Real-time Intensity of Moving a Business to Another Location
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The day before the move
The Thursday before the big day was our scheduled date for the internet and server to go down in the late afternoon and hopefully be up the following day. We made everyone aware of utilizing the morning to get whatever urgent business taken care of. After that, they would need to use their personal devices and email addresses if they needed to do anything for business. Our I.T. team worked diligently early in the week to start to switch over process and had us back up and running by Friday evening.
Since our internet connection would be down for this chunk of time, we took advantage of the down-time to bring over as much product to our new showroom as this was the area that would need to be up and running immediately to conduct business. We had made sure to have the showrooms constructed and finished first so that our employees could roll over showroom samples on Thursday and get the space set up in case meetings would be scheduled soon after the move.
Everyone rolled over trunks and rolling racks of clothing until our old showroom was emptied out. This would keep everyone busy the rest of the day. There would be no excuse for anyone to not be working. This proved to be challenging as all of this required to go out and in through freight elevators and the new building was being a bit tough on bringing in all of this during work hours, and it was pouring rain.
We made as many trips as possible and then we tried to sneak in a few more trips with a call to building management to allow us access for the last of the racks. Keeping the troops happy was made a bit easier with a super-size 6 foot sub sandwich and some salads for lunch.
As we all know when it comes to construction, there are always many things that need to be done at the very end and sometimes well past the moving in phase—and that was exactly what was going to happen to us. The new space still had lots to be done before the big move and we realized that we were still going to be handling many of the finishing details over the next couple of weeks, but the space would be functional for meetings and much of this could be done without disruption of business.
The big Friday move
The moving team would arrive at 11 in the afternoon to start wrapping up furniture and loading up their moving trucks.
They would start the loading process with the new company’s showroom because that space would not allow movers in on a Saturday if the job spilled over into Saturday. Managing the logistics of timing from all 3 buildings was challenging. The new building wouldn’t allow the movers in until 6PM. A call was made to the building management to beg if they could allow us to start to unload any earlier and they graciously gave us an update time of 3:30 to start the unloading process.
This made a huge difference for everyone as we could start to empty out our showrooms and make sure everything of importance had been tagged to go. It gave me opportunity to double check for any final things to pack up for the movers that may have been overlooked. Once we cleared out furniture, we could now take down more storage shelves, hanging racks, and brackets to use at the new space. So the day would still be busy for me even though the movers were handling the big task.
What helps to keep employees, movers, and a cleaning crew happy—pizza!
Once the 3:30 time arrived and the first load had gotten dropped off, it was helpful to be around to guide the moving team a bit when they had any questions at either the old location or the new location. So between some tag teaming of myself and a couple of other employees, we managed to help make the process run a bit more smoothly until our old showroom was cleaned out.
Well, the weekend passed and today was day 1 in the new office space. I was so excited to get into the office today to roll up my sleeves and get started with the unpacking. I don’t think I can fully explain what it feels like to come into your new office space and feel a bit suffocated by tables, chairs, file cabinets, boxes, bins—it’s quite overwhelming to even know what to do first.
Everyone feels a bit overwhelmed and paralyzed as to where to start. The best thing you can do is to make everyone first get their personal effects unpacked so they at least have a home and can get started working at their desks. From there, set up teams to take on additional spaces. And get a notepad ready to start a punch list of all things that still need to be addressed.
We still have a few days ahead of us here to get the rest of our office organized and unpacked and probably a week of final touches and signage to get this place to feel like it’s home, but to me, it already feels familiar. I supposed since I’ve had my hand in it since the summer, it is truly a proud moment to see the vision of what you wanted it to look like be a reality.
Stay tuned for photos and stakeholder’s reactions
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