The right type of premises in the right location can be the key to business or success or a millstone around your neck that can kill all progress. The decision has never been more critical, or the downside so low.
For retail businesses especially the risks are huge. You would have to be very confident indeed to take on any long term lease in a post Covid-19 world with growing on-line retail as a backdrop.
The decision is driven as much by the business model as by the actual location these days. Having a good balance between on-line and physical sales significantly increases the choice.
It could be argued that the seeming death of the high street should put the new entrant in a good negotiating position, but the landlords are under much more financial pressure these days and have to hold their prices to prevent a price collapse.
The other dimension to this is business rates which are calculated more on floor space than turnover - a genuine millstone around the physical businesses neck.
Having a good balance between online and retail can allow you to have smaller premises, perhaps in a less prominent location which can reduce rent and rates.
The more specific the business niche, the further people will come to find you. For example, if you will be the only picture framer in town, you can locate wherever you like and only a small amount of advertising will mean customers will seek you out - no matter where you are.
The post Covid-19 world will not just mean more remote working, it will mean more people wanting remote working aswell as greater customer acceptance of a distributed workforce.
Teleconferencing while not ideal has nevertheless become much more widely accepted in a very small period of time in 2020. This provides much more flexibility about where employees can be located as even important sales presentations can be made online and accepted.
Technologies such as hosted PBX are not exactly new, but suddenly have become much more practical and attractive in the new working environment.
These are positive developments for a business owner which provide much more flexibility about how and where to operate a business. It may not quite mean the death of all mega-offices and commuting, but it is likely to mean a reduction in both.
While these trends will create more problems for city centres they provide more options to improve the work-life balance of employees, increase productivity and reduce costs. It is difficult to turn away from that.
None of these comments provide a definitive answer as to the best type of business, but the overriding principles for the future appear to be to look for smaller, more flexible locations that can make use of distributed working and allow the business to be highly responsive to a very unstable outlook.
