Our Landlord Kicked Us Out! (NEW OFFICE)

All right, so it's late at night, but tomorrow our new office is going to be starting. Everyone's going to be showing up tomorrow morning for the first day here at the new office. I want to show you guys around real quick and hopefully show my decision making process on this. So a few weeks ago we were told that our lease was not going to get renewed. And let's stick, since we're going into spring rush and we are hiring a whole bunch of people for the command center. That's where I'm at right now. You're going to see some balloons. We got snacks for the team. They're going to be showing up tomorrow morning. Give them some donuts, pump them up full of sugar. Let's go. I told everyone to bring their sweet tooth, so it's definitely a little bit bare. This used to be a retail store, like a Bass Hanes underwear store used to be back in the day. But what's crazy, let me walk you through how this happened. So literally a few weeks ago, I emailed our landlord. I was like, hey, our lease is coming up. And I fully expected them to be okay with us continuing our lease. We had three offices inside the building. They were all smaller offices, but they kind of got the job done. And they're like, yeah, by the way, we're not going to renew the lease because you're using the building so much that it is causing issues with other tenants. And obviously we were filling up the parking. We were parking in another parking spot and people were walking to the office. So we just outgrown the area, honestly, and outgrown the space. But that put me in a really bad spot because I had to now come up with a new office within a matter of a couple weeks because we had conference last week. And then we start training at least 20 people starting here in a couple weeks now. And so by the end of January, we have. We. I knew we had to be moved in here. And yet it is the last week of December and I have conference the first week of January. So I literally, in two days, made the decision on where we were going to go. Immediately contacted every single potential place on LoopNet that was leasing. I contacted an eight couple agents just trying to find a place that would be willing to rent to us for only one year because really this is just like a temporary holding spot before our headquarters is done. And it's very hard to find a commercial lease with a building that's, you know, 6,7000 square feet for one year. It's very hard to Find that. So fortunately we were able to find this space. It's retail, but because there's quite a bit of vacancy in this plaza, we did a great deal in terms of rent. And yeah, it's not ideal, it's not perfect. There are a couple of different other options, but ultimately the team decided on this one because the price, price was so much less as well as it's right next door to a bunch of other retail restaurants. Etc. Oh, I should go turn the lights on. So this is kind of what we got. We kind of try to standardize the area and we had these stand up desks. You just push these buttons and it comes up. It's very cool. So we try to keep it very, very minimalistic. Very, very simple. Black, white, gray. Just try to keep as clean as possible. These are really cool. They're like 170 or 200 bucks on Amazon. But they have a secondary screen. They like to put them horizontal. So they have their messages on this one. All their messages coming in from the franchisees, all different locations. And then on this one they have their dispatch boards and are inside the CRM. So yeah, there's. I think in this office right now there's 40 desks and there's going to. We're gonna be hiring 20 people, so we'll probably end up doing. You can see there's a lot of space here. We can eventually add probably 15 to 20 more desks here and then along that walkway entrance. But the worst part about this entire office is the backspace. And that is. Let me flip this around. This would typically have been kind of like the break room. This used to be this. You can see the storage where they used to have the old store and they had all inventory back here. This is where we have everyone's cubbies for the team bringing water. Here's the problem, first and foremost, no sink here. We used to have a nice sink and a great break room in our other area. Our other office, not great here. There is also no windows and no light here. So I felt very bad. And that's actually why I did a. I put it up for a vote. I had two different offices that within those two days I was able to finally find. Okay, two different spots. One that was in a different area as well as a different price point as well as it was way nicer, way nicer than this, but it cost twice as much and it wasn't next to a bunch of amenities or the bus route. So the biggest downside of this one is the fact that this Is the only toilet in this unit. Now the.

These are cool. You'll see these kind of all over the place. People can tear them off.

Here's the thing, the plaza does have some public bathrooms. There's like, they're like probably a two minute walk, maybe a minute walk. And the gym is in the same plaza. The gym that I own, Anytime Fitness is in this plaza as well as another unit that we have that is for the facilities that we use for training our franchisees. Now all of this we're trying to bring into one under one house on our headquarters. And that's why we're looking for this kind of very temporary one year deal. You can see up here, front here, this is where we made into the break room. So we kind of have two break rooms, one in the back where they'll have the toasters and the microwaves and the fridges and stuff like that. Up front here is great because you could easily have 10 people in here. Behind what used to be the registers for this retail store, we got the bean bags over here, have a place for them to veg, take some breaks, got the music playing, couches, bar stools up top there, another stools here we got. Actually my mom built this out here.

Picnic table, let's go. But you can see here, this is kind of like the shopping center. These units, two to our right are vacant and two to our left are vacant. Other than that though, there's like subways right over there. We got woods coffee or if you're in the Pacific Northwest, gotta love Pacific Northwest with coffee. We got Bob's burger. So it'll be great for just like dinners, lunches, meetings, things like that. There's a pizza place over there. The gym though is literally right there. And so it's gonna be pretty convenient actually for me. But I think the, the thing I learned from this one is just make decisions quickly. We were definitely caught off guard by not having the ability to renew at the other place. I thought for sure, because we had like half the building in terms of leasing it, that they just let us continue for one more year and just renew and it would be fine. But they said no, like randomly. So we had to make a very quick decision. I know we're going to make some mistakes because when you move fast, like I talked about conference, you're going to make some mistakes, right? So this is probably going to be our biggest mistake. And that is going to be not our uniforms, Internet. So we have access points throughout. But unfortunately, because we had to do this all we moved everything like one week ago as I'm recording. This was conference right now as I talked, it's a week later. And so we have an access point up there which is missing because we don't have enough. And then we have access point over here. It'll have like 300 people that could get on this access point, which is great. However, Comcast we paid for 1.25 gigabytes of data. And every single thing is turned off here. And you connect, you do Internet speed, check it maximally. Max does 250 to 300 megs. So the problem with that is when you have a whole bunch of people connecting that gets divided out, right? So if you have 40 people connected that now all of a sudden you're running with like 7, 8 gigs or 7 to 8 megabytes of Internet. Not good because we do a VoIP voice over the IP like Internet phones basically. And so you can't have slow Internet. So that will probably be a problem. It absolutely will be. But ultimately we need to get moved in prior to when we start training a bunch of people. So up front here got a whole bunch of desks. This is the old style of desks, you can see green and then these non movable, they don't go up and down. Not standing desks. So what we had, the reason I put these up here is because lots of sunlight, this whole thing, just great amounts of natural light. And so kind of trade off that they get is hey, you get natural light but you're not gonna have the fancy desks. So that's kind of the trade off. So yeah, I just want to show you, excuse me, show you around. My voice is still recovering from conference. This is where the media team's gonna be at. Got Andrew, Zach, Steven and that's where I hang out a little bit. Brad and Lisa over there from home service epa. These two rooms are perfect for. This one's gonna be a little tiny one for recording. Recording. So the audio, when we do the podcast, the voiceover we are able to get clean. And then this inside here, these used to be dressing rooms. These used to be dressing rooms but now this is going to be where we have all of the media team gear, camera gear, etc. Yeah, this used to be the dressing room. Let's go.

Let'S go, fit expert, let's do it. So yeah, lots of open space now. Lots of probably will get filled in, but I think it'll last us for at least one year before we move to headquarters. And we moved a lot of our team back from being virtual into being in person. So we really had to get here. And in two weeks this place is going to be a humming, you know, buzzing activity. This is going to be the corner where the training. So you can see the larger 52 inch screen in the corner on wheels. So that way the team that's in this corner will be able to all train on that. And it'll be able to add desks out here, we'll be able to add desks down the middle and then do an L shaped here if needs be. So we'll just see how it goes. But probably in two more weeks I'll make another video update. You guys, once we actually moved in, but this is what we did in one week. It was not bad. Shout out to the team that did all the shrink wrapping and just moved all these dividers over here in the back. You see there's tons of light. Oh, I forgot. Turn the lights on. That's all. I originally held it back here. Tons of light because it was a retail store. Turn all these lights on. Yeah, tons of light. It's gonna be great. And what you're not seeing right now is all the light coming in from the exterior and just allowing a ton of natural light in. So looking forward to it. It's not the best spot. It's not ideal. I feel sort of bad because of having the two different break room areas. Not enough bathrooms in my opinion. But great parking and we'll be able to grow in here no problem for the next year and it's gonna be a lot of fun. So Command Center 2.0. Can't wait for 3.0 and to be able to get our own spot headquarters. We can put down our routes, but that is that. Hope everyone enjoys that. Take care of.