Food for Thought: Planning in Decommissioning and Liquidation Projects

This month’s Food for Thought is about the importance of planning in decommissioning and liquidation projects.

As a facilities professional, you juggle multiple priorities daily. The sight of looming deadlines, like the expiration dates for leases you plan to vacate, can be overwhelming. Negotiating all the terms and conditions for your new office space is undoubtedly a top priority. However, before moving out of your old offices, you must navigate a potentially daunting number of steps to ensure an efficient, cost-effective decommissioning project. This involves optimizing your office furniture assets for either reuse or sustainable liquidation.

It doesn’t require magic; the key to success lies in meticulous planning. The best investment you can make is choosing an experienced partner who can provide comprehensive, end-to-end service for every aspect of your project.

It's easy to underestimate the complexity of planning, especially when deciding how much time to allocate for organization before a move and identifying the key milestones to avoid delays and cost overruns.  In our Pragmatic Guide to Office Asset Management we review the factors to consider in planning extensively, including checklists to make planning more seamless. 

In this post, we want to offer some key considerations for timing that should be factored into your planning.

Although there's no universal rule for when most leases expire, our analysis of project logs over several decades indicates that the 4th quarter of each calendar year tends to be the busiest.

Where do you begin? The most crucial date is when your expiring lease requires you to completely vacate and surrender the space back to the landlord. Missing this deadline can result in steep financial penalties.

Assuming you've already explored the market, identified, and negotiated the lease for your new premises (a process that could take 12-24 months depending on the size of your occupancy and the terms you want to secure), here's what to consider next.

Working backward from the date you need to vacate your current lease, our rule of thumb is to allow a minimum of six months for spaces between 10K to 25K sq ft. For spaces between 50K and 100K sq ft, you should begin planning at least a year in advance.

During the initial planning process, select an experienced partner who can confirm the scope of work, agree on costs, and define service deliverables and project milestones. Once you begin working with that partner, they will identify and sequence all necessary factors to ensure the project is completed on time by the lease expiration date.

Your partner will conduct walk throughs of the existing office space and then create a detailed inventory of the office assets you will retain, remanufacture and reallocate, or liquidate if they are past their useful life.

Your partner can provide space planning and help you identify those furniture items you need to acquire beyond your existing inventory to accommodate new office configurations.  [In another blog post we actually explored the benefits of buying remanufactured furniture for resale versus “buying new”, as a principle of the circular economy. And the good news is that remanufactured office furniture, refurbished in our own manufacturing facility is another feature of the TFX end-to-end service offerings!]

Your partner will conduct a careful assessment of the landlord’s building policies that will impact your schedule (access to freight elevators and loading docks, black-out dates for work in the building due to holidays, etc., and prohibited hours for demolition that might disturb adjacent tenants.)

In pursuit of responsible liquidation, your partner will also plan with qualified recyclers who play the crucial role of final disposal of items that cannot be re-used or reclaimed.  At the end of the project, once they take custody of those items that cannot be refurbished, or reallocated, they will need to dispose of them, according to the highest standards to certify maximum landfill diversion, commensurate with your sustainability goals.

Simultaneously, you will need to coordinate with internal stakeholders, including HR, staff, records management, IT, and operations, to ensure employees remove personal items from the space and arrange for remote work during the relocation. Effective communication is essential to ensure everyone is confident that the process will go smoothly.

When decommissioning day comes your partner will have assembled the team who will decommission and remove furniture items, trucking the carefully inventoried items according to your disposition plan.  If there is a gap between vacating your old space and occupying your new one, your ideal partner will be able to provide storage to tide you over.  

All of this requires impeccable project management and planning that only an experienced partner overseeing all the moving parts themselves can provide.  At TFX, we believe that our experience qualifies us to be that ideal partner in any of your relocation projects. 

If you, like many other facilities executives, are facing a lease expiration in the next six months, it's time to start planning now. Please reach out to inquiry@tfxfurniture.com and let’s have a conversation about how we can help set you up for success.