Space Cadet

Office is the big new task for this week. Find an office. A good office. A cheap office. An office that won’t make staff or customers run away screaming. All for RMB 10,000 per month (or less).

So far, Rightsite has been operating in that best of all offices, my living room. What makes my living room a great office is not just the comfortable furniture and stylish decoration, but the fact that it’s free. I look at offices like I look at cars, evil concept designed to devour your time and lay waste to your budget. Offices don’t sell ads and they don’t make websites, so as far as I’m concerned they fall under non-performing assets.

However, since we are soon to expand beyond our current two-person team to a five person team, the living room will start filling up fairly fast. We should be at five staff by May 1st, and then by June 1st we will be at seven, and then nine staff by July 1st. In September, we should be a team of 12-13 including interns — definitely a bit too much for my living room. So our goal is now to move into an office by July 1st.

The time has come to start searching for space.

In Shanghai right now office space is a terrifying thing. Buildings are crowded and rents are up. While rents may be expected to fall by next year as several new giant sized office towers open up, that doesn’t do much for those of us who need an office in July. So we are forced to brave the forces of Shanghai’s raging economy by our start up selves.

Here are our budget facts:

• Projected staff in next two years: 15
• Space needed per staffer: 15
• Total space needed: 225
• Budget: RMB 10,000/month
• Rate/sqm/day: RMB 1.48

Oops! No way are we getting 225 sqm for RMB 10,000/month. Let’s look at those numbers again.

• Projected staff in next two years: 15
• Space needed per staffer: 11
• Total space needed: 165
• Budget: RMB 10,000/month
• Rate/sqm/day: RMB 2.02

That’s better. The team will just have to get to know each other a little better during year two.

The next question is location. For our business, most of our customers will be in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, which means we do not need to be downtown to reach our customers, but we do need easy access to the highways. We also need our staff to be able to get to work easily, so we had better be on the subway route. (Oh yeah, and Mike needs some good places to eat lunch).

Our top candidates for locations should be:

• Zhongshan Park — reasonable prices and easy to get out of town. Plus lots of amenities
• Xujiahui/Shanghai Stadium — decent rates and quick access to Zhejiang. (but traffic going through Xujiahui terrifies me)

So this week we will start making calls to local agents, give them our requirements, and hope they don’t waste our time. Once the office is open we’ll invite you all over root beer floats. Oh yeah, and that picture is of my office in the first company I started, back in 1996. All these years and I’ve still got no taste in colours.