Office Relocation: 9 Steps To Make Moving Cross-Country Easier
- rebeccai3
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
After years of managing office relocations, from tight city-centre shuffles to full-blown nationwide moves, one thing’s crystal clear: moving an office is never simple. Add a few hundred miles into the mix, and it becomes a logistical beast.
You’re not just packing boxes and updating a postcode — you’re navigating legal documents, IT risks, and acting as a part-time therapist for emotional staff.
But while cross-country office moves are high-stakes, they don’t have to be a nightmare. With a bit of planning, you can minimise the chaos. Erase the mistakes. Create the illusion of being some sort of office move magician.
So, if you want to relocate your business across the country easily, here’s how to get it done.
Why Cross-Country Office Moves Go Wrong
The sad truth is that when an office move goes wrong, it goes really wrong. Missed deadlines, lost equipment, frustrated staff, and unexpected costs can quickly turn a fresh start into a logistical nightmare.
The thing is, most mistakes are completely avoidable if you:
Plan properly: If you create a plan, with tasks clearly outlined, roles and dates assigned to it, 90% of the issues that occur when moving can be solved.
Be aware of legal blind spots: Lease and legal issues easily add cost to a move and are often overlooked.
Plan the IT transition: Downtime, lost data, damaged tech - all easily avoided if you don’t spend enough time planning the IT transition.
The trick is knowing how to do that, which we’re going to walk you through below. So grab a coffee, a notebook and jot down some of our hard learned pearls of removal wisdom.
Office Move Planning & Budgeting
Set goals, objectives and a project team
To make any office relocation easy, you need a project team: A cross-departmental brain trust of employees, whose job it is to make sure the whole thing runs smoothly.
You’ll want a couple of key departments and roles within this brain trust, with the most important being a project manager. They’re the masterminds of the move and are responsible for overseeing and mapping the whole job out.
Project Managers aren’t the only crucial role, though.
No, you’ll need others who are:
Responsible for the budget: This will most likely be someone from finance and accounts who can monitor and keep your spending on track.
Responsible for IT infrastructure: Usually someone from the IT team whose job it is to ensure minimal downtime and disruption.
Responsible for planning the layout: A facilities manager is usually well suited to this role.
Responsible for comms: Typically, your HR department will manage the communications around any big move.
Once the team is in place, it’s then about working with them to create the plan.
Getting each of them to map out the tasks, requirements and timings for their areas of responsibility.
When the plan has been mapped out, it’s up to the project manager to double and triple-check it to make sure that nothing is missed and the timings all match up.
Plan your budget in advance
It’s time for the unglamorous part of the process… budgeting.
The move will obviously have a top-level budget in mind - it always does - but it’s important to make sure it’s realistic.
To do that, get your team to start scoping costs for each element of the plan. It’s important when you do this to make sure you identify all of the potential costs, including the cost of if things go wrong.
Some areas that people will typically overlook are:
The legal fees associated with moving
Unforeseen storage requirements
The cost of downtime if it doesn’t move smoothly
Insurance costs
That being said, it’s important to remember that you’re not the Mystic Meg of removals, so there’s always going to be costs that you couldn’t predict.
Our recommendation would be to always factor in a contingency budget that’s between 15 - 30% of your total budget. That way, there’s a nice buffer if anything does go wrong.
Check The Legals
There’s a reason that lawyers cost a lot of money. It’s because they’re worth it.
And it’s definitely worth spending the money to consult a lawyer (or your legal team, if you have one) to guide you on the legal and regulatory considerations with moving offices across the country.
They’ll be able to help guide you on everything from employee contracts and rights to lease agreements and break clauses, all of which can cost you a small fortune if you make a mistake around them.
Communicate Early & Often To Everyone
Before you even think about breaking out the cardboard boxes, it’s important to make sure you notify the staff of the move.
When you do this depends on your timeframe for the move and what your HR and legal team recommend. But in our opinion, the earlier the better, as it allows everyone time to process it.
As you communicate the move with the business, there are a couple of important things to consider:
Capturing feedback: You’ll want to have a process that allows people to provide feedback as well as voice any concerns.
How you communicate: What is the preferred platform for regular comms.
Planning regular updates: Make sure you have a regular cadence of updates on progress for everyone.
The message: It’s important that people are aware of their role in this move and what’s expected of them. So, really refining the message and how you deliver it is key to doing this.
If you can do the above, then you’re most of the way there to making sure everyone understands what’s happening, why, when and their role in it.
Communicate with Clients, Suppliers & Partners
It isn’t just about communicating the office move with the business. It’d be a lot simpler if it were. No, there’s a whole checklist of people that you need to also communicate the move to.
The key people that you’ll need to notify of the move are:
Clients: Imagine if they turned up at your old office, the embarrassment.
Suppliers: They need to know the address they have to put on the invoices after all.
Banks, utility companies, insurance providers, etc: You don’t want them sending bills to the wrong place.
Companies House: You don’t want to be legally non-compliant.
HMRC: Where would they go to collect the tax?
Other important places to update your address are directories, social platforms (e.g., Facebook), and your Google Business Profile.
The worst thing you can do is move, and no one is able to find you because you didn’t update Facebook.
Choose A Moving Partner
Let’s face it. Moving across the country is such a big move that going it alone is naive at best. Hiring an office removals company to support with the move will be one of the best decisions you make, as they’ll take a lot of the heavy lifting (literally) off of you.
When choosing an office removals company, there are a couple of things you’ll want to look out for and ask. They are:
Are they commercial removals specialists?
Do they have a long history of managing office removals?
What support do they have around IT integrations?
Do they offer storage solutions in case you need them?
Are they a member of BAR (British Association of Removers)?
Do they have insurance coverage, and what’s their policy on damages?
If they don’t have experience or have any of these, then we’d recommend looking for another provider because the risk of going with them is too high.
Top Tip: Get quotes from three different suppliers before choosing one. And remember, the cost of it going wrong is always more than the cost of paying a little extra for the right removal company.
Take An Inventory & Create An Office Plan
You don’t have to take everything that’s not nailed down. In fact, we’d recommend creating an inventory of everything and deciding on what you want to take with you, sell, or recycle. That way, when it comes to moving day, you’ll have a lot less to move.
While you work on your never-ending spreadsheet of office items, you’ll also want to work on the plan for the new office. This will make it a lot easier to understand what you want to load first or last and where it needs to get dropped off at the new office.
Creating an office plan can be as simple or as complicated as you like. We’ve seen people create 3D renders online, people use pens and paper, and even people use every business's best friend - Excel - to create office floor plans. The truth is, it doesn’t matter what you use or how you do it, as long as the people involved can follow it.
Coordinate, Coordinate, Coordinate
Moving day is like a military operation. You need a mission (the move), a plan (the moving plan), a general (the project manager), some lieutenants, and some boots on the ground.
Just like every military operation, you should brief everyone on the mission and plan before the big day.
So, one of our top tips for making sure moving day is a success is to run through the plan the week (and even the day) before. Then circulate the plan for the day to everyone involved, as well as having printouts to hand, so that everyone has it.
On the day, you’ll want to make sure that you have someone who is coordinating the move in both locations (like your lieutenants. See? That analogy was going somewhere.) They can be the person who answers the questions and gives direction to the removal company and anyone else involved.
Finally, let's talk IT. Make sure that you have support on hand at the location on the day of the move. Having them able to troubleshoot will save a lot of time and a lot of headaches for everyone involved.
Don’t Forget To Plan For After The Move
The hard parts are now out of the way, it’s time to relax.
Well, not quite.
You’ve still got to make sure that you iron out any teething issues and that people get settled in.
To help with settling in, it’s really important that everyone gets an orientation on their first day. We’d also recommend having your floor plan printed out and displayed in key locations so that people know where other people are, and they’re not doing 20K steps aimlessly walking around trying to find Dave in IT.
The other thing that massively helps is making sure that IT is on hand for the first week or two, so they can quickly resolve any IT issues. Then once everyone is settled in, all you’ll have left to do is conduct a post move review.
Easy, right?
Unpacking It All
Relocating your business across the country isn’t just about changing addresses, it’s about orchestrating a smooth transition that keeps your team motivated, your clients reassured, and your operations running without a hitch.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned after hundreds of office moves, it’s this: the devil is in the details. It’s the tiny things that cause the biggest headaches.
But with the right plan, the right people, and a bit of foresight, you can absolutely pull it off. Get in touch with us today for a free, no-obligation quote and find out how we can help.
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