One of my former colleagues once told me that he heard that you should be careful about moving offices because the company culture can easily be distorted. As I recall he was referring to the pre dot com bubble Swedish Internet juggernaut Spray. The start up darling who had everything going for them until they moved offices and then later collapsed. I don’t know whether this is true or not but being a bit fanatic when it comes to finding underlying truths and subtleties, I find these things fascinating.

Travelstart has its bit of DNA from the walls of our offices.

Our company started in a Kärn Kaffes old coffee roastery in Helsingborg, Sweden. The city used to be famous for it’s coffee roasteries. Coffee was the dot com of its days. This small town of less than 100.000 people had several prominent roasteries; Kärnkaffe, Tellus Kaffe, Brinks and most famous of all Zoegas. Mr Zoegas was a Christian, Italian chap who combined his two interests mission work and business. His passion took him around Africa where he discovered coffee beans, which was exactly what poured out of our walls when we started renovating our offices. We occupied the previous management floor, with 2 huge beautiful safe vaults and one walk in vault with a 45 cm thick door, were we stored our servers.

How we loved those offices. It was industrious, concrete walls, high ceilings large abundant spaces. Lots of room to socialize in bright open spaces. It was to this day my absolute favourite office. I think all our staff loved the space. I had my own room with space enough for tons of books and a meeting area. This was a dynamic room. The offices also had its own showers which I used a couple of times after running during lunch breaks. Customers and airlines that visited us, could not believe that they came to a travel company, they all thought we were into advertising or something artistic. I liked that! Space must be creative. Travel posters were banned.

After five or so years the lease was about to expire and the landlord got very greedy so we decided to move. The move sent the company “spiritually” to the dark ages. As much as we loved the vibe in the old office I hated it in the new one. And I think most of my colleagues can agree. We called the new space “the pit”. With the move the atmosphere evaporated and much of the drive and energy was gradually lost. In Sweden we recently moved into our third office in ten years. Lets hope it works.

In South Africa we have had a different journey. We rented a beautiful building in Gardens called Avalon.

It was excellent space for creativity but useless for processes. There was a dischord in ensemble and somehow we never got it right.

We were forced to move offices because we were growing and our old space was useless for customer service. We moved into offices in Woodstock. These offices were just right size wise. We had high hopes that this would be the right home for our South African business. But even though our South African, MD Mrs Leeanne Melton was project leading the move and the decoration of the place she said she was shocked once we moved in. And I agree. The company was simply not in its right element and didn’t like the place. There was this dischord all the time.

We didn’t have to suffer very long. Our landlord decided after one weeks occupancy to sectional title the buildings and gave us notice to get the hell out of there. We had just spent 70.000€ renovating and the outlook of us getting the money back were slim to none. We used lawyers and advisors but decided not to stay. So we started to look for new offices.

Another friend of mine offered us space in his building. We looked at it and loved it. Located on the 7^th floor with bright open spaces in the middle of CBD. We said yes and after 2 months and another 50.000€ in renovation we moved in. 

From that day we went into profit in South Africa. From that day all the things that we battled with before was gone. Staff was suddenly more motivated, management suddenly had control, customers started to love us. It was like a new company all of a sudden. Gone was the start up chaos. The baby matured in a week. The dischord was gone and out came just beautiful harmony.

These are different experiences from office moves and it has made me a firm believer that a company is a being and it has it´s favourite spaces where karma can thrive.