We’re moving….

1 June, 2008

After 3 happy years at Centaur House we’ve decided it’s time for a change of offices. Although it might not be what you think….

We’ve been chatting for a while now about what to do about our offices. They’ve suited us well so far, but once we made the decision to stay small and focussed rather than take the larger agency route, there seemed to be a bit too much space to fill with things we didn’t want to get rid of. Hence two broken monitors sitting in the corner of the room Skateboard and I share. Our main reason for taking office space was so that clients can visit us – however increasingly, we go to them because most of them are busy running their businesses and like the fact we are more than happy to travel and see them.

So we made a decision. We’re building a new office (well we’re getting people who know how to build an office to build one for us).

As we’ve grown, we’ve found that we are working longer hours – usually including at least at least one day of the weekend (especially during football season, as Greg listens to the Norwich match at work). This has had a knock on effect for our work/life balance – especially as our son works different hours to us, so we were only seeing him once a week when we do ‘family meal’ where we all sit down together and share our news. We tend to be in the office between 10:30am and 7pm (although we check emails from about 8am), which means when we get home we have to start getting something to eat, doing chores etc. So we decided to build the new office in our garden.

The plan is that we still work from 10am until 7pm, but we can break at 6pm for a home cooked meal, instead of grabbing the quickest thing we can find in the cupboard. Plus if we want to work a bit later we can, and if we need to start a bit later we can. It also means that all the stuff currently in the den (where we work from home) can go into the office, meaning our home is for living in, and our office is for working in.

One of the things that helped our decision was the increasing movement towards shedworking, so when Cathy Dobson (author of the excellent Planet Germany and also a shed worker) pointed us towards Alex’s shedworking blog we both knew immediately that this was an option we were keen to explore. Not only does it give us the chance to work more effectively, it also lowers both our environmental and financial overheads as the office is built to be environmentally friendly, taking fewer resources to keep cool or warm.

The building is well under way, and we’ll post some images when we can remember where we put the camera….

Rachael posted this in Business, News, Random

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