You’ve got a business to maintain. And now you have to maintain it while you’re moving it from one location to another! How do you keep your Houston 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 correct answer for you – one that’s predicated on helping you bypass 8 blunders that we, as
office relocation specialists, find all too typically made:
- Not Planning Ahead. The moment you get word that you’ve got to move, that’s when you ought to start planning for it. Regrettably, too many businesses get started on their office relocation planning a little too late. Too late for what, you ask? Well, too late for moving companies and other suppliers to come up with 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 usually opens the door for too many mistakes. Let the size of your firm and the complexity of your move – i.e., the number of steps that must be finished before other steps can be started – guide you in determining how soon is soon enough.
- Not Checking Out Your Mover Thoroughly. Office relocations are complex. You need a moving company that’s 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 contemplating, 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, particularly for interstate commerce. Examine the reviews at bbb.org. to learn if any complaints have been lodged against them with the Better Business Bureau. And, if you can, speak with other companies who’ve used them to find out how well they satisfied their contractual promises. It’s also wise to ask 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 Adequately 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 aren’t working against each other. Any [[changes in the schedule have to be properly conveyed to everyone involved, so that one problem doesn’t lead to all sorts of errors and cost overruns.
Not Devoting Enough Internal Staff to Your Move. The difficulty of any office relocation pretty much dictates that you get the help of your own employees. Select people in each department who understand their department’s needs thoroughly and have access to pertinent company records. That might not always be the department head! In fact, you’re often better off getting the help of experienced but non-managerial staffers, as they’re more likely to follow your relocation manager’s direction without argument.- Not Adhering to Schedule. It’s not often the case that an office relocation schedule decelerates. Certainly, various tasks can be held up for this or that reason. But what usually happens then is that the schedule is truncated. And that usually happens because the planning got off to a late start. And what happens when you try to compensate for lost time? More people from your side and the mover’s side are assigned more overtime hours. Everybody starts getting in the way of everybody else. Things get confused. Mistakes are made. And who pays for all this? Yep. Better to draft a rational schedule at the start and stick to it.
- Not Budgeting Appropriately for Your Move. Admittedly, it’s tough for any company that hasn’t undertaken a relocation before to know precisely what its move will end up costing. To leave that cost to a roll of the dice, though, or to budget for it insufficiently is a huge no-no! At the highest level, you have to figure in recurring real-estate costs, soft-dollar expenses for, say, employee relocation and training, capital expenses such as 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 accommodate in the beginning, the more governable the expense of your office relocation will be.
- Not Having Sufficient Coverage. If you’ve picked a professional relocation company of any recognition, the potential for property damage is slim. Still, you be prepared. Consult your mover about the coverage options they offer and choose the one that best accommodates your company.
- Not Thinking to Back Up Your Data. There’s no point in recounting horror stories here. Suffice it to say that when your office relocation is underway, your business’s material records should be backed up digitally, wherever practicable. Those that can’t be digitized should be stowed 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” experience. But do you really want to risk it? Then, however you can, back it up!
A great way to bypass these sorts of mistakes – or to counteract them effectively – is to employ a moving company that has a proven track record of successful office relocations. May we recommend A-1 Freeman Moving Group right here in Houston? Check out our bona fides as we suggest above. Then check out our
office relocation services and ...
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