You’ve got a business to manage. And now you’ve got to manage it while you’re moving it from one location to another! How do you keep your Wichita Falls business growing and the profits flowing while your furniture’s going out the door? That’s the essential question of office relocation! Answer it erroneously, 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’s predicated on helping you circumvent 8 mistakes that we, as
office relocation specialists, find all too commonly made:
- Not Planning Ahead. As soon as you know you’ve got to move, that’s when you ought to get down to planning for it. Regrettably, too many companies begin their office relocation planning a little too late. Too late for what, you ask? Well, too late for moving companies and other suppliers to put together a decent 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 usually leads to too many errors. Let the size of your company 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 deciding how soon is soon enough.
- Not Vetting Your Mover Thoroughly. Office relocations are demanding. You need a moving company that’s savvy enough to take care of 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 looking into, 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 discover if any complaints have been entered against them with the Better Business Bureau. And, if you want even more-direct insights, talk with other businesses who’ve hired them to see how well they lived up to their contractual promises. 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 follow 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 see that your internal team and the moving company’s team are in perfect sync. Any [[changes in the schedule have to be properly communicated to all involved, lest one delay give rise to others and cause all sorts of gaffes and cost overruns.
Not Assigning Enough Internal Staff to Your Move. The complexity of any office relocation practically decrees that you recruit the help of people from within your firm. Select people in each department who know their department’s needs thoroughly and have access to applicable company records. That might not necessarily be the department head! In fact, you’re often better off soliciting the help of experienced but non-managerial staffers, as they’ll tend to submit to your relocation manager’s dictates without argument.- Not Keeping to Schedule. It’s seldom the case that an office relocation schedule loses speed. Sure, various steps can be delayed for this or that reason. But what typically happens then is that the schedule gets truncated. And that typically 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 end and the mover’s end are assigned more overtime hours. Everybody starts getting in everybody else’s way. Things get sloppy. Mistakes are made. And who pays for all this? Yep. Better to establish a realistic schedule up front and follow it.
- Not Budgeting Sufficiently for Your Move. Frankly, it’s difficult for any company that hasn’t gone through 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 big mistake! At the outset, 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 requirements you reckon with at the start, the more manageable the expense of your office relocation will be.
- Not Having Sufficient Coverage. If you’ve selected a professional relocation company of any renown, the risk of property damage is minimal. Still, you have to be prepared. Talk with your mover about the coverage options they offer and pick the one that seems most right for your firm.
- Not Remembering to Back Up Your Data. There’s no point in recounting horror stories here. Suffice it to say that during your office relocation, your firm’s material records ought to be backed up digitally, wherever feasible. Those that can’t be digitized should be stored safely in a warehouse. And your digital data ought to be backed up in the cloud. As a matter of record, losing such data or suffering its destruction isn’t a regular phenomenon. But do you really want to risk it? Then, by all means, back it up!
An excellent way to prevent these kinds of errors – or to counteract them effectively – is to sign on with a moving company that has a proven track record of successful office relocations. May we propose A-1 Freeman Moving Group right here in Wichita Falls? Investigate us as we suggest above. Then look over our
office relocation services and ...
Request a free quote
