not a deliverable.
None of this is exotic. It just doesn't happen by accident.
