Moving offices usually means great things are on the horizon for your business.
Maybe you’ve found an office space that’s more conducive to encouraging productivity or maybe you’re expanding rapidly and need the room. It’s exciting!
The actual moving process, however? Not so much.
Bulky furniture, Tetris-like packing conundrums and a probable deadline by which you have to be out of the building never to return: that’s not exciting, it’s a recipe for disaster.
So, here are some common disasters you might face when relocating and how you can avoid them.
MISTAKE: Taking everything with you
If you subscribe to the KonMari way of life, you should only be clinging on to those items that ‘spark joy’ for you. Clearly, this is impractical advice when it comes to paperwork, bras, and, yes, office equipment—I mean who’s even that into printers?!—but it’s still not a bad idea to assess what you keep and what you chuck.
After all, taking everything with you into a new office is never a good idea. It’s supposed to be a fresh start!
SOLUTION: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
First of all, ditch any office equipment that’s broken and outdated.
It’s no use to you, but you should be sure to recycle it using an ethical companyrather than just taking it to the tip. This helps the planet more than you know.
Secondly, really assess the rest of the things you plan on taking.
If you’re downsizing your office then you probably won’t need as much furniture. Take a hot second to mull all of this over before indiscriminately moving everything.
Finally, clean out your desk junk instead of simply tipping everything into a cardboard box and carting it to your new office. And take the opportunity to throw away your kid’s terrible ‘artwork’, while you’re at it.
MISTAKE: Moving before the time is right
This one is straightforward: you don’t need to immediately expand your office space the second you take on an ‘Assistant Manager’ or seal your first big deal. You’re just setting yourself up to be paying way more rent than you can afford.
SOLUTION: Hold your horses!
Slow your roll, hold your horses, take a time out. However you want to say it, just chill a little. Expansion—and higher rents—can wait and big leaps should always be calculated.
MISTAKE: Underestimating just how long it can take
Moving takes a looooong ol’ time. There are things to sort, plans to be rearranged and, as mentioned above, an office’s worth of junk to sort through before you even get to the ‘moving’ part.
That’s where underestimating just how long moving offices will take can really catch you out.
Say you’ve given yourself the weekend to get cracking and move everything ready to be back in work for an important meeting on Monday morning, but everything goes wrong and you have to cancel at the last minute. V. unprofessional.
So, under-preparing can literally cost you both money and work when it comes to moving offices.
SOLUTION: Make a damn plan!
Not everyone is a born planner, that’s true. However, someone on your team surely has the skills to whip the place into shape and sort things out. Find that person, offer them overtime and get them on board. It’s worth the investment in the long run, based on the savings you’ll make by correctly guesstimating just how long moving offices will take.
MISTAKE: Trying to get your team to help with the move
By far the biggest office moving mistake you can make is trying to convince your team to help with the actual heavy-lifting bit. People, for the most part, barely even like helping their friends move house without the promise of free beer and pizza at the end, so why would they come into work on their day off to help you lug printers and office chairs from one building to another?
Hint: they wouldn’t.
And if they did, it would only end in disaster; think, broken furniture and broken morale, neither of which are great for business.
SOLUTION: Get the pros in
Stop being stingy and hire some professionals. They’ll do the job fast, they’ll do the job right and they’ll help save you and your team’s sanity in one fell swoop. The best way to compare the office removal companies for your budget and needs is to head over to buzzmove, who work only with trusted organisations that can get you into your new workspace in no time.
It’s worth mentioning that you should really consider your options properly though, because while the cheapest might seem, well, the cheapest, they might not offer the exact services you need.
There’s nothing wrong with a little forethought!
MISTAKE: Forgetting to tell everyone about the move
It’s easy to let something like this slip your mind in the heat of business and a wealth of planning madness.
However, it happens and it shouldn’t.
Imagine turning up on the Friday and being told that Monday sees you working in a new office space!
If you hadn’t had the time to plan ahead—people’s whole routine can be affected by something like that—you’d be pretty annoyed.
Similarly, if you forget to advise organisations like the postal service or fail to update tiny addendums on your website, you might get important mail and potential clients going to your old place of work. Not ideal.
SOLUTION: Remember to tell everyone about the move
Flippant? Yes. Valid? Also, yes.
The first thing to do is confirm your moving date well in advance and, as soon as it’s confirmed:
1) send out an email blast to everyone in the office telling them about the upcoming move (although, for the love of god, don’t give them the option to ‘Reply All’)
2) take the time to tell clients and customers that you’ll be moving. It may not seem relevant—depending on your line of business, of course—but even the very fact that you omitted to notify them could come across as a little underhand and shady.
