When the time comes and you need to move your business from one location to another, it is entirely natural to feel stressed or even nervous. It is a huge upheaval that can completely tear the roots out of your business. Why? Unless you are just moving across the road, it may require your employees to relocate themselves and their families, which will trigger a great deal of uncertainty and angst for them or force you to hire a whole new workforce altogether.
What’s more, you may have to renegotiate with suppliers or find new ones, as well as smooth over the process with your customers, who may rely on you to be in a certain location. All this is not to say that you shouldn’t relocate your business at all, only that you need to think about how the process will work well in advance and make sure it is as smooth a transition as possible.
To help you move your manufacturing business premises efficiently, here are some top tips:
Use a transportation firm to help you to move.
One of the hardest elements of any move – whether business or personal – is the physical task of moving all of your belongings from one place to another. This is hard enough when it is just your personal possessions, but when you have an entire manufacturing business to try and shift, it all gets rather more complicated.
The problem is that your company needs to stay open and function as much of the time as possible, so you can’t shift everything gradually from one location to another. Furthermore, hiring vans or trucks and attempting to do it internally will just cause additional stress and confusion, even if you run a small business.
Instead, why not use a professional moving company to help you? In the case of a manufacturing firm like yours, you could use machinery movers to do the heavy lifting for you in one go rather than spreading yourself thin over several weeks or months.
Prepare well in advance
Another key tip that you need to keep in mind is to prepare for the move well in advance. It can be tempting to put such a stressful process off to the last moment or presume that your team will easily adapt to such a change.
This is completely the wrong approach. Instead, you need to map out the entire process months in advance, work out how every problem can be overcome, and inform your workforce so that they can relocate if necessary or find alternative employment.
Once you know how many staff members will be staying, you can start searching for replacements and adapting as necessary.
Make the actual transition period as short as possible
You need to ensure that the transition period between your old and new premises is as short as possible. You don’t want to be in a halfway house between addresses because it will be incredibly difficult to prevent outright confusion for your staff, suppliers, and customers.
Make the move swift, and ensure there is an exact date when everyone knows you will be in your new building and open for business.