Some aspects of facilities are common to all firms, whilst others will depend on the kind of office environment your firm requires.
It may be that you would benefit from advice as to the pros and cons – and we would be happy to discuss those with you. Here’s how we can help.
Building Management
Many smaller firms might benefit from being in the serviced office environment. It is potentially expensive for the space you are likely to have and there are greater restrictions on how you can use the space than if you leased it. On the other hand, there are advantages to outsourcing the many health and safety aspects of managing an office to the landlord.
In addition, you save time by not having to separately negotiate contracts for broadband, utilities and other services that are part of the serviced office contract. These advantages will offset part of the cost, as well as a lot of the inconvenience, compared to the alternative. But it doesn’t remove all your responsibilities. For example, in the context of Covid, it would still be a firm owner’s responsibility to undertake a risk assessment regarding attending the office.
If, though, you have committed to a longer lease in order to grow your business, then you will need to have processes and contracts in place to manage alarms (burglar, fire), fire, gas and electrical safety assessments, consider and mitigate issues arising from workstation set up, and so on.
Are these jobs you want to do? Are these jobs you have the expertise to do? Are these jobs you have the time to do? We have people that can help.
Purchasing group
Skilfully negotiating contracts for stationery, archiving & shredding, utilities and other purchases that your business must make can deliver significant savings. And these savings do matter for retaining profit margins, particularly in low margin areas of legal practice.
However, the process is very time consuming and, in any event, negotiating on behalf of a smaller firm means that you do not necessarily have the buying power to achieve the best rates from suppliers. This is the reason that many purchasing groups have formed over the years to facilitate purchasing based on a larger overall spend – to achieve better individual pricing.
You can come and join our gang. RockMS is already engaged in the process of negotiating these different contracts periodically – usually annually. Each new RockMS client increases the overall spend being offered to suppliers and increases our collective purchasing power. Even if you are a smaller firm, we can help you access the prices being offered to much larger organisations.