Dear Web Guest:
Anyone who has watched The Apprentice on TV or has been responsible for managing their own projects knows that even the best of plans with thought through and organized critical paths are subject to uncontrollable external influences that can derail, postpone and ultimately increase the cost of the project. It takes experience to be aware of the potential pitfalls and a diligent effort to get in front of them to make sure that in the end everything comes together as originally planned. That is what we ascribe to here at French Quarter Hospitality. We manage our projects on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis to make sure that all the components of the plan are on track to come together at the appropriate time.
We moved our Corporate Office in July
Here are some examples of what we ran into with the move of the Corporate Office, a seemingly simple project.
The Movers
We called three moving companies to give us a bid on the move. One company came right out and gave us their bid although they would not guarantee a maximum price; the second company took 2 weeks to give us a bid which was way out of the ballpark; the third company came out to do an estimate and it took us us 10 days of chasing to get a bid [which was the best one] and another week of chasing to get a contract from them. In the end they did a good job moving us. If we hadn’t started the search process a month before the move we would have had a difficult time getting it done reliably for a reasonable cost.
The Phone Company
Anyone who has worked with phone companies knows the aggravation that can be. You seldom can talk to the same person twice. They say that they open a ticket for your issue and keep track of all their discussions with you and the relevant information regarding the issue but I have found more often than not they don’t do a good job of it. In our case of moving our phone system I talked to no less that 4 diffferent customer service representatives who had no knowledge of the details that I spoke with their predecessors about. About two weeks prior to the move I lost all confidence that they had their ducks in a row and began calling every day to make sure it was going to get done. The last few days I called no less than three times a day. It finally did get done on the day we needed it to but I guarantee if I had not chased them as hard as I did we would not have had phones for several days after the move.
The Landlord
Last, but not least, was the landlord, a major office management company in our area. After nearly a month of negotiating the new lease and resloving the buildout issues they gave us a construction timeline with the client walkthrough 1 day before we were scheduled to move in. During the construction phase I sent them several emails detailing certain of our needs. One of those needs was to not carpet the computer server room. Three days prior to the walkthrough I decided I had better check on the progress and found that, you guessed it, they had carpeted the computer room. We had scheduled our computer service company to come out the day we moved in so they could hook up our servers to the new data T1’s and had to have the carpet removed so we could install the servers before they were connected. Another mission critical event. Luckily one call got the job done and the next day the carpet was gone. Had we waited until the client walkthrough we would have been delayed by one day which would have disrupted the entire move-in schedule.
Wrap Up
In the end we made it on schedule. We moved out of our old offices on Wednesday night and were up and running again first thing Friday morning, phones, computers, internet and all. I would like to thank Hanz Alva and Richard Dittmyre for their tireless work getting ready for the move and helping getting us set back up in our new offices.
New Address
Our move was not far from our old offices so all the phone numbers are the same, no changes there. The physical address is:
French Quarter Hospitality, LLC
47 Perimeter Center East
Suite 425
Atlanta, GA 30346.
Mike Kaufman, CFO
July 30, 2006.