Tips for a Successful Office Move

So, you’ve gotten serious enough about your upcoming office move to be looking at a blog about it. As an NYC professional organizer,
I like to reward effort like that among my clients and readers, and so let’s get started. I’ll be providing a series of office move tips that constitute what people call “tips,” let me know how they work for you!

Probably the single most stressing aspect of moving is actually money. People have a vague sense how much moving a household costs, but unless you’ve personally overseen an office move of late, you probably are less clear how much one costs.

The most important tip, then, takes money head-on: develop a budget for your move, and stick to it. Depending on the size of your business and the scale of your move, you’re probably going to need to pay for the following:

Packing your office space
Designing the layout for the new space
Fitting out the new space
Furnishing the new space
physical move
Establishing new phone and computer networking service
Cleaning the space you’ve moved out of

These are all going to cost money, and you’re going to want the party providing the service to present you with a written estimate for each of them long before moving day. That’s tip number one from your NYC professional organizer. Don’t let the money part of your move be a snowball that bowls you over!

In terms of how to actually keep costs down, my next greatest tip is to leave yourself enough lead time to create competition among vendors. You need to get prices from at least three businesses for each of the services listed, and you need to let all three know, from the very start, that you are managing a bidding process and that in all likelihood the lowest bidder is going to win your business.

Finally, don’t even try to manage this bidding process in your head, or even on paper. Create a computer file, using whatever program you’re most likely to actually use (yes, Microsoft Word is fine), and enter the bids for each specific
service there.

As your NYC professional organizer, that’s my last office move tip: let the planning for this move exist in your electronic world in a smart, cohesive way. It’ll help you see what’s going on, it’ll help you know what’s going on, and it’ll help you be the hub of communications throughout the process that you need to be. You’ve got this!