Coffee Break

Grown Out of Your Office? Here’s What to do Next

Image Credit: Pixabay

A great sign of a thriving business is when you look around and suddenly it seems like you don’t fit in your office anymore. What started out as a small group of desks clustered around the room is now a sprawl of workspaces with people working almost on top of each other!

It’s time to find some more space and let your surroundings grow with you.

Build an Extension

If you own your building and you have enough surrounding land, you could consider building an extension. The advantage of this is that you don’t have to move from a location you are happy with and you also get to decide exactly what you want. You will also have the foundations of a professional looking office set out.

To get a good idea of what will pass planning, employing planning consultants will help you to decide on the best plans to present the local council. This should save you time and money by avoiding the tricky areas of planning rejection and appeal. It will also help to clarify your vision for your future building project – you don’t want to have to extend again too soon!

Find Bigger Offices

Finding bigger offices can be a difficult task. You need to consider how your employees will get to their new workplaces as well as whether there is enough parking, places to get food – all the basics. It might be worth setting up a small committee to ask your employees what they need from their office space too. This will help to clarify your options.

You should also think about the layout of your new offices. There is a fashion for large open plan spaces in new builds, but older buildings with smaller sets of rooms might be more appropriate, depending on your type of building. You also need to think about having enough meeting space to host clients.

Go Bespoke

If you can afford it, building a bespoke office is a great plan. This might mean building up from scratch, but buying a building and then reconfiguring the inside is probably more likely. There are all sorts of different things you can do to make sure that the spaces work for you. For example, taking out a floor level could give you an impressive double height space that would be perfect for a photo studio, but cutting down on square footage like that won’t be ideal if you have lots of desk-based employees.

Request the help of an architect to help you imagine your space will be really beneficial too. The role of the architect is to offer up a solution to all your different problems and then give it a sense of your brand’s image. They will have the expertise you need to get the very best out of your offices.

When you are in the position to move offices, it is a really exciting time. However, you must be aware of your budget and make sure that you don’t overstretch yourself too quickly. You need to get the balance between having a little more space to grow into without pushing your budget and risking the financial security of the whole company at the same time.

Good luck!