Avoid these mistakes when moving to your first business’ premises

September 16, 2021 3

Small business owners are guilty of making common mistakes all the time. There are many instances in your life where you might make an error or two. When you look at the process of setting up a company, you can identify numerous occasions where mistakes are more likely to happen. For example, starting your business and drawing up your business plan – a lot of entrepreneurs make errors here, which have a knock-on effect and can set their business back before it’s even up and running.

However, there’s one particular instance where more mistakes are made; moving into your first workplace. Whether this is an office, warehouse, retail store, restaurant; you name it, it’s a cause for concern. In this post, we’ll explore some of the most obvious mistakes small business owners make at this point, helping you avoid them in the future.

Not buying business insurance

Business insurance is absolutely essential. This is true, especially when you work in a setting with employees, or see members of the public daily. At the very least, you need to have general liability insurance. This protects you if someone gets injured on your premises – say, by slipping on a wet floor in your retail store. You should also have worker’s compensation insurance, which protects you and your employees if one of them gets injured or sick at work.

The mistake in this situation is not having any insurance at all. Not only can this technically be illegal in some states, but it leaves you vulnerable. All it takes is one customer to have a small accident. Then your business can be sued for a lot of money.

business location — MAX VAKHTBOVYCH/PEXELS PHOTO

Not conducting a health and safety survey

Before moving into any business premises, you need to conduct an extensive health and safety survey to see how safe your workplace is. This helps you identify any safety concerns that will need to be dealt with before you can open for business. As an example, you may move into an old office and realize there’s asbestos in the ceiling. Thus, you need to pay to have this safely removed before you start work.

Failure to carry out these checks can mean you put people at risk, which could lead to legal and financial ramifications. Not only that, but it can also mean that you move into a place that demands lots of extra work to get it up to the current safety standards, meaning it costs far too much money.

Not checking out the local area

Do you know what the local area is around your new workplace? If you’ve lived and worked there all your life, you will be pretty confident when starting a business there. However, if you move somewhere that you’ve never been, are you sure it’s a great place to open a business? Maybe the workplace location was cheap for a reason. It could be that hardly anyone lives there, and the business opportunities are scarce. Always scope things out beforehand to avoid moving somewhere that offers limited opportunities for your small company.

As you can tell, it’s very easy to make these mistakes when you start your business. Hopefully, by identifying the errors in this post, you will be able to stop yourself from making them.