The lease is signed. Somewhere between 30 and 120 days from now, your people need to walk into a space that works — phones ringing, files opening, printers found, calls connecting. IT is the workstream that quietly decides whether day one feels like a fresh start or a fire drill, and it is almost always the workstream that gets started last.
We have stood up and moved dozens of offices across California. The pattern almost never varies: the things that derail a move are ordered too late, and the things that get ordered first are the things nobody needed to rush. Here is the sequence we actually use, working backward from move-in day.
Order Your Circuits Before You Order Anything Else
This is the single most common way an office move goes wrong, and it is entirely avoidable.
Dedicated fiber routinely takes 45 to 90 days to install, and in older buildings it can run longer. If the building is not already lit by the carrier you want, you are waiting on construction, permits, and a landlord’s willingness to let someone open a riser. None of that compresses because your lease started.
- Order the primary circuit the week the lease is signed. Not after the floor plan is final. Not after the furniture is picked. That week.
- Order a second circuit from a different carrier on a different physical path. Two circuits from the same provider through the same riser is one circuit with extra billing.
- Get the install date in writing, then assume it slips. Have a bonded LTE or 5G failover ready to carry the office for the first few weeks. It is cheap insurance and you will reuse it as permanent failover.
What Only Your Landlord Can Tell You
Ask these before you finalize anything, because the answers move your timeline more than any decision you will make yourself:
- Where is the MPOE, and how do we get from there to our suite? The minimum point of entry is where carrier service physically lands in the building. The path from there to your space is yours to build, and it is sometimes not obvious.
- Which carriers are already lit here? An existing carrier can often turn service up in days instead of months.
- Who controls the telecom riser, and what does access cost? Some buildings require a specific vendor and charge accordingly. Budget for it now rather than discovering it in week six.
- What are the rules for after-hours work and freight elevator access? Cabling crews and equipment deliveries both depend on this, and both get scheduled weeks out.
Design the Network Before the Furniture Plan Is Locked
Cabling is poured concrete. Once walls close and furniture lands, changes cost three to four times what they would have cost on paper.
Access point placement, floor boxes, drop locations, and conference room cabling all depend on where people and walls will actually be. That means your network design and your space plan have to be built together, not in sequence. Get the drop count right the first time and add 20 percent — the cheapest cable you will ever run is the one pulled while the ceiling is already open.
A move is also the least expensive moment you will ever have to standardize hardware. Mismatched laptops, docks, and monitors accumulated over years get cleaned up in one purchase cycle, and every device after that is one you chose deliberately. If capital is tight, this is where a hardware-as-a-service arrangement earns its keep.
Conference Rooms Deserve Their Own Budget Line
Nothing burns goodwill faster than a room that cannot start a call while six people watch. Conference room AV gets treated as furniture and it is not — it is a networked system with cabling, power, display, audio, and a platform decision behind it.
Pick one platform. Deploy it identically in every room. A room that behaves differently from the room next door generates tickets forever, and the people filing them are usually your most senior.
A Move Is the Cleanest Security Reset You Will Ever Get
You are rebuilding the network anyway. That makes this the cheapest possible moment to fix the things that are hard to fix later:
- Enforce SSO and multi-factor authentication everywhere before day one. Rolling out identity controls during a move is one project. Rolling it out afterward is a change-management exercise with an audience.
- Enroll every device before it ships to the new office. A device that arrives already managed never has to be chased down at someone’s desk.
- Segment the building systems. Badge readers, cameras, thermostats, and visitor kiosks all live on your network now. They belong on their own VLAN, away from everything that matters.
- Retire what you are not taking with you. Old servers, old firewalls, and old accounts are easiest to decommission when they are physically in front of you in an empty room.
The Two Weeks Before, and the Weekend Itself
By this point the work is logistics rather than design:
- Test both circuits under real load, not with a speed test. A circuit that passes a speed test and fails at 40 concurrent video calls has not been tested.
- Confirm every static IP, firewall rule, and DNS record that points at the old location. This is where the surprises live.
- Label everything before it goes in a box. Photograph every rack and every cable run before you unplug it.
- Decide what happens if the new circuit is not live on move day, and write that plan down before you need it.
- Print a one-page day-one guide: Wi-Fi, printers, conference rooms, and who to call.
Then have IT physically on site for the first two days. The day-one ticket queue is a fact of life — the only question is whether someone is standing there to clear it in minutes or whether it sits in a queue for a week while people form opinions about the new office.
What This Actually Costs, and Who Should Do It
Most companies moving offices hit the same fork: assign it to whoever handles IT internally, or bring in a team that does this routinely.
The honest math is about frequency, not competence. Your internal person may be perfectly capable and will still be doing it for the first time in this building, learning its quirks on a deadline, while also keeping the current office running. A team that stands up offices regularly has already made the mistakes somewhere else. Under a few hundred people, a partner is usually both faster and cheaper — and the work is a few weeks rather than a few months.
Either way, start the circuits this week. Everything else on this list has slack in it. That one does not.
Questions We Get on Every Office Move
How far ahead should we start planning the IT side?
Ninety days is comfortable. Sixty is workable. Thirty means you are building the office around whatever connectivity you can get, rather than the other way around.
Can we keep our phone numbers?
Almost always, yes. Number porting takes two to four weeks and is one of the few items that genuinely cannot be rushed at the end, so start it early even though it feels minor.
What if the new circuit is not ready on move day?
This is common enough that it should be planned for rather than feared. A bonded wireless failover carries a normal office workload well enough to keep people working while you wait.
Do we need to re-cable if the space already has cabling?
Test it before you trust it. Existing cabling is frequently the previous tenant’s, of unknown category and unknown condition. Certification testing is inexpensive relative to discovering the problem after everyone has moved in.
Should we move our server, or is this the moment to go cloud?
A move is the natural decision point, because you are paying to relocate the hardware either way. If the equipment is more than three or four years old, the relocation cost is often better spent on migration.
Planning a Move?
We handle office standups and relocations for companies across Los Angeles, Orange County, and the Bay Area — circuits, cabling, network design, conference rooms, security, and someone standing in the new space on day one. It is included in our managed service, not billed as a separate project.
Call (213) 873-7620 or book a free IT assessment and we will walk the space with you.
