Business is so good at your small company that you’ve outgrown your office, and you’re moving to larger quarters.
Congratulations! Now you get to deal with the complications and stress of moving.
Veterans of office moves say it’s critical for a small business owner to focus on the priorities when switching offices: making sure your phone and Internet service is up and running, that critical files and papers don’t get lost, that your computers are all re-networked, and that your business keeps running in the meantime.
Perhaps most important is to approach this as a professional move, something to be done with plenty of advance planning and budgeting.
“Don’t do it the way you move your apartment – office moves need to be organized,” said Richard Laermer, CEO of the public relations agency RLM, who said he’s moved his company 10 times in 14 years in New York and Los Angeles. “You need to hire a professional mover.”
Just as personal moves are fraught with things that go wrong, moving a company is bound to have its glitches. To coincide with one of RLM’s moves, the company contracted with a new telephone and Internet service provider, which failed to deliver the service; Laermer said his company was hobbled for two weeks until service with another provider was arranged.
The lesson he learned was to have a solid support system – including good lawyers – to back you up if things go wrong.
Ben Holtz, who has moved his customer relations management firm, Green Beacon Solutions, learned that you need to be prepared for unexpected costs such as legal fees and charges for a letter of credit his landlord required his company to have. He also discovered, before he signed the lease, that his company might have had to pay more than $60,000 to improve the premises.
A lawyer who knows real estate is a crucial adviser during a move, said Holtz, whose firm is located in Watertown, Mass.
“We’re good at what we do, we’re smart people – and then you get a 180-page lease and say what the heck is this,” he said.
Costs can run up particularly fast when you’re moving to a place where you need to do construction or renovations.
“We underbudgeted how much we were going to need for fire provisions – $70,000 more,” recalled Ash Huzenlaub, CEO of Emergisoft, a Dallas-based software firm. His advice: “You need to budget $100,000 in oops money.”
Business owners who have moved preach organization – packing your equipment and files so you’ll be able to find the important things first. And the most critical things shouldn’t be transported by the movers, said Lisa MacKenzie, owner of MacKenzie Marketing Group in Portland, Ore.
“My laptop, cellphone and my active files – they go home with me and then they go into the office” after the movers leave, she said.
You should also have a list of what needs to be done first so your employees can get back to work as soon as possible. That means getting the copier plugged in and being sure the network computer is up and running.
When it comes to moving your high-tech equipment, MacKenzie suggests not having the movers take it, but having information technology people do the work.
If you have outside IT consultants, they can take care of getting your computers working again.
Some businesses have duplicate computer systems in place as they move. Honey Rand, president of the Tampa, Fla.-based firm The Environmental PR Group, discovered that you shouldn’t be in a rush to shut down an old system. She dismantled the server in her old office, and then a series of problems kept her company from being fully functional in its new home.
Planning must include letting your customers and vendors know you’re moving, and how they can reach you in case of an contingency such as the phone system failing. Be sure people have back-up numbers such as your cell phone so they can contact you.
Moving certainly is a distraction from the regular course of business, one that owners need to be careful about – you need to be sure things don’t fall through the cracks while you and your employees are packing or unpacking. That includes your most pressing client or customer deadlines.
After Rand’s company moved, she noticed a “dip in billings, where everyone was settling in and putting stuff away.” That meant payments from clients were delayed, although Rand had enough of a cushion in her cash flow that the billing slowdown wasn’t painful.
A final word of advice: Don’t leave it until the last minute of your old lease. You need some buffer time in case something goes wrong. As in many other parts of business, having to rush things can lead to disastrous results.
Small Business is a weekly column on the topic by the Associated Press.
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