Business Relocation: More Than Just a Move

Business Relocation-Move with a Plan

So you’ve made the decision to relocate your business. You’ve carefully considered better uses of current space. You’ve looked at expanding at your present location. You’ve examined moving files and equipment to remote storage to create more room. Outsourcing functions to gain more space has been critically reviewed and rejected. The choice has been made and now the business will face many challenges when planning and making the move.

Relocating your business is much more that packing some boxes. Even for the 11 year olds required to move their lemonade stand across the street and around the corner because, for safety reasons, they lost their “lease,” at a construction site, moving can be a challenge. Now they had to find new customers, new ways to serve their current customers and market their product and find a new employee because the 10 year old helping them now was not allowed to “work” out of sight of home. Like moving the lemonade stand, for many businesses the move itself is rather straight forward rather it’s all the ancillary issues and details that can create the challenges.

So it’s clear a successful move is all about planning and advance preparation. Developing the critical path with appropriate anchor points is decisive for effective planning and cost containment throughout the entire move. However, the experts admit that even in the best planned moves, something inevitably goes wrong. For each action consider developing a back-up plan. Add a plan “B.” If necessary put in place a plan “C.”

Your goal should be, on the first day at the new location, for the business to be as close to “normal” as possible.

You might consider using a business relocation service to help your enterprise move your operations from Point A to Point B as they offer services such as planning, storage, transportation, and installation of office furniture and other equipment. Business relocation is stressful enough without worrying about planning how your data, internet and telephone infrastructures will be moved.

Now comes the hard part. Get this right and your relocation can pay big dividends for years to come. You can develop costs and a budget and ROI for the move, cost of space, utilities, transportation, travel and more, and these cost items can be very closely estimated, measured and controlled. But what about the “soft” costs of the move?

They include convincing key people to make the move as they are the main assets of a business. Lose a critical manager, or engineer or lead supervisor and your organization will feel the impact for many months. On the flip side, now is a good time to critically assess the quality and performance of individual staff. Do they go or stay behind?

Digging deeper into the organization, what functions can be eliminated or outsourced at the new location? What needs should be strengthened? What current functions are going to be expanded to take advantage of the new location? Moreover, moving into a new workspace is this the time to set new policies? All are important questions to be considered.

Don’t forget that business relocation can provide valuable public relations and marketing opportunities. From the public relations aspect of the move-how is customer services being improved, new products added, these and more are important to communicate to the community, customers, vendors and prospective customers.

With proper planning and the involvement of all your employees, a move can be a valuable exercise in building intra-division teamwork and at the same time improve morale and communications. Both are key factors crucial to overall planning and successfully implementing of a business relocation project.