The business plan was simple. You would offer a writing service that would help high school seniors polish their college admissions essays.
For the first two years you helped three to four customers with this process. Simply employing the teaching techniques you and your business partner used when you were in the classroom, you assisted your clients in honing in on a topic and making the most of their word count. Sometimes aiming for short lengths like 250 words, sometimes expanding to 1000 words for a few select schools, for the most part you helped students craft 650 essays for the standard application that most students used. As time consuming as the task had been in the classroom, your process was enhanced that you were able to offer the student clients the experience of two different teachers. With an eye toward detail and an ear for individual voice, the results were impressive.
Three full ride scholarships for students during your third year of working with students, however, increased your student load and made you reconsider parts of your business plan. Initially content to meet in local libraries or coffee shops and meeting the students close to their home, this plan needed to be revised. When you reached the point where you were meeting with two, sometimes three, different clients an evening, it made much more sense to have the clients come to you.
Although you could not have imagined the success when you started this simple adventure two years ago, you now found yourself entering into an office lease agreement. A fairly small space with room for storage of your materials, by renting the space you would no longer need to carry your bags from location to location. A simple common space between offices allowed you to book two or three clients one right after each other. The few chairs allowed these writers a place to wait if they arrived a few minutes early.
Entering Into an Office Lease Agreement Allows Small Businesses to Expand
Much of the business world is a balance of finding the space that you need to achieve the goals that you have. The option of entering into an office lease agreement instead of building or purchasing a building allows companies to start small and then to grow as needed. Leasing, rather than buying, often offers the immediate opportunity to expand into more space when needed.
From small two person businesses to large corporations that need warehousing and distribution, finding the right space at the right time is crucial to success. Fortunately, determining warehouse space needs and distribution warehouse space needs can be as simple as finding a two person office if clients work with the right real estate agents. Experienced in knowing the right questions to ask about facility needs, the top real estate agents can quickly offer the top options that are available. And while leasing a warehouse space initially seems quite different from entering into an office lease agreement for a small business seem very different, the basic concepts are the same:
- What kind of space do you need?
- Will you need parking?
- How long do you want the initial rent to be?
- What is your budget?
- Do you need the space built out to certain requirements?
- Will you require onsite security?
Statistically, the American markets absorbed a total of 70.2 million square feet of office space in the year 2014. This marked the highest demand since 2006. From businesses as small as one person writing coaches to full staffs trying to meet the needs of emergency insurance claims after a major weather event, this office space needed to be flexible and fluid. While some renters were in for a 24 or 26 month lease, others were simply looking for a two month solution to processing a large number of claims.
And at the same time that office space numbers were increasing, so too was the need for warehouse space. In fact, 4 billion square feet of warehouse space was built between the years 1990 and 2003. This fairly rapid increase led to the U.S. storage and warehouse leasing industry now being worth an estimated $26 billion.
Space is everything. If businesses do not have the space they need, they are limited in what the can achieve and what they can produce.