1. Office grandeur is wasted money. Spend the cash on making your website better instead. An excessive office gives off the wrong signals when getting profitable is key.
2. Coffee? Get a good coffee machine, yes it’s a personal thing, but the smell of fresh coffee kick starts the morning for me.
3. Meet standing up. A meeting room is important but not essential. Stand up meetings around a PC are quick and to the point. Try change of scene and meet in the local coffee shop.
4. Look for flexibility. You never know what’s round the corner, keep the lease flexible to allow you to expand or contract as needed. In the current market great lease deals are for the taking, make sure to negotiate on rent and terms.
5. Big office toys are fun, but not essential. Staff most impressed by office toys probably aren’t the staff you need.
6. Use mobile phones, have as few landlines are necessary. In the UK you can get unlimited land line calls on a contract for £30 a month, then add a skype out monthly contract (6 Euros per month) to call worldwide landlines for free (thanks to JasonD for the tip)
7. Location. Think about location but remember its not everything, a dynamic company should be able to attract and retain excellent staff on the back of the business and culture rather than its office.
8. Wireless connectivity. Properly secured wireless is great and saves the need for cables everywhere.
9. Large screens and monitors. We’ve only recently done this, but now everyone has at least 24″ of screen to work with, it just seems to make life easier.
10. Simply entry & security. Keep office access features simple and practical (complex alarms, entry systems, etc tend to need admin time) if you’re small enough to work without these systems, then all the better.
11. Bin clutter ASAP. (I’m terrible at this!) if you haven’t used that stack of CD’s or out of date printer in 6 months find another home for it.
12. Use low tech networks. Low tech networks need low tech support which is cheap, sometimes less is more!
13. Secure your data & backup data off site. Double backup and secure heavily the mission critical stuff.
14. In town office space works. Chances are for a tech start up you’ve got a fairly young team, town centre means the team can arrive by public transport. Also lunch breaks can be used to best effect for people with busy lives.
15. Consider taking space in a shared environment. If you’re on your own, and just getting going, shared office space is a cost effective way to you out of the house (and out of your underpants) and allows you to meet new people in a similar situation for networking and business.
16. See if you local university has office space (Doug of CarRentals used this to great effect), space is normally cheap and flexible, networks are in place and talent is on the door step. The vibe of the university also seems to help.
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Any more tips, please add them in the comments below – thanks!
Pictures:
Get some pictures of your work up on the walls. Clients will look at the walls when they come into your office. Show off your best work, they might never have seen it and it will show that you are proud of what you do! Get your team to pick what goes up and change it regularly. You can get high quality frames quite cheaply from the web.
Get a dog.
An office dog enhances the family-feeling that makes a start-up fun to be part of, lowers stress, entertains clients, and means that at least one staff member gets out for a nice walk with the pooch each day.
Ours has her own team CV – job title: client welcomer.
@Tamsin – I agree, we don’t have an office dog but we do have three that come in every now and then.