Whatever kind of business you run, one of the most centrally important things you will always need to make sure of is that you are working in the right location, for the sake of yourself, your colleagues and employees, and your customers and clients too. There are actually a lot of processes that might go into making this decision, and it’s not the kind of decision you should make lightly or quickly without thinking about it in advance.
In this post, we are going to help you out by looking at some of the most important ways in which you can hope to choose the right location for your office. As long as you make a point of being aware of the following, you should find that choosing the right location is easier than you think, and that you can make the decision in no time.
Where Are Your Customers?
One of the most pressing questions you need to answer here is, simply, where are your customers? Knowing where they are can help you with being more in touch with them, and this is something that is relatively easy to find out through a simple bit of market research. Unless you are running a huge multinational corporation, your business will do well to think of itself as local and to remain in touch with local people as well as you would hope, so it’s vital that you are doing all you can to be aware of this.
So once you know where they are, you can ensure that you are looking for offices in that kind of location. There is something about having the headquarters near to their home that really helps people to respect and trust your company, and it also means that you are going to be much more a part of the local community, which helps in so many ways like that too. So it’s vital that you are aware of where your customers are when you are thinking about your office location.
How About Your Staff?
Of course, it’s also important that you are in a good position and location for your staff, because this is going to matter to them quite a lot too. In particular, you want to know that they can get to the office easily and that there are plenty of opportunities for that in place – which we are going to look at specifically shortly. So you need to take a tally of your workers and see where they are living and where they would ideally like the offices to be situated.
The more information you can gather on this, the better, so it is definitely a good idea to make sure that you are doing all you can to find out as much as possible on behalf of your staff. Remember: keeping your employees happy is a vital part of keeping the business working as it should, so this is something that will likely have considerable knock-on effects for your company.
Public Transportation
As we briefly alluded to, it’s also going to be important that you are choosing somewhere that has decent public transport links to it. That’s most important for your employees, who might have all sorts of different ways that they like to travel into work. You should take a look and see what options they might have for getting in each day. That might include everything from driving to getting the bus or the train, but there are specifics about each of these you need to bear in mind too.
For instance, you probably want to be seen as having green credentials, so you want to encourage lots of use of public transportation as much as possible, or better yet of private bicycles and scooters. So ensuring you are near good roads for that is really going to help, and you also need to consider your role in their safety if they are going to be getting into work that way too. You don’t want a scooter accident or a bicycle crash just outside your offices, after all.
So as you can see, even this has some really important concerns that you need to be aware of, and it’s important that you are thinking about these as you look for the right spot.
Proximity To Suppliers
Another group that you are going to want to think about in all this is the suppliers, because they are very often going to be able to help you to get exactly what you need for your products and so on, and it can be a huge improvement if you are a lot nearer to them. For one thing, it helps to reduce the cost of transporting those supplies, and you can also generally build and develop a much stronger partnership if they are geographically closer too. It is also easier to communicate and you can again argue that you are a local business making use of other local businesses. That’s really important, so it’s something to think about.
Of course, it might be impossible to be near all of your suppliers, so just try to get close to one – ideally the one that matters most, whether because they offer the most value or they are just the best partners. All in all, this is going to help make your decision for where to locate your business’ office.
The Right Address
There is also something to be said for having the right address. In other words, you probably want an address which gives off a good impression, and which is therefore going to be good for the branding and reputation of the company. You would be surprised at how much of a difference this can make, and it’s something that you are going to want to think about when you are choosing between a number of different offices. Sometimes, the choice of address is the final thing that helps you to make that decision once and for all, so bear that in mind.