When speaking with business owners and leadership teams, there is often a desperate need to move premises and time is one of the biggest obstacles.
Time is a valuable resource that is so often wasted. Once lost it cannot be re-found or replaced.
How efficient are you with the use of your time? I’m an avid bookworm and one of the books I am reading at the moment is the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.
It’s a fascinating read and I’m about a half-way through. One of the points it raises is that from scientific study carried out on the ultra-successful, one commonality was found, which above all else determined the level of success and that is their ability to focus on the most important things. By focusing on the most important things, this will give you the greatest leverage to achieve the things you want to achieve.
The more I’ve thought about this, Covey is absolutely right. The demands placed on the business owner and the leadership team to run a business, can be incredibly time consuming. The distinction between important and urgent work can become blurred and it’s easy to slip into the operation whirlwind of the business.
I hear this all the time from the business owners I speak with. They are caught in a cycle where they need to move premises (to facilitate a business expansion, which takes them and their business towards their business objectives) and yet they are so busy in the business they can’t free up any time to devote to a thorough search. They end up searching when they can grab a free moment. I hear “yes I will have a look online occasionally, but nothing really comes on to the market and I can’t find what I’m looking for”.
Finding the right property for your business (unless you are incredibly lucky), is far more than just the occasional look online. Looking online is certainly part of it, but it also involves speaking with the commercial property agents on a very regular basis.
As a business owner and a leadership team, you have choices, you can stay as you are searching on an adhoc basis hoping a suitable property will suddenly appear. You could decide that finding the commercial property is the important task that you should be doing and devote more time to it. As you probably are finding out though, looking for commercial property can be incredibly frustrating and whilst devoting more time to it could help, more time will not guarantee results. So you could trade off your leadership and management tasks to property tasks and still have nothing to show for your efforts. This is one of the biggest frustrations for the people I speak with. In reality, this has cost you twice.
The third choice is to contain your business growth and stay the size you are, which would seem a shame, if you’ve got the opportunity to grow.
Finally, you could bring a property expert on board to help you. This gives you leverage in a number of different ways. It frees up your time to continue working on the important things within the business and a property expert, with their contacts and experience, is more likely to get to a solution, enabling your business to grow quicker.
If you are looking to move commercial property to achieve your business growth and want to leverage your time and our property expertise then please give us a call to discuss how we can help you achieve this.
June 21