Making careful consideration and analysis for all the stakeholders that could be potentially affected is vital when relocating a business, whether it’s a portion of the business or the whole organization. As a leader of a business or organization, you don’t what to make a decision that will have severe impacts on your stakeholders or cause financial loss to your business. Relocating a business has long term and short term financial impacts. It is expensive to move your entire business to a new location and also your new location has the possibility to increase or decrease overhead costs by changing utilities, lease payments and taxes.
As a result, it is essential to carefully assess the factors involved with business relocation. Here are some of the vital factors to consider.
Impact of location on employee and stakeholder
Everyone want to work for and with businesses and organizations that make it easier for them to come to and stay at their location. For instance, think of the last time you went to a business that had difficult parking. It is not fun or convenient. To deal with that problems, the organization can build a parking lot or lease a lot. But then again this will impact on the cost of moving and must be taken into account.
Next, the new location should be easily accessible by your existing employees and visitors, especially from a commuting perspective. No employee wants to take over 30 minutes to commute into an office, so ensure you choose a location that in in close proximity to convenient parking and public transport links for employees, clients and customers.
In addition, ensure the location is relevant to your business. For example, if your business requires a retail space, it is wise to move to a location that allows for plenty of foot traffic and/or areas with other retail businesses.
Cost
There are several hidden or secondary costs involved with relocating a business. You must consider the cost of moving the office equipment from one location to another. The longer the distance the hire the moving cost. For instance, using relocating corporate relocation services to relocate a 1000 person office across country is more expensive compared to relocating a 20 person business across town. In both cases it is important to carefully asses if the cost benefit outweighs the cost of making the move.
Additionally, it is important to consider how the overhead costs of the new location will impact on your business operations. If you move to an expensive location, you will have increased cost on things like lease or mortgage payment, utilities, shipping, and employee wages. You should look at the hidden cost carefully to avoid any financial surprises that might show up as a result of moving.
Future growth capabilities
When relocating your business it is important to consider how the new location will impact the growth of your business. No business operates without the intent of growing more or expanding in the future. As a result, you need to asses whether the new location has the labour pool that can support the growth of your business. This is especially crucial if your growth will be around unique skillset, for instance farm science. If that is the case, you need to perform an extensive study to determine whether the area actually has the talent for that.
Business growth doesn’t just apply to human capital. It also apply to the need to grow your business space, and capacity of local shipping. You should ensure the space you have will allow for more staff to join the team, more stock and larger meeting areas for the growing number of clients.
It is important to plan for the future when making big business decisions, and ensuring the new location you are moving to will allow for business growth will help you ensure your business proper for many years without having to plan for another move.
Customers
Your customers and clients are the backbone of your business’s financial health. As a result, when relocating, it is important to consider the impact it will have on your customers. This can be inform of increased cost or decrease in cost since you are moving close to a customers.
Most importantly, if your business is over reliant on a specific client, ensure you take into account all the risks associated with moving closer to that client for cost savings. If you are ever to lose the relationship in future, it could really destroy your business financially.
Community impact
Businesses that are a major part of a community are interdependent. So when the business relocates, it impacts the community as well. For instance, say your business is a bigger employer in a small town of about 200,000 people. If you relocate the business to a new town, the amount of jobs available in the community will decline, resulting in rise of unemployment and reduction in town population as people leave in search for employment. Because of this, it is a business’s ethical responsibility to analyze and minimize the community impact that comes with relocating the business.
Taxes
When moving to different states or countries, it is important to analyze and assess the tax situation of the location you are moving to. Depending on the location you are relocating to and your current location, taxes have a huge impact on the profit margins of your business or organization. It is important to research and weigh tax impacts on your business or organization when relocating to ensure business profitability.
Conclusion
Moving a business is stressful, you will need to move and keep running the business at the same time. You need to ensure you can still offer services to your clients and customers, so it is important to have a strategic and well laid out action plan that will allow your business to perform certain operations. It is best to hire Corporate relocation services that has the knowledge to provide your organization with a smooth transition to your new location.
