Location, location, location.
Since 1996 we’ve served London and Yorkshire from Halifax and, more recently, a local London office in the heart of Bloomsbury. But we’re on the move.
In 2011 we fully adopted a location-agnostic model, dropping our dependence on physical location. This approach has been fantastically successful and it’s now time to embrace and extend this location-independence whilst maintaining our client-support ethos.
As less is required of our office infrastructure, how we provide local physical support has also changed so that means we’re on the move. We identified a number of changes:
- Ease of access – closer to key transport links and more convenient.
- Shift from formalised desk space to co-working hub-type accommodation.
- Easier access to small ad-hoc meeting space and less need for formal meeting areas.
- Wholesale shift away from traditional communications such as landline switchboards and posted mail to collaborative communications such as Slack, Skype and our Zendesk-based helpdesk platform.
- Need for reliable ultra-high speed Wi-Fi and 4G data at office locations.
- The end of the stigma attached to virtual organisations.
- London-focus of our core client base needs improved and better located facilities for our central London clients.
Usefully, the digital world is becoming an easier place to exist in a virtual mode and new operational models are appearing that understand the need to deliver improved location-agnostic working.
With the planned HS2 train service, the choice for locations was pretty simple. That means bases at either end of service at Kings Cross Station, London and Leeds Station. We’re down to a short-list of office providers and expect to have completed our office move by the start of Q2 2015.
We’re very excited to be on the move again and we’ve seen some fantastic co-working hubs over the last few months – it’s refreshing to see the growth in virtual office working and the choice today is vast compared with our last move.
It will mean saying goodbye to our local presence in Halifax, and we’ll miss the wonderful, and award-winning, converted mill we moved into a decade ago but times move on and we hardly use the space since we went fully location-agnostic 4 years ago.
We’ll miss our Bloomsbury office, too, it’s one of the last areas in central London that still retains a village-feel and community (we’ll miss the pubs, too) but it’s “close, but not close enough to major links” location has made it ever more redundant over the last year.
We were, for a while, tempted by some of the trendy new locations around Old Street and Shoreditch but second-rate communications and even poorer value dragged our thinking back to the needs of the team and not to sweat about “cool” (and pointless) postcodes.
We’ll keep you posted on the details once we’ve made our move and look forward to meeting clients at our fab new co-working spaces.
