The Moving Planner Blog

When Moving Your SoHo Office, Use A Professional Mover.

Moving your home is stressful; everything has to be packed up and boxed and inventoried, and nothing ever packs the way you’d expect it. At least you can rely on going back to work once the move is taken crare of, secure that, aside from an aching back, and a few days of frantic unpacking, your work life won’t be disrupted.

At least, that’s the way it used to work. If you have a small or home office (SoHo), that security that your move hasn’t disrupted your paychecks isn’t there. In particular, moving your home office runs the risk of a lot of potential disruption to your work-flow, and keeping your clients happy, if you’re not careful.

Now, as a SoHo business owner, you’re indoctrinated into the idea of “do it right, do it yourself”, and probably can think back to moving in and out of dorm rooms and apartments, and have tagged this, mentally, as a “do it yourself” job. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hire a professional, and hire one that has direct experience in moving an office.

Movers with office experience understand the importance of documenting what everything is, and where it went in relation to other boxes. Particularly with movers that do “store and forward” moving, having a paper trail is critical to tracking down anything that went astray or awry. Nothing can be quite as disastrous as discovering, at the end of the move, that two cartons of tax records are missing, because the store and forward place didn’t set them together.

Just as important, a business mover with SoHo experience understands office equipment and palletized goods. Most SoHo offices rely on a few critical pieces of hardware. If you’re an architect, working out of a small office, your $22,000 plotter is a vital critical need. A good mover with SOHO experience will note not only that you have a big, awkward, fragile plotter moving, but they’ll ask for the make and model number so they can research exactly how to pack it and unpack it at the destination.

Speaking of unpacking at the destination, a good mover with SoHo experience will ask you lots of questions about that as well. As someone doing a well prepared move, you should have your floor plans already in place for the destination. Ideally, you’ll even have the utilities turned on by the time you arrive. Go over the floor plan with the movers, and let them know where everything should go when you get there. Large companies planning office moves do this, and it’s an exercise in forethought and planning that will have at least a week, and possibly more, off of the disruption of your professional life and client contacts due to the move.

In particular, knowing where everything goes at the destination makes it easier to figure out what order to load the trucks at, on the point of departure.

One company with an excellent reputation for small office moves is Flat Rate Moving. They’ve done this for decades, and were one of the first companies to specialize in moving home offices, and later small offices. They’ve moved companies ranging from law offices (with more filing cabinets than you care to name) to small home based publishers (with industrial laser printers and a book bindery setup) across the country.

In addition to their experience in moving businesses, Flat Rate understands the need to do staged moves, and to prioritize what moves when and where they know that every hour spent packing or unpacking a box is an hour that you’re not solving a problem for a client. As small business owners themselves, they understand how much that pains you in maintaining your business. An Flat Rate estimator will personally look over your existing office setup, tally up the inventory, ask you what’s the most important, and help you build a priority list, so that what gets packed last gets opened first, to minimize the disruption of your work-flow.

Flat Rate, like any other mover, carries insurance against loss or breakage during the move, and Flat Rate’s movers know exactly how important your office equipment is. They’re also organized, and will make sure that everything is packed, labeled and annotated correctly, using a double-check system, where every item is assigned a label, a contents sheet and a packing number, making sure that you’re good to go when your goods get there to restart your life.

If you’re running a home office, as opposed to a small office, you may want to talk to your mover about the differences between moving your own items, and having them pack up the rest of your house. For one, this can make your entire move tax deductible, if done carefully. For two, it gives you a lot of freedom to focus on what’s important those extra days where the movers are packing up the house could be extra days where you’re generating revenue because you aren’t playing Napoleon with a tape gun in your hand. If you have a business with a high “per day” take, or one that’s deadline driven, completing one more job can more than offset the additional costs of packing up the rest of the house.

Flat Rate movers offers the following timetable for moving your business.

1. Get the floor plan for where you’re moving to, first and foremost. You want to have this two weeks before you start packing boxes, and three or four weeks is better.
2. Build a priority list label each of your filing cabinets from most important to least important. Your office records are the sinews that direct your business’ motions.
3. Inform your clients about the move again, two weeks notice is the minimum, a month is probably better. Make sure that any projects being done for clients are scheduled around the move, and make a list of what projects start at what priority level once you’re relocated.
4. Two weeks before the move, have any maintenance people look over your equipment before it gets packed. Get a “full bill of health” on any equipment, so that if something gets damaged you can assert your claim for insurance purposes.
5. One week before the move, contact your new landlord about getting keys, and getting business essential utilities (telephone and internet) turned on.
6. Five days before the move, wrap up your last client projects. One or more of them will ALWAYS run late make arrangements to handle what you can electronically, from a laptop, during the move. Start packing up your personal belongings five days before the truck arrives, going from least used items to most frequently used items.
7. Make a hotel reservation at your destination. Trust us on this spending a night at the hotel and tackling unpacking when you’re well rested is far better than trying to do the Office Move Death Slog.
8. When you’re unpacking, take the time to check every single box off the master packing list. Any box that looks dinged, open up and check the contents against the master packing list.
9. Once you have bare bones business functionality up again, talk to your clients and let them know you’re ready for them. It’s better to unpack while you’re getting up to speed on your clients issues than to unpack and let them linger good client relationships are built on communications, and the reason you’re hiring a professional mover is so you can focus on client relationships, not packing tape.

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