Walking the floor before anything gets touched
We start every commercial job with a walkthrough of both the old space and the new one, usually with whoever manages the office along for the tour. That walkthrough is where we sort out which desks, filing cabinets, and shared equipment are staying, which are being replaced, and which workstation goes where in the new layout.
Instead of labelling boxes by room the way a house move works, we number each workstation and department on a floor plan and match every box and piece of furniture to that number. A receptionist unpacking on Monday morning should never have to guess which of forty identical boxes has the desk phone in it.
Scheduling around the business, not the calendar
Most commercial moves happen on a weekend or overnight, so staff walk into a finished space rather than a construction site of boxes on a Monday. We book the loading dock or freight elevator for the full window we expect to need, plus a buffer, since a building that only gives us two hours does not care how much furniture is left in the hallway when the clock runs out.
For a business that cannot close at all, such as a clinic or a shop with walk-in customers, we split the move into phases and shift sections overnight or in slower hours, so there is always a working space open during business hours.
Handling shared equipment and cables
Photocopiers, servers, and networking equipment get flagged early, since some of it needs a technician present rather than just careful lifting. We photograph the back of any complicated setup before disconnecting it, the same as we would for a home entertainment system, and bag cables by machine rather than by type.
A server room or a room full of filing cabinets under lock and key gets its own numbered zone on the floor plan, and access to that zone is limited to whoever the office manager names ahead of time, not just whoever from the crew happens to be closest.
Getting the doors open on time
Reception, phone lines, and whatever equipment the business needs first thing get placed and reassembled before we touch the back offices, so the parts of the space that customers or clients see are ready first. A final walkthrough with the office manager confirms every numbered zone landed where the floor plan said it would.
If anything is missing or in the wrong spot, we sort it before the crew leaves rather than promising to circle back later in the week, because a business that opens Monday morning does not have a second chance to make that impression.