Moving a business usually presents a daunting challenge, but you can make it easy and fun. Read the following 8 tips for relocating your business that will help you have a successful move.
1. Understand why you are moving: Without a clear purpose, you could be leading your business into a big mistake. By clearly documenting why you are moving and what you expect to happen as a result of the move, you can make sure that the time, expense, and effort required for the move is worth it.
2. Planning is essential: Finding the time to plan a major while managing your regular responsibility is not easy. Still, you must make the time to think through the moving process from start to finish or else you will lose even more time and money in the process. Document your plans that include the type of facilities you need and whether you will lease or buy those facilities are good starting topics. With resources in place, you will have an efficient move.
3. Pay attention to expenses: Do your research on your planned new location. Find out if there are any tax surprises lurking in the shadows that could turn your move into a disaster. Similarly, find out if there are tax incentives to move into your new area. Often cities and states will offer incredible incentives just to get more business within their borders
4. Talk to your employees: Moving time offers a great teambuilding opportunity, by getting your employees to participate in every stage of the process. This makes good business sense too because your employees probably know a lot more about what features your new location needs and factors to consider while moving merchandise and equipment. Feedback about location is important too: you don’t want to make your business inaccessible to any employees you want to keep.
5. Talk to your customers: You know you have to move your business, but how your move will impact your customer base is important. The feedback you get from your customers will help you plan the move.
6. Clean house: Over the years, businesses develop inordinate piles of junk. Moving time will let you part ways with that stuff you thought you would use someday but never have. Cleaning out the junk will save money and time during the move and help you get started with a clean slate at your new location.
7. Have fun: Moving is a drag, so do some things to keep everyone focused on the mission. Make competitions to see who can move the most stuff, make special moving t-shirts, offer extra pay for extra effort, buy a special lunch for the staff, etc. Get creative and you will actually have a good time while moving your business.
8. Get some advice: Especially if you’ve never moved a business before, you should talk to people experienced with relocation. Whether you talk to local business people or hire relocation experts, the additional input will be invaluable to making a successful move.
9. Tie off the loose ends: With all the activity during the move you can easily forget details such as closing your current lease and recovering your deposits, filing a change of address with the Post Office, putting a sign at your old location with a map to your new location, and updating your Web site with your new address, phone number, and facilities, are easy to forget about, but shouldn’t be overlooked.
Moving can become a costly, time consuming ordeal unless you take some time to prepare for it first. Take these 9 tips for relocating your business and you will be on your way to a good move.
This blog post was written by James Adams, a writer covering developments in tech who also reviews the build quality of newly released hardware like the HP 351XL for a supplier of HP cartridges.