What To Do When Your Office Move Falls Through?
When Your Office Move Doesn’t Work Out
As with anything in business, sometimes the best laid plans can go awry. It is important to stay positive and act quickly to assess what steps could have been missed and adjust your plans. Often office moves don’t work out through no fault of your own and it may not be in your power to fix them.
Why Our Office Move Fell Through
Unfortunately, at the eleventh hour of our office move, we had to step away from the deal. We couldn’t agree terms with our potential landlord and there seemed to be a mismatch in fluidness of those involved in the potential future relationship. We made the decision to step away rather than enter into a deal in which we would be unhappy.
The First Steps to Take When Your Office Move Falls Through
It is important that you remain calm and make no knee jerk decisions at this time. The first thing that you should do is to speak to your current landlord to ask if you may stay in your offices for longer. If this isn’t possible, you should seek short term office space, there are many companies who provide this service.
You should have allowed for contingencies in your office move budget, although you may now end up with abortive costs from suppliers such as solicitors. You need to ensure that you include any costs from the fall through, such as the short-term office rental (if necessary) and work out if these costs can be absorbed in your budget.
You should ensure that you notify any interested parties that your move will not be going ahead. These can include insurance and utility companies, particularly if you have installation dates booked in.
Speak to Your Estate Agent
You should speak to your Agent as soon as possible to see what other, if any, long term office space options are available. We spoke with the Agent who we used to find the office space that had fallen through. Despite there being a lack of business properties becoming available due to economic uncertainty in the UK, she was able to find a range of options for us to consider.
Re-Adjust Your Office Move Plan
You may need to readjust your budget to consider any costs that your business has incurred due to the unsuccessful office move. We ran our numbers for each of the potential options and decided upon one that fit our business needs and budget the best.
Communicating With Your New Landlord
Considering our experience with the unsuccessful move, we felt that we had gained more experience and used this as a positive in our dealings with the new Landlord. We felt that we had a lot more synergy with the new Landlord.
Use Your Experience as a Learning Curve & Stay Positive
Maintaining a positive outlook when things go wrong is something that is important to ICU IT. This attitude certainly helped at a time when it could have been easy to panic. Just remember that the old saying “sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together” is absolutely true!
