The Efficient Practice: Transform and Optimize Your Financial Advisory Practice for Greater Profits

CHAPTER 9

Office Space Utilization

Using your existing office space efficiently can be one of the most challenging aspects of your operations. Often, the cost per square foot of office space demands that you lease as little space as possible. Yet how many financial practitioners use expensive office space to house old files, for instance? As an example, placing older files (dormant client files, aged files, and files no longer in use) in a filing cabinet inside an office space that costs upwards of $20 per square foot per year, when compared with an offsite storage solution for the same space at a fraction of that cost, is an inefficient use of your resources. Yet many financial practices are doing this. Why is this so? Usually, the answer lies in an understanding of the evolution of the practice. Often, a practice starts out as a one-person shop and grows from there. It is possible that, as the practice grows, more file cabinets are purchased to house paper files, and little thought is given to the per-square-foot cost (footprint cost) of placing those file cabinets in an office location.

Consider the following example. A typical 48-inch-wide lateral file cabinet occupies approximately 12 square feet of space. But, considering the drawer-open space needed and walking room around the cabinet, that number balloons out to 24 square feet. If your office has 10 such cabinets, you are using up to 240 square feet of office space. If the space costs $20 per square foot per year, then ...