--- title: What to sort out before you move offices description: The technology side of an office move runs on lead times, not gear. What to order first, what to test, and what is better left behind. date: 2026-09-30 updated: 2026-09-30 tags: [planning, small business] url: "https://joshdargie.com/blog/before-you-move-offices" author: Josh Dargie --- Most office moves I get pulled into are already behind schedule, and the reason is rarely the equipment. It is the internet connection. Almost everything else in a move can be bought in a week. A business circuit into a building that does not already have one cannot. ## Order the connection before you commit to dates The first question is not which provider to use. It is whether the building already has usable service at the suite you are taking, and who owns the wiring between the street and your walls. If fibre is already lit in the building and there is a path to your floor, an install can happen in a couple of weeks. If it is not, you are waiting on a build: permits, a crew, and often the landlord's sign-off to open a wall or use the riser. I have watched that take three months. Nobody warns you at lease signing, because the leasing agent usually does not know and does not have to care. So do this early. Get the exact suite address, ask two providers to run a serviceability check on it, and ask specifically whether the date they quote assumes infrastructure that already exists. Get the answer in writing. Then keep the old circuit running past the move date. Paying for two connections for three or four weeks is the cheapest insurance in the whole project. Cancel the old one after the new one has carried a full week of real work, not on the day the truck arrives. ## Assume the cabling that is there is not usable Every vacated office has network cable in the ceiling, and it always looks fine from the doorway. Sometimes it is fine. Often it is Cat5e from 2006, a third of it has been cut, none of it is labelled, and the patch panel left with the last tenant. Test before you plan around it. A certification pass on the existing drops is cheap next to discovering on day one that eleven of your twenty desks have no live jack. And if the cabling does need redoing, that work wants to happen while the space is empty. Once the desks and monitors are in, the same job costs more and irritates everyone. For a straightforward commercial Cat6 drop I usually see $200–400 per run in Southern Ontario, with more where there is conduit, a hard ceiling or a heritage building involved. If a cabling quote comes in far under that, read it the way I would read any [network quote](/blog/network-quote-red-flags). Decide where the rack goes too, and go stand in the room first. A network closet with no ventilation and no dedicated power is a problem you will live with for years. ## Find everything pinned to your old address Moves break things that have nothing to do with moving. The list differs for every business and it is worth writing down before anyone packs a box: - Static IP addresses, and anything that trusts them. A VPN, a payment terminal, remote access to a server, a supplier portal that allowlists your office. - Phone numbers, and whether they can port on your timeline rather than the carrier's. - Alarm and camera monitoring, which may depend on a line type that does not exist at the new suite. - Door access. Fobs working on day one takes longer than people expect, and it is usually the landlord's system rather than yours. The pattern I see is that the network gets planned properly and the boring dependencies get discovered on the Monday morning. ## Decide what is not coming with you A move is a good moment to stop paying to move something. The aging on-premises server, the printer nobody likes, the switch in the corner that predates the current staff: this is the one time the cost of keeping them is visible. The trap is doing too much at once. A move is already a change. Stacking a server migration or a phone system replacement on top of it means that when something misbehaves on Monday, you will not know which project caused it. If you can separate them by a month in either direction, do that. Plenty of gear is worth carrying over untouched. Replacing working equipment because it happens to be in a box already is not a saving, and I have written before about [leaving working systems alone](/blog/keep-what-you-have). ## A realistic timeline Ninety days out is comfortable. Sixty is workable. Thirty is a scramble, and at that point your choices narrow to whatever can be delivered rather than whatever is right. Work backwards from the first day you need people actually working, not from the day the lease starts. Those are different dates. The gap between them is where the cabling, the circuit test and one quiet day of troubleshooting belong. If you want a second set of eyes on the plan before you commit to dates and deposits, that is the sort of thing I do on a [planning engagement](/hire#planning), quoted as a fixed fee, hourly or on retainer depending on scope. If you need the physical work done, my company [RelayPoint Technologies](https://relaypoint.ca) handles cabling, mounting, cameras and access across Southern Ontario. Either way, start with the circuit, then [get in touch](/contact) if you want to talk the rest through.