You have 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 Killeen business growing and the profits flowing while your furniture’s going out the door? That’s the big 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’s predicated on helping keep you from making 8 errors that we, as
office relocation specialists, find all too typically made:
- Not Planning Ahead. When you first realize you’ve got to move, that’s when you should commence 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 vendors to come up with a proper 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 translates into too many mistakes. Let the size of your business and the complexity of your move – i.e., the number of steps that must be taken before other steps can be begun – guide you in figuring out how soon is soon enough.
- Not Investigating Your Mover Properly. Office relocations are tough. You need a moving company that’s experienced 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 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. Read the reviews at bbb.org. to learn if any complaints have been entered against them with the Better Business Bureau. And, if you can, consult with other companies who’ve employed them to find out how well they lived up to their contractual promises. It’s also worth your while 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 observe standard chain-of-custody procedures.
- Not Coordinating and Communicating Properly with Your Mover. Your office relocation manager has to work with the project manager your moving company has allocated to see that your internal team and the moving company’s team aren’t working against each other. Any changes to the schedule must be properly relayed to all those involved, lest one upset create others and cause all kinds of errors and cost overruns.
Not Devoting Enough Internal Staff to Your Move. The complexity of any office relocation fairly demands that you get the help of your own employees. Look for people in each department who understand their department’s needs thoroughly and have access to pertinent company records. That may not always be the department head! In fact, you’re often better off seeking the help of experienced but non-managerial staffers, as they’ll be more inclined to follow your relocation manager’s direction without argument.- Not Keeping to Schedule. It’s rarely the case that an office relocation schedule decelerates. Certainly, various steps can be delayed for this or that reason. But what usually happens then is that the schedule is compressed. And that usually happens because the planning got started too late. And what happens when you aim to compensate for lost time? More people from your team and the mover’s team are stuck with more overtime hours. Everybody starts tripping over everybody else. Things get confusing. Mistakes are made. And who pays for all this? Yep. Better to set up a rational schedule at the start and follow it.
- Not Budgeting Appropriately for Your Move. Frankly, it’s difficult for any company that hasn’t experienced a relocation before to know exactly what its move will wind up costing. To leave that cost to chance, 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 like 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 up front, the more manageable the expense of your office relocation will be.
- Not Having the Right Amount of Coverage. If you’ve picked a professional relocation company of any repute, the possibility of property damage is slight. Nevertheless, you must be prepared. Ask your mover about the coverage options they have and pick the one that seems most suitable for your business.
- Not Thinking to Back Up Your Data. There’s no point in recounting horror stories here. Suffice it to say that during your office relocation, your business’s material records are best protected by being backed up digitally, whenever practicable. Those that can’t be digitized ought to be stored 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 a frequent occurrence. But do you really want to risk it? Then, for goodness’ sake, back it up!
A great way to bypass these types of errors – or to compensate for them effectively – is to employ a moving company that has a proven track record of successful office relocations. May we propose A-1 Freeman Moving Group right here in Killeen? Investigate us as we suggest above. Then check out our
office relocation services and ...
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