The question almost every business owner asks first isn't "how much" or "when". It's "how long will we be down for?" That's the real fear with an office move: not the cost, but the days when nobody can work, the phones ring out, and the customers who needed you that week quietly go somewhere else.
The good news is that lost trading days are almost always avoidable. Downtime on an office move is a planning problem, not an inevitability. Get the sequence right and most businesses are back at their desks the next morning as if nothing happened. Get it wrong and you can lose a week to a move that should have taken a weekend.
Here's how the businesses that move well actually do it.
Move when nobody's working
The single biggest lever is timing. If your team works Monday to Friday, the move happens Friday evening through the weekend, and everyone logs back in Monday at the new address. Nothing about your trading week changes. This is how we run most commercial moves, and it's the reason a lot of clients are surprised at how little they notice.
Out-of-hours and weekend moves cost a little more, because the crew is working evenings and Saturdays. But weigh that against the cost of a lost trading day. For most businesses, even one day of stalled work, missed orders, and idle staff dwarfs the premium on a weekend move. The maths usually makes itself.
If a weekend won't work, an evening move can. We've shifted small offices between 6pm and midnight and had staff walk into a working space the next morning. It depends on the size of the job and the access at both ends, which is exactly what the survey is for.
If you can't close, move in phases
Some businesses really can't go dark, even for a weekend. A customer support team that runs seven days, say, or a firm mid-project with deadlines that won't wait. For those, the answer is a phased move.
Phasing means splitting the office into groups and moving them one at a time, so at no point is the whole business offline. Non-customer-facing teams go first. Their kit is set up and tested at the new office before the customer-facing teams follow, so the phones are always live somewhere. Done properly, no single team loses more than a few hours, and the business as a whole never stops trading.
Phasing takes more planning than a single weekend move, and it needs a clear runsheet everyone agrees to in advance. It's more work up front. It's also the difference between a move your customers never notice and one they feel for a fortnight.
The IT is where the day is won or lost
Ask anyone who's had a bad office move where it went wrong, and the answer is nearly always the same. It wasn't the desks. It was that Monday morning arrived and the network wouldn't come up, the phones weren't ported, and half the team sat looking at dead screens.
IT is the critical path. Everything else can be a bit late without much harm; the IT can't. So it gets planned first and moved with the most care. Workstations are labelled by user and desk before they're unplugged, so each one goes back exactly where its person sits. Servers and comms equipment travel with anti-static protection and in a set order. And the timing is built around your IT team or supplier, so the kit is in the right room and ready the moment they arrive to bring the network back up.
One thing worth saying plainly: the removals crew moves the hardware, they don't reconnect your network or configure your systems. That stays with your IT people. What a good mover does is make their job as fast as possible by getting everything labelled, sequenced, and in position. The two jobs have to be planned together. (There's a fuller guide to IT and server relocation if you want the detail.) If your broadband and phone lines at the new office aren't live before moving day, nothing else matters, so sort those weeks ahead, not the week of.
Tell people before, not after
A move that goes perfectly on the physical side can still cost you business if nobody told your customers it was happening. The address change needs to go out ahead of the move, not as an afterthought once you've unpacked.
Update your website, your Google listing, your email signatures, your invoices, and your headed paper. Tell suppliers and anyone who posts you anything. Redirect the post. If your phone number is changing, that's a bigger deal, flag it everywhere and as early as you can, because a dead number costs you enquiries you'll never even know you missed. Most businesses keep their number, which makes this easier, but check with your provider well ahead of the day.
Give yourself somewhere to put things
A surprising amount of move-day chaos comes from having nowhere to put the things you're not ready for. The new office isn't fit out yet, the old lease overlaps by a fortnight, you're downsizing and there's furniture you can't place on day one. Trying to cram all of it into the new space at once turns a clean move into a scramble.
This is what storage is for. Holding furniture, archived records, or surplus equipment offsite for a few weeks means the new office opens clear and working, and you deal with the rest at your own pace. It's a small cost that takes a lot of pressure off the day itself.
What we'd do
When we survey a commercial move, we're not just counting desks. We're working out the sequence: what moves first, what your IT people need and when, where the access pinch points are at both buildings, and how to fit the whole thing into the window you've got without a working day being lost. That plan is agreed with you before the day, so there are no decisions being made on the fly with a van blocking the loading bay.
The businesses that lose days are almost always the ones that treated the move as a single event to get through rather than a sequence to plan. It's the planning that protects the trading, every time.
If you're weighing up an office move and want to know how to run it without losing a day, our office removals team can talk it through and survey both buildings before quoting. For a free, no-obligation quote, fill in our contact form or call 0800 043 5393.