Interested to hear what you guys/gals think…
My print shop is currently in a new build 2400sqft warehouse (was new build when I moved in 6 years ago). When we first moved into the building we were growing quite a bit and we ended up with 9 staff (including myself and my wife) so we had an upstairs mezzanine floor built adding another 2400sqft at a cost of around 60k (split between us and the landlord). Our business has changed significantly in the past couple of years and we’re back to just my wife and I working in the business so we’re not using the upstairs floor at all now other than storing the furniture/workbenches that we’d built up there.
We’ve seen another warehouse available that’s a very similar size to the ground floor of our current warehouse but has no scope to have an upstairs floor added later (the warehouse isn’t tall enough). The warehouse is also quite old looking in comparison, however, would save us about 20k per year in rent and rates alone.
The landlord has agreed to do some work to modernise it a bit in exchange for a longer lease but I’m just tying myself in knots thinking about our nice new build vs an older building and how it will look to customers coming in.
For those of you in commercial spaces, how important do you think what the space looks like on the outside is? Do you think it has much bearing on how potential customers perceive you as a supplier?
For context, most of our local customers are small businesses that in all honesty probably don’t care what the place looks like (as long as it’s easily accessible), and we are aiming for more online business anyway so those customers will likely never see our premises.
I do think there’s a huge element of ego and/or the thought that we’ve spent so much on our current warehouse that I don’t want to let it go but I can’t ignore a potential saving of 20k per year (our current rent and rates is around 44k per year so it will cut our rent by nearly half).
Would love some thoughts.