A Guide To Successful Office Relocation
If you’re business is growing, you’ll soon need bigger premises. Moving is one of the most stressful things we can do in our lives, and the disruption it causes your business can also cost you money so making it as painless as possible is a must. In this article Lauren Wisemen looks at how you can successfully relocate your office with the minimum of fuss.
In the process of your company’s expansion, you might feel the need to move to a bigger office, reduce your overhead by finding an office with a cheaper lease, move downtown in order to boost your reputation or relocate to tap into a different market. All in all, at one point in your company’s existence, relocation will be necessary. However, it’s more likely that this is something you’ll have to deal with at least several times. Because of this, relocation is one of the essential skills you need to acquire and it is something you need to learn as soon as possible. With this in mind and without further ado, here are several tips that will set you on a path towards a successful office relocation.
Learn how to schedule
One of the greatest problems that people get entangled in, when it comes to the move, is their general lack of knowledge when certain tasks should be performed. For instance, packing your equipment one week prior to the move means that your staff won’t be able to use it for work, which further expands your downtime. On the other hand, scheduling a moving packing service or notifying your clients isn’t something that should be left for the week of the move. In other words, you need to figure out which tasks should be done two months before the move, which of them should be done two days in advance and which tasks you can handle on the day of the move. For this, you need to look for moving checklist templates.
Everyone should know in time
The next thing you need to understand is the fact that a move is something that affects your staff the most. If you’re moving to a different country or even to a different city, most of your staff is likely to abandon you. Even if you’re just relocating your office, you might significantly disrupt their commute. People who are 20 minutes away from your current office probably walk or cycle to work. By moving, this might change drastically. Those who carpool may no longer find it convenient to do so, seeing as how they would have to go significantly out of the way in order to pick up some of their coworkers.
All in all, a move brings change in almost every way conceivable, which is why your employees, clients and investors need to know of this in time.
Finding a temporary solution
Another major issue that you need to worry about is the issue of downtime (something we already hinted at). You see, once your company is no longer operational, you might start losing clients and you will definitely start losing money. The longer this takes, the greater the problem this becomes, and not just from the financial standpoint. By turning down a potential regular client, you might harm your company in the long run, but there really isn’t much you can do about it. The only possible solutions out there are either to run both offices for the time being (which is definitely not cost effective) or to look for a serviced office space.
Work on two fronts
The greatest issue related to office relocation is the need to be active on two different fronts. On the one hand, you need to cancel all your subscriptions on your former address and you need to re-subscribe to them to your target location at the same time. You need to clean up your former office and set-up a similar layout in your next one or find a way to further improve it.
Apart from this, you need to make sure that you leave the place exactly how you found it while ensuring that your target destination has no pressing issues you’ve failed to notice prior to the move. Most importantly, you need to do the inventory and make sure that every single item gets successfully transferred from point A to point B. Needless to say, this is also a great opportunity to introduce some changes (not just equipment-wise), yet, this may be a bit more overwhelming when considering all the other tasks that you’re currently facing.
Conclusion
If the move was a one-time thing, you probably could afford a mistake or two but if you keep making same mistakes every time you are forced to relocate, this might just become an expensive systemic problem. In a way, it becomes a dent in your corporate infrastructure, which is a bad business practice you simply can’t afford to tolerate. Therefore, becoming an efficient mover needs to become one of your top priorities as an entrepreneur.
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