How to Know When It’s Time to Upgrade Your Office
A new office building can revitalize your small business, but it’s a serious commitment that warrants proper consideration. I’ve moved my law practice twice, and I’m currently expanding an office in downtown Houston, so I’m very familiar with the whole process. I’ve written a few thoughts about how an office upgrade can improve a small business, for the timid business owner hoping to take a positive new step.
Whether or not it’s time to expand depends on how you use your office space. My office is full of Houston criminal attorneys, so the space is used for filing, paperwork and other office work, but it also has to be presentable for potential clients. As a result it’s necessary to not only have enough space to function as a business; we need room to make it all happen without an air of total chaos.
If you’re trying to save money on rent by cramming your business into a small space and trying to be creative with your storage space, know that at a certain point you will start to sacrifice productivity. In my first office building our files were so concentrated (they were jammed into a tiny storage room) that it was a total waist of time. It was an ordeal any time we had to process an old case file or review some client’s history.
This has been less of an issue since we moved all of our old files onto our external hard drive, but regardless of how advanced our system becomes we will always need physical office space. For instance, we’ve hired a new Houston criminal lawyer a year for the last three years running, as our business has expanded, and we obviously need extra physical space to accommodate that growing body of lawyers.
When considering an office expansion the primary thing to consider is how to optimize productivity, while staying within your budget. It’s easy to rise to that challenge with a little bit of thoughtfulness.