When searching for new premises, there are many things a business needs to consider. While a lot of them may appear pretty obvious, there are a number of factors that are often overlooked. The topics outlined below will help ensure that your business is set up for the long-term.
Location
The first thing to consider is location and how easy it is to get to the building. Depending on your industry, you may need to take into account the distance it takes to get to a major motorway or public transport hub. If you target international customers, it would also be worthwhile considering premises close to an airport. The final location consideration on the checklist should be parking facilities for your customers and staff.
Building
The next step is to start analysing the building itself. Does it need a lot of refurbishment? Does it have gas and electricity? Once you’re happy, it’s time to consider costs. Look at how you’re going to acquire the space and start to consider whether you need to rent, buy or lease. Providing the building is affordable and the paperwork is all correct, you can move into the building.
Telecommunications
It is essential that on your first day in your new building you have full internet and phone services available. To ensure your staff and customers have the most effective tools to communicate you should consider moving away from old-style phone connections and utilising VoIP capabilities.
In today’s business environment, it would be fair to assume that every commercial building has access to high-speed data services. However, all too often that’s not the case. So when checking the availability of fibre services, you may find it’s still a way off and the nearest telephone exchange is several miles away. At best you may be able to get an ADSL connection with download speeds of approximately 1Mbps and upload speeds of about 180kbps – which will severely impact your ability to communicate. There are some alternatives available but these may be prohibitively expensive.
You also need to check whether or not the building is in a black spot for coverage to the major mobile networks, something you can do nothing about once your lease is signed.
Unfortunately, the above is a scenario that I have encountered far too often. There are a surprisingly large number of commercial hotspots in the UK that have very poor communications infrastructure. An example of this was a big industrial estate – developed in the 70s – only one mile away from the M1 motorway and 15 minutes away from Luton Airport. So despite being in the perfect location, its extremely poor communication facilities made it an unpractical option.
That is why it’s so important that you analyse all aspects of your desired premises.
And finally…
Before considering a building for your business I’d advise you to look carefully at what communication options are available. If you really want to be sure, contact any reputable communications provider. They will be able to establish whether the location has the correct connectivity capabilities.
Consider your business’ future needs, as well as today. When considering a new business location, the availability of a communications infrastructure is just as important as any other consideration so don’t leave it to chance! At the time of writing, Local and Central Governments are running promotional and funding initiatives in some areas that may enable you to recover all or some of your installation costs.