The Hunt for Our Office: An Adventure (of sorts)
I was so excited when my second week at Social Tables (August 2013) I was tasked with finding an office space to accommodate our quickly growing team. At the time we had 20 employees and were looking for a short-term sublet that was fully furnished since at the time we couldn’t afford new furniture.
On the day of our first group of office tours, I set out with one of our real estate brokers to look at five spaces across Northwest DC. We would arrive at a location, take a few minutes to walk around, then hop back in the car to go to the next spot. Each space looked pretty similar (empty office, mediocre furniture), and none were very exciting.
We continued our search for a few months, and any time we found an office that excited us, we couldn’t afford it. Every office we could afford was boring and corporate. This cycle continued until mid-way through October, when we suddenly realized we had two months to: find an office, negotiate a sublease, and figure out move-in logistics. At this point, we went into full crisis mode, touring offices we’d already seen and sending our brokers daily emails, begging them to find somewhere in our price range we could actually picture moving into.
After a few more weeks of searching and finding nothing, we were really starting to panic. Finally, the week before Thanksgiving, we found a 5,000 square foot space that we actually liked — only slightly above our price-range! With only three weeks left until we were homeless, our brokers managed to negotiate a sublease and, somehow, we moved into the space at the end of December.
Lesson One: When searching for a short-term sublease, allow yourself at least 6 months to look for a space.
Fast forward to October 2014. We had a little more than six months left in our sublease (set to expire April 30, 2015) and realized it was time to start looking for a long-term home for our rapidly growing company. We selected a new real estate broker to help us with the search… and soon found out we were already 4–5 months behind schedule if we were planning on doing an entire office buildout. At this point in time we should have already selected our new office space and be well into the design phase of the project.
Lesson Two: When searching for a new office, allow yourself at least 1 year to select a space, design the space, and execute the buildout.
We began our search looking for 15,000–20,000 square feet of space and again found that everything we really liked was out of our price range. After about two months of looking, we finally stumbled upon an amazing office located above the Warner Theatre. Our broker immediately began drafting a Letter of Intent (LOI) while we worked to select a local architect to work on designing our office buildout. We were so excited about our new office space that we decided to announce the location to the entire company during our monthly all-hands meeting. Looking back, this was not the smartest idea since we were still in the process of negotiating — but we were so pumped we didn’t really care.
A couple weeks later, our Board of Directors came to DC for the quarterly meeting and we had the wonderful idea of showing them the new space. Wonderful idea indeed, because: Had they not seen the space that day, we might have signed a 7-year lease for 20,000 sq ft of office space that would have been at maximum capacity the day we moved in. Thankfully, though, they did and quickly helped us realize we were set to outgrow the office within the first six months of moving in.
Lesson Three: When searching for a new office, make sure you look at spaces big enough to accommodate your anticipated headcount 5 years down the road.
Once again we found ourselves back at square one with three months left in our sublease and no place to go. We began the search again (this time for 30,000 sq ft) and shockingly managed to find a space we loved within a few weeks. The only catch: The current tenant’s lease was set to run through February 2016. The broker for the location assured us that they would be able to get this tenant out sooner so we negotiated an extended sublease in our current office and once again begin the LOI process.
Fast forward to present day and after two months of excruciating lease negotiations, we FINALLY signed a lease July 2, 2015. We completed the design phase of our new office build out a little over a month ago and have just entered the permitting phase. Thanks to the careful guidance of our architects and project managers, we’ve managed to make it a full 3 months without making another massive mistake. We’ve still got a long way to go, but what we’ve learned thus far will be invaluable when we begin this process again in a few years.
