In common with most startups, Loftex started life in the UK in a tiny managed-service office. Then moved to a slightly larger one, more central. Then had a wall knocked through to expand said office to a modest but multi-roomed one. Then realised someone was going to want money for all this….
Right at the point that it looked like we might have to re-shrink the office, a stroke of luck. The managed-service-office people got evicted. Turns out they were in their turn renting what they rented to us, and their landlord (a state-owned enterprise of some infamy) had decided they needed the space for their own expanding workforce, having only lost £200 million in the preceding financial year and needing to staff up to get government’s attention (which they duly did, but that’s another tale). Now this was lucky for every tenant of the managed-service office company because (and who’d have believed it of the legal profession) their lawyers had screwed up and failed to notice a fine detail of their lease. Namely, the 30 days notice period.
This was some 60 days shorter than the notice period their own tenants had. So some humble pleading began, based on a need to relocate all tenants to one of their other fine facilities, none of which was central. Because if a tenant refused to budge a costly and embarrassing legal battle could be guaranteed to hit the papers (at least, the local ones).
So we were showed a series of offices, each grander and more remote than the last. And a deal was struck. Our man in charge of such things, Roger, did his best disgruntled terrier impersonation and got us twice the previous office space for half the going rate. Better, we needed a space they didn’t actually have, so ended up with a space way larger than we needed with a promise not to use the desks in half of it. Which we didn’t, much. Same as we only ever used the internet one at a time so only paid for one ‘live’ port with all the rest just for intra-office communications (these people were even slower than BT to realise what a router could do).
Life went on, the commute from the centre an irritation but the expanded space (including our own ‘boardroom’ should we ever appoint a board) pleasant enough internally. The surrounding wasteland took some getting used to (but saved the wallet from the deprivations of shops, sandwich bars and pubs) but the views of traffic queues and delayed trains were small compensations. We grew to fill the space, almost. We grew beyond our ability to pay the ‘burn’. We grew angry and mutinous.
In months when there was no guarantee of salaries being met, brochures for newer, bigger, fancier offices were spotted floating around the desks of key individuals. This is where my lack of financial nous comes up again. Apparently if you do deals where the first year’s rental is deferred this can make an apparently more expensive office cheaper. Obviously we’d have to spend our office hours sitting on beer-crates until furniture was made affordable (who knows, IKEA might have a ‘pay nothing till 2007′ offer any day now) and there might be small inconveniences in the target offices being in a village without public transport to speak of, but the overall benefit of having our name on a lease and being able to buy our own coffee out-weighed these considerations.
Perhaps unluckily, the opportunity to move evaporated when a bunch of asylum seekers with cash gazumped us, so we stayed put. Well, almost. Again the managed-service office people made us another offer we couldn’t refuse, so we moved again, this time within the building. Even bigger, yes, and definitely grander for the Politburo side of the office. Once again parts of it aren’t strictly ours so we pretend not to use them. Aside from one instance of an entire live server-rack being accidentally left in a ‘spare’ office, we’ve not been caught doing so yet, either.
Without naming rights for the building we still have unfulfilled ambitions in the real-estate aspects of our corporate existence, but at least now visiting clients get a better sense of what Loftex is all about.
The key to this of course is that the size and physical separation of our offices is such that from the meeting rooms, the wailings of the staff are inaudible.
