If anyone watches Mad Men on television then you will have the image of how we have always worked.   Our goal in life was to get that amazing corner office and have all our peers look to us in admiration, whilst cowering in front of our business greatness.  the cost of this was normally a early morning commute to the office with thousands of other commuters crowded into public transport or the equally bad car trip, inching along at a mile an hour on inadequate highways to get us to a glass or concrete jail where we would spend 70% of our waking hours.  Sound depressing?  I have not even got to the trip back home yet. 

This way of working was not only inefficient but it also created an unfair business playing field because, if you did not have space in one of these expensive office buildings, then companies did not feel safe doing business with you and the big fish stayed big against all comers.

Then something magical happened.  Technology came into our lives and rewrote the business manual.  Laptops meant we were no longer chained to the desks, wireless networks meant that we could dispose of the wires, Smart phones and tablets meant that we could take our office with us, the cloud meant that this new office did not weigh anything and for the first time, a true free market without boundaries became possible.  Smart commercial building owners and executive suites quickly maximized customer benefit and provided far reaching business solutions such as high level video conferencing to connect us all over the world.  Virtual offices became the new low cost company image, so executives could have their addresses in amazing buildings and phones answered far away from where they are based.  Drop in offices became available for rent for as little as a day at a time globally, led by Regus and then followed by other providers like MWB, Premier, Servecorp and Avanta.  Now for the first time companies could really build their own Ideal Office rather than being forced to follow an outdated convention.  More recently the latest move forward is to do with co working as a solution to the home and mobile working mass.  Co Working is when multiple companies share the same space but it is genius because it is a marketing return on investment rather than a facility cost.  To explain more simply, I would rather have 30 companies around me helping my business grow than rely on little old me coming up with all the solutions.

All of this is made possible by technology and Microsoft is the daddy of this technology.  Their latest move to roll out retail stores around the US but to use them as local business hubs instead of just shop fronts is akin to what co working is doing for executive suites.  We managed to get the below video from Microsoft about their vision of the future, which we highly recommend a look at. 

Micrsoft Vision of the future

Your Office Agent Scorecard

Your Office Agent Scorecard is always based on six criteria out of a maximum score of five points for each criteria. 

1. Lease Flexibility and Space Agility – 5
2. Personal employee growth – 3 (technology is a great teacher but we are still learning how to learn this as well as through human interaction)
3. Community Collaboration – 4 (social media gets us access to more people than ever before but we must learn how to manage this)
4. Premises look and feel – 5 (you get to create your own reality at a fraction of what the price used to be)
5. Desire to be here - 4 (for me this is a 5 however measuring remote technology with fixed technology is important for many people)
6. Employee work life balance 4 (Technology has actually made most of us work harder but we get to do it where we wish and that’s pretty good.

25 out of 30 puts technology in front as the best office of the future yet.  In addition, as we evolve, this score will only increase.  We will be watching closely to see what Microsoft and all those developers do next to take us to the next level.  Let the team here at your office agent know if you ever want any help with finding your office of the future at www.yourofficeagent.com.

How would you like to have your own office in probably the greatest innovation centre of the world where you can run shoulders with the greats of business everyday, no visa is needed to do business and tax is a distant memory.

Last week we focused our attention on start up businesses and how difficult it is for them to find the right advice when looking to match up their space plan and business plan.

This week the Your Office Agent team are looking at established businesses and ironically the situation can sometimes be even worse.  Even if the original space plan was well managed its probable that the business itself has overtaken the practical uses of the space and the company has fallen into the trap of adding desks as new staff are added.  Then, to make the team feel more settled, a 3 to 5 year lease is signed and the future looks bright until those rainclouds of change start to appear overhead.  In the same way that taxes and death are the two certainties of life so it is true that change is inevitable and by fixing 100% of your staff into a fixed, inflexible, non agile model such as this, you are not going to be able to adapt when that change comes.  Many CFO’s shut their eyes to this at lease signing, hoping that the change ticket comes after they have moved on but, although this may have been possible 10 years ago, it is not today.

The solution for the established businesses out there starts with – Do you have a best and worst case business strategy written out?  This is not just a real estate floor plan but a detailed breakdown as to how you currently align your real estate with your business objectives and where innovation is possible.  The options range from outsourcing to executive suites, optimizing desks, to hoteling, to reverse hoteling, to hotdesking, to name just a few.  Outside the office walls you have mobile working, home working and telecommuting.  Although there are cost savings of up to 70% to be achieved from implementing some or all of these work styles there are those who are afraid of change, who find it hard to manage a remote team, who do not trust their team to work as hard when they are away.  There are others who covet their desk, the prestige it brings, the feeling of accomplishment that this particular piece of wood gives to them. Seriously, get over it.  It’s just a tree.  The below is what you really need to think about: 

• What do you want – a strong company or your desk
• The savings from real estate can go straight into marketing and give extra commission or better facilities.
• Many employees will not stay unless there is a work life balance.  This keeps better people longer.
• Hoteling gives you hundreds of desks, not just one. The desk was never yours. 
• Space utilization is not cutting 1 inch off a desk that is only used 50% of the time and the same applies to meeting rooms, common areas, etc.

Here at Your Office Agent we normally advise our clients not to eat the proverbial elephant in one bite.  Start with small bites.  Check out competitors for best practice, measure total potential savings, and then do a pilot.  Ask employees what they want and don’t go too extreme on day one.  Take small steps and most importantly get the buy in from your team.  If you do all this then you will build the bullet proof company of the next 10 years.

The office space decision for new business start ups is very difficult.  They just don’t know where to go and are normally too small for brokers to even pick up the phone to.  Commercial landlords won’t speak with them as they don’t have sufficient credit and they are left using their friend Google search to make the online journey to each local executive suite, without any knowledge of their individual strengths relative to their business needs and are destined to choose the cheapest one or the one with the best view rather than the one which aligns best to the businesses best chances for survival.

The solution for small businesses is to look at everything their company will need to be successful over the coming year and years.  Then notate it as this will become the checklist for the office space beauty contest that’s coming.  Challenge yourself as to why you need an office.  Put your ego aside and start with your business objectives and what it will take to realize those objectives.  Then look at your home circumstances and include this as part of the final measurement.  Don’t just take an office because you feel it’s something that must be done.  Take one if you actually need to use that office for business benefit 40 hours a week.  If you don’t then there are plenty of part time off icing options along with virtual office solutions all over the world and if image is of no consequence then you can always start at home.  Remember that it’s as easy to get a solution in Los Angeles as it is in New York, Tokyo or London so don’t limit a great business idea because you believe it will be too expensive to move it outside your city.  Ask friends, colleagues and those who you know have travelled the same road as you and just remember that whatever else you decide cash flow trumps everything.  As long as there is cash flow there is a business so plan to keep it.

We at Your office Agent specialize in giving advice to small businesses to make this minefield a liitle easier to navigate through. There are so many excellent low cost options out there. You just need to know where to find them.

Yes, what you see below this caption is a shed.  This is one of the latest concepts to come to the mobile working market.

Do you have a workplace recovery strategy, a Disaster Recovery Plan or a Business Continuity plan that your business can depend on?

I remember a Sunday afternoon in December 2005 in Buncefield, England, when the oil refinery blew up and 200 local company offices were destroyed along with the refinery.  This was not a terrorist attack or the act of a madman; it was just an unlucky and unintended manmade screw up, which affected over 200 neighboring companies for more than 12 months after the event.  Many of these companies were international well educated facility manager led organizations and I remember vividly having two very distinct thoughts in the aftermath of the explosion. Firstly, as it happening on a Sunday, nobody was hurt in the explosion, but even more surprising, was the fact that, out of the 200 plus companies which got disposed of, only 1 had what you would consider to be a robust business continuity plan, a disaster recovery plan or even a workplace recovery plan.  That company was 3 Com and they had their management in the workplace recovery HQ offices by 2pm on the Sunday, their new, by employee, workspace and work style plans were agreed for 150 people by 3pm and the communication to their whole team went by email with a full implementation plan by 9pm that evening.  In contrast to this every other company in that compound was on the phone by Monday or Tuesday morning begging for office space and many of these companies never got any space at all.  The oilfield area was closed down for 6 months so anyone who planned badly at the start stayed in that state for much longer than they would have liked.

There was an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal around the same time which said that 65% businesses which have to close their doors for a prolonged period of time are likely to never to reopen those doors again.  It is incredible to me that any company would take that risk especially as we protect ourselves in every aspect of our private lives so well.   Surely our business lives should be even more important, as that is what pays for every other life we have.

There have been so many examples of unforeseen disasters happening over the past 10 years from the most obvious such as the twin towers through to hurricanes, tornados, fires, floods, electrical problems and in other countries, where wars and revolutions are the news of the moment.  Some CEOs would say that there is no perfect plan, as the world moves too quickly and the only option would be to rent two offices and keeping one mothballed.  They are wrong.

The good news is that there are some excellent options out there, many of which cost nothing to know about and little to safeguard with prior to the event.  Your Office Agent have access to wonderful products to protect your data with cloud solutions,  to protect your workspace with access to tens of thousands of workspaces  in  office warehouses all over the world and protect your Executives and mobile workforce with executive suites, which specialize in this area.  All the solutions are really cost effective and the executive suites have excellent products which start at under $8 a month for access to a high quality co working spaces. Then it’s not much more for first right of refusal on actual office space and finally they can rent you small space areas and turn off the lights until you need it.

So why don’t more people prepare for the worst.  Well most don’t know about solutions and some just hope nothing happens to their business and believe they will deal with it when it happens.  Mainly though there are very few companies specializing in these types of solutions and fewer still who offer free consultancy to help you get the right solution.  Call our team today on 8006000881 or on our site at http://www.yourofficeagent.com/business-disaster-recovery.php

How should companies approach their office space strategy in this economic environment? – The team here at Your Office Agent asked our clients, brokers, facility managers and prospects and the answers will surprise you.

Right now we are in the middle of the worst economic crisis of the last 100 years. It is the perfect storm where every time you think that we are in core and about to exit; it just gets worse with some new unimaginable trigger to multiply the doom and gloom. Almost every country everywhere is being hit and its one thing after another, time and time again.

For the Your Office Agent team the most obvious thing that this recession has thought us is that the old Real Estate tactic of sending 100% of a company’s employees to a location to be chained to a desk every day and then to lock that strategy into a 5 year plan / lease is just not going to cut it these days.  The glut of sublease space and mothballed buildings available today only reinforces just how out of sync most real estate strategy was over the past 10 years and its only in times like this that the importance of keeping the facility platform as fluid as the business plan is just common sense.  5 years ago over 98% of a local, national or global company’s platform was fixed in long term inflexible 3 to 10 year leases.  My expectation was that this economic environment would send companies large and small scurrying to alternative workplace models such as outsourced space in business centers, more home working solutions, hoteling, reverse hoteling and hotdesking in the office and a decentralization of large HQ’s to smaller and more nimble hubs.  What actually changed was “nothing at all” in most cases.  Now don’t get me wrong because there has been plenty of talk about changing the way we work and incorporating perfect work life balance and maximum workplace efficiency but, on the whole, very little has actually been done to change anything.

The incredible thing is that this lack of fluid facility planning is not just restricted to the slow growth companies.  Early rapid growth sized companies like Groupon and Face book still have over 90% of their space in long term leases even though they have no idea what the next 3 months hold, never mind the next 3 years.  Established fortune 500 companies still cling to keeping their people in central locations and spend money on flying to face to face meetings and driving to see clients over the use of the digital technology.  This same digital technology could save them millions every year but it is still not widely used.  Small and medium sized companies are still taking subleases to house all their people rather than outsourcing the majority of their space to executive suites and start ups still dream of having the corner office when they finally make it rather than preserving cash flow and flexibility.  New working methods such as executive suites and co-working models are still being explained away as new fads which will pass with time rather than being embraced as working methods of the future.  With all we know today can we really justify continuing with the same old methods that did not work before and expecting different results.

Now we understand why the building owners are in no rush to change this long term leasing structure that they have controlled for the past 100 years and in a way we understand why some brokers would be tempted to want to keep those nice commissions that they receive for long term lease negotiations, but what we did not get is why those companies who rent space did not say enough of this madness.  To find the answer we surveyed the market to ask brokers, facility managers and clients alike what their plans were for the future and why more radical change has not been made yet.

The documented results were not surprising as they stated the usual excuses from finding the right time to execute a plan to creating the appropriate workplace culture but when we dug deeper the unspoken insinuations were much more interesting.  Over 80% of all companies we spoke with had discussed alternative workplace strategy in the last 12 months but only 20% had on any serious level implemented one.  The unspoken message we were hearing was push-back from the CEO’s inner ego to relinquish that pleasant feeling when their dinner party friends see their name on the side of a building, the facility managers knowledge that nobody ever got fired for not changing a historic strategy, middle manager fear of the unknown and push-back from first line managers who are terrified as to how they will be able to manage this new remote business community.

Sometimes the simplest things to change are the most challenging and suddenly it is easy to imagine how difficult that change was from the typewriter to the computer, from the spoken word to the phone, from yesterday’s newspaper to the Internet with tomorrow’s information curated to our very specific needs.  The world is certainly turning and the only thing we know is that it can’t be stopped; only slowed down.  Unless we, as advisers to industry decide to put greed and out of date advice aside and help those companies find a better way to work, then we will be as extinct as they will once that future comes rolling in. Let’s do the right thing and all have a great 2012 from the team at Your Office Agent.

SHOULD YOU OWN / LEASE COMMERCIAL SPACE OR OUTSOURCE TO AN EXPERT – YOUR OFFICE AGENT INVESTIGATE AND THE ANSWERS MAY SURPRISE YOU

We sit with companies daily who feel they are adapting their work style to reflect the changes that are happening in their business world. Sometimes though their proposed innovations are not changes at all and are just the same walls with different wallpaper.

We at Your Office Agent would argue that there is too much focus on just being clever with how the same old office space solutions are repackaged from a PR perspective rather than actually implementing cutting edge Alternative Workplace Strategies to reduce the true total cost of occupancy and improve real employee work life balance. Traditional brokerage can still only think in square foot cost and open plan or individual office configuration and not outside those office walls into the virtual world that technology has introduced us to.

In this issue we investigate the age old tradition of companies taking long term leases and compare this to newer practices such as the integration of mobile working practices and the outsourcing large amounts of space to specialized managed space providers to manage. Before we start though it’s important to know that 99% of global commercial real estate is still fixed long term leases, while most company business plans are no more than 6 months. Because of this it really is no coincidence that there is currently so much sublease space available globally and that so many companies have gone out of business in this recession because of mismatched space and business needs, but this needs to change.

The reasons for this mismatch between available space and business needs is mainly due the commercial real estate industry having too much to lose to want to change, but Your Office Agent are leading the opposition to this outdated working practice. The old fashioned fixed inflexible space needle needs to move down to 70% or 80% or the companies we advise just won’t survive against their newer more nimble competitors. In addition outsourcing some of a company’s facilities is the first step to even more effective mobile working practices and every study being done now not only shows mobile workers being more efficient than their office counterparts but also that they work more hours and are happier. In summary there are so many options available to us that a poor and mismatched facilities strategy is unforgivable based on what we know today?

In our comparison we have looked at the most important elements of commercial space from a company perspective and compared a standard lease with the most basic alternative workplace strategy, which is to start to outsource offices which are less than 5,000 square feet to outside providers to manage for you. We have color coded and commented on each critical decision criteria with green being good, red being not so good and orange being worthy of a deeper dive. For example, under ongoing costs we firmly believe that one charge for all the facility costs is a great thing but a full cost comparison needs to be done between the relevant traditional space and the best outsourced provider so that the costs work. We have cost models for doing this however they are location specific.

Comparing traditional Space to Managed Office Space – The Facts

Everything that outsourced managed space providers like Regus, ServCorp, Premier, Pacific, Regent, CARR and MWB to name a few have done in the last 10 years have got the office industry to a place where managed space is now trusted from a service perspective by the majority of small, medium and large companies and that is the leap of faith that was needed to get the outsourcing movement started. Now it’s just about making sure the cost argument makes sense.
Irrespective of these companies though, if data, mobile and video conferencing technology keeps moving as fast as it’s moving now, then the fixed inflexible traditional office space model will become obsolete as we know it and consumers will find their own solutions.

Let us know what you think and speak with any one of our agents in Your Office Agent and we will be happy to discuss openly what solution is best for your company

Marketing is an integral part of any successful business strategy.  Back in the day when there was no Internet, an ad in the local newspaper and the yellow pages was enough to get the word out to customers. It is different these days. Customers go to the Internet for information on your business and if you want to attract more business your way and save on advertising expense, local search marketing is for you.

To put it simply, local search marketing is making sure your business is promoted by search engines and yellow pages on the Internet such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, CitySearch, and Foursquare. As you can see, there are many options you can choose from but make sure to use the ones that are popular with your target customers. The form may differ with different services but the basics of each are the same.

Build a website or claim and register your business

A storefront is not enough. Create a website so that your business can be found online. Also, do not forget to claim your business in Google Places or any other sites similar to it. And, register your business in Internet local directories. These are all great ways to be easily found online.

Optimize your site with keywords to increase ranking in local searches in search engines (SEO)

Get the right keywords people use in searching your type of business and add them to your website or any other place your online business profile might be in such as review sites or online local directories. Google AdWords can help you identify relevant keywords for your business.

Encourage customer reviews

Reward customers with incentives if they leave a review online for your business. Reviews are important for other customers to know if your business or service is something they would like to pay for.

These are just a few ways to begin to tap into the important world of marketing online. With the increasing popularity of smartphones and GIS devices, it’s essential to your business’s success to be prominent in the online space. If you’re not, your competitors are and they will be found first!

The term “new ways of working” is fast becoming much more than a footnote in the corporate boardroom agenda these days. It can deliver real, long-term advantages to your workplace if it is properly understood and implemented. The four principle factors to deciding on an alternative workplace strategy are below and are easily quantifiable in the short, medium and long term.

Greatly reducing Commercial real estate needs and costs – Companies have traditionally strived to have between 100 and 200 square feet per employee but, by employing alternative workplace strategies such as teleworking, smart working and outsourcing, this can be brought down to as low as 50 square foot per employee. Yes, we are talking about serious savings here.
Increasing productivity – Contrary to corporate belief, employees do not live to travel the long commute to a corporate building just so they can spend 60% of their lives in a glass box and the new generation of employees just don’t see any sense in it. Not only is the workplace full of efficiency wasting distractions but it also plays tricks on the mind, because, just by being at the workplace there is a feeling that we are already working. This is contrary to when an employee is working from home where the difference between being productive or not is much easier to measure as well as the fact that the employee is always eager to show how much more productive they can be in a comfortable environment, so they just work harder.
Boosting staff retention and satisfaction – Home / work life balance is just so difficult these days and any flexibility given to employees to help is normally greatly appreciated. A study was done recently with University leavers who said that they expected to never be in one job for more than a 2 year period. Employers now have to work much harder for that loyalty that came so naturally before.
Providing flexibility across the organization – This is key because in this economic environment companies need to be able to change direction to react to whatever is thrown at them that day. The Wall Street Journal famously said after the 2001 recession that companies who could not change direction on a dime in this economy would not survive, no matter how big they are. This was true then and is still true today. This is not a matter of workspace preference its about economic survival.

The issue is not that companies wont embrace new ways of working its just that so few brokers and consultants really understand how to analyze and implement a strategy for companies of all sizes, together with the medieval attitude that still remains in some areas of corporate America that our workplace is our castle. In reality this is just a thinly shrouded way of saying that I like to see my company name on the biggest building in town or that size really does matter.

We at Your Office Agent don’t propose that this is an all or nothing strategy and the opposite is actually true. Companies should analyze this by employee and review daily depend on the 4 principal factors we mentioned. If you are to be successful in this type of work style change then you need all the help you can get to help to guide you through the maze of opportunities and pitfalls that come hand in hand with implementing a highly effective and productive plan for your company.

New ways of working is also sometimes called “agile working” and as the ultimate agile concept of “virtuality” gains ground, creating an internal robust business case for changing the way your company works will become essential. Winning strategies at work are all about success and this success is for both employer and employee, as the concept of VWork delivers dividends in a number of areas.

A very good example of this type of success is a legal firm we are advising who feel they have a unique business model and wish to take advantage of the low cost / high impact market entry options available today. Their entry strategy is to take executive suite offices and virtual offices in 20 new cities immediately, start their advertising straight away helped by low facilities operational costs and then follow up by increasing office size by market as their operation grows and reducing space when not. Here is the genius in this case. The company become global in a 3 month period and can change their office cost in line with their business success. Smart working to reflect a new world if you ask us with virtually no upfront fit out costs and an additional saving of $300,000 in year one against the next best traditional business facility plan available to them. it also reads very nicely on the balance sheet for their investors.

We at Your Office Agent help many of our clients with change management and strongly recommend some level of agile working in every organization. This does not mean that we encourage extreme change but your company should continually be reinventing itself to both stay competitive in this new business world we live in and also show your teams that your money is being spent on them and the marketing of their product, not expensive inefficient real estate.

This is not complicated. Just seek to really understand all your options, not just the traditional ones and live by the rules of the “KISS principle” when choosing a consultant partner and implementing your policy. Everyone has to understand the why and how and you wont go wrong.
Good luck and let us know how Your Office Agent can help you.