A house is only as strong as its foundation. This is a wise old adage. I shall expand the adage for your commercial construction: a shop is only as good as its function. Consider your shop’s function to be the soul of your commercial space. A body with no soul is a dead body. So is a physical building without a function is lifeless. Therefore, the first step to construct your dream commercial space into reality is envisioning its function.
In starting and/or conducting a business, you would want to know everything about the business itself. You paid meticulous attention to the details of the market research and financial data as well as your S.W.O.T. analysis. This mindset is precisely what is needed to envision the function of your commercial space.
Imagine that your business plan calls for manufacturing of light fixtures. Simple enough that you pick a warehouse space in a location that you desired.Now you need to know the function of the space that you have.Yes, the obvious function is for the space to accommodate the equipment for production.But how about visitors?Do you expect the warehouse space to accommodate potential visitors?If so, then your space design must accommodate for safety and comfort of those visitors.And storage may be needed.So now you need to envision the size of the storage depending on the manufacturing productivity to produce (IN) and marketing ability to sell (OUT).The downtime between IN and OUT would largely determine your storage need. Speaking of storage, the accessibility is essential. So now hallway dimensions need to be determined as well as the height of the storage space. Do you need ventilation or certain type of natural lighting within the storage space? How about the security of the space? It is also possible that you may want the space to function as a headquarter as well. For a long time, Howard Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks Coffee, had his headquarter inside his coffee manufacturing plant. You would need to envision and to answer a whole list of questions for your space to accommodate a headquarter.
The above imaginary exercise should begin to shed some light in your mind on what to envision for your dream commercial space.Obviously, there are so many more thoughts and questions need to be addressed before you can even begin to hire architects and engineers to design the layout/floorplan of your space.
Chisel and Tool offers construction project management consultancy to assist you in envisioning your dream commercial space. Our experience in constructing commercial space can offer you invaluable insights into your own plan for your space. We can also assist you to find and to coordinate with your pre-construction team such as architects and engineers.