Moving the business: what to order three months ahead, and the weeks you exist at two addresses

The article beside this one asks what actually stops a business for a day and orders the IT pillar by that. It addresses somebody settled in one place, deciding what to deal with first.

This one starts from an event. A move puts the line, the cabling, the servers, the telephony, the cameras, the backups and the address printed on all your documents to the test in the same month — on a date you did not choose and cannot easily negotiate.

The commonest mistake is treating it as a transport problem. The van is never the long pole: the long pole is a line an operator has to bring to an address, and no budget recovers that delay.

This article gives what to check before signing the lease, what must exist at both addresses at once, the order of shutdown on the last day, and why we will never give you a connection lead time.

The step costs a visit and a call. You check, for the exact address — number, building, floor — whether it is served, by which technology, and whether capacity is available. That is not the same question as "is the district covered", and the difference between the two is the subject of a great many lost months.

Do it on the two or three premises you are comparing, not only the one you prefer. The answer sometimes reverses the ranking: two equivalent units, one connectable in a fortnight and one within a delay nobody will commit to, are not two equivalent units.

If the question can be brought into the lease negotiation, bring it. A clause suspending commencement until service is available, or simply a later entry date, costs one conversation and saves you paying rent on premises your business cannot work in.

This check is also the moment for two other questions to the landlord, free now and difficult later: may we drill and run cable, and where does the electrical supply arrive. The second decides where your cabinet goes, and where the cabinet goes decides all the cabling.

We labour the point because it is the only place in this subject where a few hours before signature are worth weeks afterwards. Every other mistake in a move is recovered by paying; this one is recovered only by waiting.

The number your customers know is often the most valuable item in your installation and the worst handled, because it looks like nothing: it is printed on thousands of documents and saved in thousands of phones.

You need to know from the start which kind of number it is. A fixed line is attached to service and to an area; a mobile follows the card; a number served over an internet telephony system follows the configuration rather than the place. Those three cases do not pose the same problem and do not have the same answer.

The question to put to your operator is precise and should be put in writing: can this number be kept at the new address, and if so within what time. A reassuring verbal answer at a counter is worth nothing three weeks later.

When the answer is no, one measure works and it is cheap: keep the old line for a month or two after leaving, with a divert to the new number. That costs two subscriptions for eight weeks and saves you the calls of customers dialling a number they wrote down three years ago.

It is also why a move is a good moment to raise internet telephony, without it being compulsory: a number that no longer depends on a socket never has to move again. The bad moment to decide it, though, is the week of the move.

There is a surprisingly stable list of things that vanish during a move, and it contains no computers. They are the small indispensable objects nobody owns.

At the top: the server’s UPS, unplugged first, set on a box, then forgotten. Unusual power leads. The service keyboard and monitor that let you reach a machine with no network. The key or dongle that licenses an accounting package. The little label printer.

A more awkward category joins them: information. The router’s administrative password, the line contract’s reference, the cabinet code, the name of the contractor who installed the cameras four years ago. They were nowhere — they were in somebody’s head, and that somebody is currently carrying boxes.

The defence is a box and a page. One closed box carried by the owner or manager rather than by the van, holding the critical small objects. One page holding the credentials, handed over in person at the new address rather than sent as a message.

It can look trivial beside the rest. It is nevertheless what decides, in half the cases we have seen, whether the first Monday starts at eight or at two.

We run the address check on the premises you are comparing, before the lease. We build the inventory and the diagram, write the "where each function lives during the transition" page, and fit out the new premises while you are still working in the old.

On switch day we shut down in order, with the backup verified first and the breaker last, and we bring things up at the new address starting with what has to work on Monday morning rather than with what is most visible.

We refuse to give you a connection lead time, including when it is asked for as an order of magnitude. The previous section says why: it is not information we hold and are withholding, it is a property of your address that only a check reveals.

We also refuse to guarantee an overnight switch without having seen both premises. It is sellable and it is sometimes true; mostly it is the promise whose cost, when it is wrong, is paid by the client as a week of disorganised trading while the supplier did indeed work all night.

Finally, we will tell you when your system should not move with your furniture. If your server is eight years old, transporting it and powering it up elsewhere is the moment in its life most likely to end it; better to replace it beforehand, or leave it off and work another way for a fortnight. That reduces what we invoice on moving day, and it is the only honest recommendation.