You may think that modern technology makes physical location less important, but there is still huge value in face-to-face meetings with customers and suppliers. And who wants to spend time and money travelling great distances around the country if your key contacts could be on your doorstep?
It's vital to think ahead. Once you have a large staff, moving becomes increasingly difficult, so businesses need to be planning their ideal location from the start. To identify the best location, factors to consider include communications links, availability of the right kind of labour and proximity to customers and suppliers.
To maximise profit, you need to keep your costs as low as possible. The two main cost factors of labour and property. Both these will be lower the further you are from London, but other business needs may require you to be close to the capital. There's no point moving to the Scottish Highlands if you need easy access to customers and a large, skilled workforce. Any business's biggest asset is its people, so you must be somewhere you can find people with the right skills and education.
Each individual business may have specific needs when choosing a location: a research company might need to be close to a university; a manufacturing company benefits from proximity to its raw materials or supply chain; and many different businesses benefit from a clustering of similar companies.
Each individual business may have specific needs when choosing a location
All areas of the UK are keen to attract investment and there are many organisations to help you start up in or relocate to their patch. Nearly every local council will have a development agency vying for you to set up in their area. These organisations offer all kinds of assistance and deals to attract companies. They can point you to the cheaper premises, give you information about the skills of a potential workforce, information on communications links, and all the other business factors to consider.
These people are experts at attracting you to their area, and you should tap into all their advice and assistance. But at the same time, it's important to remember that they're all trying to sell their location to you. Talk to as many different agencies as possible and you will have a competing set of offers to make a comparison. Why would you choose an area that couldn't care less when another will bend over backwards to attract you?
If you have an established workforce, you are unlikely to up sticks from one end of the country to another, but your staff could travel 15 or even 30 miles without too much trouble and that could take you into a different town, district or county with a better offer.
When making a decision about location, it makes sense to work downwards by first choosing the region, then the town or district and finally the actual premises is the last thing to look at once you have the ideal location. Development agencies will be able to put you in touch with property agents and suggest individual premises as part of their package to attract you, but it is the last thing to consider.
I set up my website as a one-stop shop for business locations after spotting that there was a wealth of information available, but it was not easy to access or compare. Finding the best possible location should be a priority for every type of business, from the new start-up to the multi-national corporation. Even a one-man band working from home needs to think about where they want to be in the future.
If you don't think ahead or give your location the attention it deserves, you will almost certainly end up with higher costs and lower profits than your potential. It's certainly not all about finding a cheap premises and sticking with it.
For more information please visit www.locations4business.com
