Saturday, May 30. 2009Moving Premises - Always A Potential NightmareJohn Linton ...but this move appears to have gone as well as any I've been involved in. Annette and I had dinner with Steve on the Monday night after we returned from Sri Lanka and he stopped off in Sydney on his way back to Perth from Interop in Las Vegas. We had all had successful trip results and I was stupid enough to say that everything was going really well with the business which was good to see as we had all been out of the country for a week for the first time since we decided to start the business. Steve said I should be more careful about making such statements as they always presaged 'disaster'.....and so it proved to be. About 10.30 the following morning (Tuesday 26th May) our CFO dropped a letter on my desk saying that I had better read it as it was urgent. So I read the tersely written three paragraph letter of demand from our land lord (actually the recently appointed agent of the land lord) giving us 7 days to quit the property or else. "Or else" seemed to include locking us out of the property and sequestering all goods and chattels not removed from the premises by 12 midnight on May 31st 2009. Now we had given our landlord notice on 24th March 2009 that we would move by either 31st May 2009, if we could, or by June 30th 2009 if anything went wrong (as things tend to when you buy a new property and then do major renovations and refurbishment). We had been on a month by month lease for some months up to now as we waited to complete the purchase and renovation of our newly acquired floor space and not having heard anything from the agent had not really rushed to complete the work as we resigned ourselves to paying 'dead rent' until June 30th if things went wrong with our plans. Now, being a fairly tough person with a relatively quick mind and some reasonable amount of experience of dealing with total ***holes, I was concerned at the tone and content of the letter but having met the writer on two occasions I responded after a few minutes thought as follows: "Dear Sir, My view was that we were being blackmailed by an unethical sleazebag agent and a, presumably, equally morally challenged land lord who figured that we wouldn't be able to move a highly complex $A50 million a year business that had, and was completely reliant upon, complex telephone and data line services installed in the offices with, effectively, three and a half working days notice and he was demanding six months rent (at a much higher rental) if we were still occupying the premises at midnight on May 31st. This was clearly based on his assessment that we also had two or three hundred thousand dollars of equipment and fittings that couldn't be moved without seriously damaging our ability to operate the Exetel business and therefore our fear of them being 'sequestered'.. As can be seen from my 5 minute reply I knew that we could use the court process to get a 'cease and desist' order within 24 hours from the NSW Supreme Court so after my initial surprise I wasn't particularly concerned but I was very, very angry. So after thinking about it for a further 20 minutes or so I walked 'up the road' and had a brief discussion with the project manager of our building renovation program who assured me that he would complete everything on time by late Friday 29th. Over the next few working hours I checked with various people and contacted removalists, cleaners, electricians and our data circuit suppliers and then the decision was made to move the Exetel 'head office', its telephone services that serve 100,000 customers and the major data lines that are essential for our help desk and other support services (both in Australia and Sri Lanka) within 48 hours. I refuse to talk to the sorts of people who would act in the way that the agent and landlord had acted and referred their reply to my brief "go and get f***ed" email to our solicitors - in their follow up letter the mealy mouthed swine of an agent stated he hoped the matter could be settled "amicably" as he was sure we wouldn't want to damage our business and involve ourselves in legal costs - pretty clear where that piece of sh** thought he was coming from and how difficult/impossible a situation he thought he had put us in. As of 10.20 pm Friday 29th May we had managed to comply with the totally unethical and completely unreasonable demand but only because we have the good fortune to know very, very competent and resourceful people in the many areas that needed to be actioned in unbelievably short time frames. Just as importantly we have exceptionally gifted and resourceful people within our own organisation. Not only have we moved into and are now operating completely and completely effectively in our brand new premises but we have removed all of the old work stations and the other furniture and fittings we won't need and have safely terminated the electricity and removed the Ethernet cables from the previous offices. The remaining bits and pieces will be removed tomorrow and then the carpets will be steam cleaned on Sunday morning. In the meantime we relied on our solicitors to meet with the people who had sent the letter and they will deal with the situation of what is required in terms of 'making good' the floor space we have vacated in such a very short time. Hopefully they will reach a mutually sensible "amicable agreement" with the building owner and their "representative" on Monday morning when there is a joint inspection of the completely vacant and cleaned floorspace they ordered us out of three and a half working days before. The world, or perhaps the business world, seems to have a disproportionate number of very unreasonable people. Fortunately, as Annette sensibly said, reasonable people can usually rely on the other reasonable people they meet in their lives to help them out in times of need - something that unreasonable people will never get to enjoy - as of course they shouldn't. Trackbacks
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Hmmm.
Aah well, it sounds like the move was fortuitous then. If your landlord / agent was that unreasonable; who knows what plans they might have had in store for you down the line. A planned move is certainly better than an unplanned sudden lease termination! It's one thing when it's furniture; as you can call your mates around to help lug it down the street; but Comms cabling is another kettle of insulated copper fish. Well done Cheers, Mike Comment (1)
Business has its fair share of a**holes.
You can only hope the author(s) of that unreasonable request get their just deserts down the line sometime. It leaves a sour taste in your mouth for a while. Comment (1)
Woops! forgot to to add a name to the "a**holes" post.
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Wow, so commercial tenants get treated with as much respect as residential tenants by some agents. Your story is jaw-dropping...!
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As Annette points out - there are many, many more nice people in the world than total ****heads - it's just the ****eads make more 'noise'.
In this case the sleazebag was truly an outstandingly awful piece of human garbage and he will undoubtedly come to a sticky end one day. Rental real estate, second hand cars, double glazing, drug dealing - hard to rank those aspects of commerce in terms of which attracts the very worst dregs of the human race. Comment (1)
I couldn't help but laugh at the fact that you managed to comply so quickly, leaving your landlord in the lurch. I hope the landlord is pleased with managing to deprive himself of the income for the rented space after his failed extortion attempt.
I can only hope there is leeway to see him forced to pay you some form of compensation although I suspect that trying to extract it from him would be a waste of time and valuable resources. Comment (1)
Seems like this weekend was a moving weekend. I helped a friend pack up a three bedroom house and move it over the weekend (some task considering none of the packing was done!). Still, nothing as complicated as organising a functional office on such short notice.
Sorry to hear your recent landlord was such a douchebag. It never ceases to amaze me just how many shit people there are in the world who actually think that tactics like that work. It's amazing what you can do with dedicated, loyal people (and probably more money than you really wanted to spend on the move), but at least you get the satisfaction of knowing the property owner will probably be quite unhappy with their agent for encouraging the property to be empty so effectively (is the commercial real-estate property as over-stocked in Sydney as it is in S.E. QLD at the moment?). Thankfully, this is something you probably won't have to deal with again considering you now own your own premises. I have been following Steve during his TwitterMove™ experiment and have been impressed with some of the ways problems have been resolved (which I may borrow next time we have to move). Good luck with your new premises and lets hope that the new financial year has many more happy times. Comment (1)
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