Snooping on Private UK Companies

Companies House, Ed Sheeran, Sidemen, KSI (+ Miniminter with $10m)

Learned a while ago that UK private companies have to publicly share their audited financial statements every year. So that means that you can search for any UK private companies name and find out how much money they have etc. This is really useful for checking how big a private company is and snoop on how much money celebrities in the UK have through their businesses.

For fun lets see what we can find out Ed Sheeran. There's a bunch of 'officers' with the name Edward Christopher Sheeran born in Feb 1991. If you check wikipedia, you can confirm this is indeed The Ed Sheeran. He is a director at a bunch of companies which all have a bunch of documents filed.

For our snooping, we only need to click on the company name then click filing history. I have no idea what all these document filings are for but the most interesting one is Total exemption full accounts.

In this document under maverick properties you can see it's balance sheet which is pretty cool. So maverick properties has 34.4 million pounds in investment properties. Interesting.

While this is cool, we all already know Ed Sheeran has made hundreds of millions in his career. Where companies house becomes interesting is for people whose income sources are a bit more hidden like YouTubers. As an example, let's explore the balance sheets of the Sidemen. When you search for Sidemen, you immediately see a bunch of companies titled sidemen.

You know this is the real sidemen because it has 7 current officers which are each of the sidemen. You can then see the balance sheet of Sidemen Clothing. There's a bunch of details but they had $3.9m in 2019 and owed $0.9m to creditors (pretty sure this is pre-tax and includes cost of running the business + profits split amongst the 7 of them). Then they had $6m in 2020 and owed $4.8m to creditors. Then they had $3.2m in 2021 and owed $1.2m to creditors. So $3m in 2020 and $2m in 2021 for Sidemen Clothing. Interesting

After digging thru these filings, one of the more interesting filings is that of Simon Miniminter. Vikk and KSI get mentioned a lot when talking about who's richer but Simon has 8 figs cash in the bank. Interesting.

The only issue with this is that it's not that useful as the UK is not really known for its successful startup scene. I can only think of two UK based startup that are unicorns (OnlyFans and GymShark). Anyways, here's a full list of the staggering 44 unicorns + 17 exited + 2 that no longer exist.

To be fair, the UK is 4th in the list of countries by number of unicorns behind the United States (644), China (302) and India (108) but relative to the leader its quite a bit behind but still this tool is quite useful to quickly check details on how well UK private companies or founders are doing by looking at their balance sheets and get inspiration.