For the past six months I’ve been agonizing over where our new office should be located.  The agony has never been related to determining what factors should be evaluated so much as it’s been related to the prioritization of these factors. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that there is a “best” choice among any given number of options. You can imagine how difficult this has made my life considering it’s not true in most cases.

So what were the factors that played into our decision for a new office?

Cost and Lease Terms

At the end of the day the cost and lease terms were the number one factor. We have so many good things happening with our company right now and several opportunities that could take us in any number of directions. The last thing we wanted to do was sign a lease that locked us in for a long period of time and strapped us for cash. Our plans for 2010 and 2011 involve a 40% expansion in staff and cash on hand is an important factor in growing our team.  The typical lease for a group like ours runs from three to five years. With the commercial real estate market being what it is, we were able to get a two year lease, several months of free rent, a custom build out and a monthly rate that’s less than half of our current rate. This puts us in a prime position to route these savings towards the expansion of our team and thus the expansion of our service offerings.

Location

Location might have been the toughest factor to evaluate. Should the focus be on the employees and their drives to work or on existing clients who visit most often? What about proximity to the airport for our many out of town clients? How about proximity to where I think future clients will be located? Should I consider a location that is near our bank? Nice hotels? Fun restaurants? The reality is that I have to focus on all those things and some how come up with the “best” answer.

Let’s look closer at employees and clients for a moment.

Employees

For whatever reason, it turns out that the majority of our team members live in Seminole County. This means Longwood, Oviedo, Maitland, and Altamonte. And after closer review it turns out that my partner Eric and I are the only ones who live in Winter Park. Many of our employees put in long hours and love to visit the office on the weekends. If the drive time of 6 individuals could be cut by 50% over a span of roughly 250 working days per year, what could this do to the bottom line? It either gets them more time with their families and thus makes them feel better about their employment with us or it gives them more time to spend at the office helping our clients. Any way you shake it down, this was a vote to head towards a Seminole County destination.

Existing Clients

After taking a sampling of client visits during the past five years we realized the majority of these visits are from out of town clients. We have great clients in places like Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, New York, California, Washington D.C., Virginia, The Bahamas, Puerto Rico and The Cayman Islands who love traveling to Florida to visit us for several days at a time. This means hotels and restaurants are a factor. This means that proximity to the airport is a factor, as is the accessibility of our office, as is parking. While our Park Avenue location is certainly closer to the airport than our Altamonte Springs location, the variety of hotels available near Park Avenue is almost non-existent. And as great as the Park Ave restaurants are, Altamonte Springs has plenty to offer in this category. Our parking situation will be drastically improved with dedicated parking spaces versus our current “first come, first serve, probably gonna get a ticket if the meeting runs long, you don’t have a chance during the two art festivals per year” parking situation.  Although it’s not a landslide, Altamonte Springs seems to edge out our current Winter Park location. Our out of town clients can finally get a good night’s sleep without waking to the Winter Park train every 45 minutes and find a place to park their rental cars.

Floor Plan and Layout

The floor plan and layout was probably the most enjoyable factor to evaluate. Many of the places we looked at allowed us to modify the floor plan to our exact needs but the Altamonte Springs location we selected was the closest to matching our needs out of the gate. This means less time and money will be spent knocking down walls and re-wiring electrical outlets and more time can be spent on customizing the interior. Our current space is about 3,200 sf but we never felt like the layout used this space efficiently. The single largest room in our current office is 16 x 12 and it was very difficult to have more than 6 people in a room collaborating at any given time. This was a big limitation in the collaborative world of web design and development. The first thing we set out to do was enlarge our meeting space to 22 x 19. This will allow two 16′ whiteboards, a 52″ LCD mounted on one wall and a high-resolution projector screen on another. We also have room for a U shaped table to comfortably seat 10.

The one thing we did really like about our Park Ave location was that it allowed for every employee to have a private office. I know there are endless debates about open work areas vs. private work areas and there are some really bright people on different sides of the fence. To me, it boils down to personal preference. Employees will be most productive where they are happiest. I spent roughly five years working in a very open environment when I was a software developer for Fidelity Information Systems and did not enjoy it. I’ve always been more of a “tune the world out and get to work” sort of person. Complete immersion. Finding and embracing “the zone”. A private office has always been a better setting for me to work this way and it seems that our employees are all wired the same way. Each private office is large enough to have three people comfortably collaborate. Each private office is equiped with ample white board space, seating space, and telephone equipment. And when more than three people are required for a meeting, we have a great conference room to handle that.

Here is a snapshot of our new floor plan:

Intangible Perks

Once we found places that met our specs for cost and lease term, location, and floor plan and layout we started to look around at the intangible perks. Because we had already decided on a Seminole County destination the choice here seemed obvious. Uptown Altamonte is the only area we felt could begin to compete with the intagibles offered by Park Ave in Winter Park. The water, the bridge, the surrounding beauty, the restaurants within walking distance, the community events, the mall, the movie theater, the nearby grocery store and even a daycare within walking distance for one of our employees.  It’s the intangible perks that make our employees love coming to work and encourages our clients to stop by more often then they otherwise might.

Without further ado, here is an aerial shot of our new office location: