Scott Dickson’s Post

Transcript

Hi Bob, I'm Scott from Instant Officers. I've been speaking to a client today about a challenge that they face, which I think it affects a lot of business owners and people who are involved in finding new workspace. The challenge is lots of companies have a lot of leases which are very long term commitments for office space that they don't use anymore. And so when you get to the end of those leases, you naturally want to get out and go into more flexible solutions which rate size the amount of space you need. But the flex offers market only has a notice period or avoid period that providers will accept of about 3 months from you signing to you starting paying rent. But on the lease market you often have a six month notice to give. So you have to go down one of three scenarios from what I can work out which becomes really difficult for you as a business owner to make informed choice route one. Is leap of faith. You go and you look at the flex market, normally via an aggregator of all the providers and landlords which the instant group and incident officers do. And it's free and partial. And in effect what we try and do is give you enough facts and figures so that you're confident to put your notice in and accept. In 2-3 months time you can go and buy your ideal next office. Option two is you have crossover where effectively you put your notice in six months out, but you start paying rent three months beyond that on your next office space and you sign the two contracts at the same time for giving notice and finding your next space. But that's not ideal for a lot of business owners because what it means is that you're going to end up paying two lots of enter periods. You're not going to have your deposit back on the lease until you give the keys back, but you're going to be asked for deposit for your service office. So actually from a cash flow perspective, it's really difficult and not ideal. Especially for a lot of small medium scale businesses who just don't have that money in the bank, third route is almost the needle in the haystack approach and we love a challenge, but this isn't possible in a lot of markets. You're either looking to find somewhere where there's a client inner space you want to be in and they're going to move out around the time you want to move in. And it's just a case of aligning those two. Or you try and find a provider who's launching a brand new building in a location you want to be in, but it isn't open yet. And then again, that gives you a bit more breathing space to sign on the dotted line without paying rent until that space is finished and delivered. I think all of these three scenarios have pros and cons. But this is the kind of advice we have to give clients day in, day out to help them make informed decisions about whether they're staying or going and how they do that so. First time doing this would be great to hear any thoughts, any scenarios you've been through or any alternative you can think of to these three approaches. But this is the kind of conversations we're having day in, day out with clients. And if there's anyone you know, we could help further with that, we'd love to speak to them. Thanks everyone. Bye.