John Linton .....it never seems to work for me - no matter how much time and effort I put in to it and irrespective of how many years experience I have.
We moved from our rented premises in North Sydney on May 31st in 2009 to our own purchased premises a hundred or so meters away which had 50% or so more space. Within six months we had to buy more space four floors up in the same building. Now, some nine months after that we are about to run out of space again and although we could scrape by for perhaps another six months by really over using the current space and increasing the number of people who work from home it wouldn't be anything like a sensible solution. We made the same mistake in renting floor space in Sri Lanka taking more space twice on the initial floor we rented before taking a deep breath and nearly trebling the space we rented on a new floor and reserving the remaining 20% on that floor on a first refusal basis for two years.
We have yet to finalise the re-working of the plan for the second half of FY2011 but it is evident that we will not have anything like the space we need if we are to add the numbers of people we look like needing. Even if we continue to grow at the more moderate rate we are achieving over the past few months we will need more space.....and increasing your longer term overheads (as well as incurring the significant up front costs of fit outs) in the brutal market conditions we are experiencing at the moment is a very brave/foolish decision. Like all 'top management' decisions there are no easy answers.
So Annette has been investigating the possibilities with our preference to buy space rather than to rent (strangely our bank seems more than willing to lend us the money to buy - we must have done something right) but it is proving difficult to find what we need in North Sydney and we don't want to incur the price premiums for space in the CBD. We have, fortuitously, been advised that almost the whole floor below us is about to become available and we have briefly looked at that. If we can't find somewhere to buy (the owner of the floor we are considering want's too much money for us to seriously consider buying that which would have been an ideal solution). So we, yet again suffer the consequences of being too timid in accepting what our planning shows us we will achieve....in the latest case it showed quite clearly that we would need more space than we had by around this time.
One alternative is to scale back our plans for next calendar year. That poses a different set of problems in that once you scale down your growth plans you change many 'dynamics' within your business - particularly in personnel expectations and 'morale' - being part of a continuously growing company is something that you would only purposely move away from with great reluctance......for all of the obvious reasons and more less obvious reasons. So obtaining more space that will be usable by very early 2011 has become something that now has priority to 'finalise' (in terms of options, fit out prices and rental commitments/purchase funding) irrespective of whether we actually go ahead and do it or not.
One more thing to worry about.
PS: For sheer commonsense backed by reality and experience this man is hard to beat when it comes to putting the inane writing on the 'NBN2' in place:
http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/365972/us_expert_future_wireless_broadband/
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