You’ve got a business to keep going. And now you‘ve got to keep it going while you’re moving it from one location to another! How do you keep your El Paso business growing and the profits flowing while your furniture’s going out the door? That’s the essential question of office relocation! Give it a wrong answer, and your productivity and profits will go out the door with the furniture.
At A-1 Freeman Moving Group, we’ve got a right answer for you – one that can help you bypass 8 blunders that we, as
office relocation specialists, find all too typically made:
- Not Planning Ahead. As soon as you get word that you’ve got to move, that’s when you ought to commence planning for it. Alas, too many businesses begin their office relocation planning a little too late. Too late for what, you ask? Well, too late for moving companies and other vendors to create a good proposal for you, let alone properly deliver the goods and services you purchase from them. It’s best to be mindful of one thing in particular: too little time often leads to too many blunders. Let the size of your business and the complexity of your move – i.e., the number of tasks that must be completed before other tasks can be started – guide you in figuring out how soon is soon enough.
- Not Vetting Your Mover Thoroughly. Office relocations are tough. You need a mover who is savvy enough to handle office furniture and modular systems, computer systems and networking, office equipment, machinery, and hardware, cabling, phone systems, security systems, building permits, and ... that’s just thinking about, make sure they’re legitimate. Check https://ai.fmcsa.dot.gove/hhg/search.asp to see, first of all, that they’re U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) licensed and insured, especially for interstate commerce. Read the reviews at bbb.org. to learn if any criticisms of them are on file with the Better Business Bureau. And, if you want even more-direct insights, speak with other firms who’ve employed them to see how well they satisfied their contractual obligations. It’s also prudent to inquire about their moving crews – whether they’re full-time employees or temps, whether they’ve been background checked and drug tested, and whether they adhere to traditional chain-of-custody procedures.
- Not Coordinating and Communicating Sufficiently with Your Mover. Your office relocation manager must work with the project manager your moving company has assigned to ensure that your internal team and the moving company’s team are tracking together. Any amendments to the schedule need to be properly conveyed to all involved, so that one upset doesn’t engender all kinds of errors and cost overruns.
Not Assigning Enough Internal Staff to Your Move. The difficulty of any office relocation pretty much directs that you enlist the help of people from within your company. Look for people in each department who know their department’s needs well and have access to applicable company records. That might not automatically be the department head! To be blunt, you’re often better off soliciting the help of seasoned but non-managerial staffers, as they’re more likely to follow your relocation manager’s orders without argument.- Not Adhering to Schedule. It’s rarely the case that an office relocation schedule decelerates. Certainly, various stages can be held hostage for this or that reason. But what frequently happens then is that the schedule is truncated. And that frequently happens because the planning got off to a late start. And what happens when you aim to compensate for lost time? More people from your side and the mover’s side are forced to work more overtime hours. Everybody starts tripping over everybody else. Things get confused. Mistakes are made. And who pays for all this? Yep. Better to devise a rational schedule initially and follow it.
- Not Budgeting Appropriately for Your Move. Admittedly, it’s hard for any company that hasn’t undergone a relocation before to know exactly what its move will ultimately cost. To leave that cost to a roll of the dice, though, or to budget for it incompletely is a huge mistake! At the highest level, you need to figure in recurring real-estate costs, soft-dollar expenses for, say, employee relocation and training, capital expenses including new furniture and office equipment purchases, moving expenses, and consulting expenses for such things perhaps as interior design and engineering. The more of your needs you give a thought to up front, the more governable the expense of your office relocation will be.
- Not Having Enough Coverage. If you’ve decided to sign with a professional relocation company of any renown, the possibility of property damage is slight. That said, you should be prepared. Talk with your mover about the coverage options they have and select the one that best accommodates your business.
- Not Taking Care to Back Up Your Data. We needn’t call up horror stories here. Suffice it to say that when your office relocation is underway, your business’s material records are best protected by being backed up digitally, whenever practicable. Those that can’t be digitized ought to be kept securely in a warehouse. And your digital data should be backed up in the cloud. Historically, losing such data or suffering its damage isn’t an “everyday” occurrence. But do you really want to risk it? Then, in whatever way you can, back it up!
An excellent way to eliminate these sorts of blunders – or to offset them effectively – is to sign on with a moving company that has a demonstrable track record of successful office relocations. May we call your attention to A-1 Freeman Moving Group right here in El Paso? Investigate us as we suggest above. Then check out our
office relocation services and ...
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