Many business owners and executives approach business relocation with a certain degree of trepidation.
On the plus side, the relocation is hopefully for positive reasons. Perhaps your business is expanding and you need larger premises or simply more office space because you are taking on extra personnel.
So, there’s a degree of excitement but also deep unease because should anything go wrong with your commercial relocation, you may be unable to continue your business until it has been resolved.
So, a good thing to consider is putting together what is sometimes called a ‘risk response’ list. What does that entail?
Basically, it involves you thinking about some of the scenarios that might arise should you have problems with your relocation. Even more importantly, alongside each of those you do a thumbnail sketch of just how you will respond should the worst happen or what you’ll do to stop it happening in the first place.
Just how far you go with this type of contingency planning is a matter of debate and experience. Some people will rank the problems based on the likelihood of them coming to pass or on the basis of which would have the most severe impact.
There is no general template for how to go about this because much will depend upon the nature of your business and your planned commercial relocation.
What follows below is just an illustrative example of some of the things you may wish to consider in terms of risk and your fall back planning.
1. Technology failing to work may have a moderate probability of happening but will have a severe impact on the ability of your business to function. You may wish to rent or install kit in advance of your move.
2. While it may be unlikely that your utilities are not connected on the day of your move this could have severe consequences so make sure things are up and running 48 hours in advance.
3. Delays in getting everything packed up may result in things running a bit late.
Of course, some risks may be far more likely to affect you in your removals context than others.
In project management circles, this type of risk identification and management is also sometimes referred to as a ‘risk register’. You may think that it is perhaps slightly overkill for small to medium size companies but in fact problems don’t restrict themselves to only larger-scale commercial relocation.
It’s not unusual to find companies who have had one type of problem or another and who have then expressed the wish that they had thought about the potential risk in advance and put something into place to either prevent or mitigate it.
In some cases, a problem with removals or a commercial relocation could bring your business quite literally to a stop. In today’s tough market environment, that is something that few of us can afford and therefore a few minutes spent in the above risk management exercise might save you some grief downstream if a challenge arises but you are ready to deal with it.
Inevitably though, it’s fair to say that nobody can think of everything!
It is always possible that you will encounter some sort of glitch and that is why it is typically a sound idea to try and arrange business relocation for a Friday. That at least gives you the weekend to recover from any problems you may not have foreseen and to hopefully get ready to start business again on Monday morning.
Using a professional commercial relocation company will also help you to reduce at least some of the risks inherent in this type of project. Good luck!