Whether you’re buying office furniture for the first time or you’re redesigning your existing office, developing a budget is paramount. Office furniture varies in price, durability, style, and even function. All of these factors combine to make the purchasing process time-consuming and sometimes confusing, and the best place to begin to find clarity is by developing an office furniture budget.
By developing a budget in the early stages of the office furniture buying process, you avoid under or overspending and can plan for the office as a whole. Taking the time to properly assess your needs and then working to meet them is the way to go. Below, we highlight key steps to follow when determining your own office furniture budget.
Assess Your Office Furniture Needs
Though an office furniture dealer will ultimately help you finalize your needs before purchase, doing research beforehand can help ensure a more accurate budget. First, examine your office and work with employees to determine their wants / needs. Those who currently use and interact with the office space will have a greater understanding of where current office furniture is sufficient or lacking.
Beyond that, consider workflows as well as collaborative and private areas. Determine whether current collaborative areas promote efficiency and flexibility. Ensure that private areas are comfortable to use and free from distractions. Asking the right questions at this stage can go a long way towards ensuring an accurate office furniture budget as well as making employees happier in their space.
Determine Available Funds
Nobody likes setting hard limits, but setting boundaries for your office furniture budget keeps things realistic and is ultimately beneficial. Work with decision makers to determine how much they are willing or able to spend for the office furniture upgrade. Alongside your class of office space, the figure you come to will help drive research into potential solutions and what grade of office furniture is right for your company.
With your organization’s needs and available funds defined, many individuals dive into pricing research and the shopping process. However, with so many design styles, manufacturers, and moving parts (e.g. delivery and installation costs), it can get overwhelming pretty quickly.
An office furniture dealer like OFW can help make sense of this process and help you explore solutions that fit within your budget. Depending on your needs and spending limits, a dealer will present you with a design plan and get your feedback on potential solutions using new and used office furniture . In some instances, mixing and matching these types of furniture will help a company get all of the solutions they need while staying under budget.
At Office Furniture Warehouse, we even offer companies free office design and space planning to help them make the most of the space they have at hand.
Take a Closer Look
For businesses on a tighter budget, it’s important to identify areas of your office space that have high visibility. In other words, what areas will visitors be seeing or using when they come to your office? In order to make the most of your budget, these areas should utilize higher grade items to please guests while cost savings can be found in areas that aren’t as visible or high traffic. For example, places like reception areas, conference rooms, and executive offices oftentimes take precedence over storage areas or wall-facing workstations.
At Office Furniture Warehouse, we help customers with this process by identifying these high visibility areas and making recommendations as to where new office furniture is necessary and where they can get away with used office furniture.
From Office Furniture Budget to Project Execution
Once you’ve taken the steps discussed above, you should have a general office furniture budget. But even with a budget in place, choosing office furniture can be a daunting task, which is why working with a reputable office furniture dealer is important.
We detailed some of the benefits of working with a dealer in this article, but it’s important to choose one that has a history of helping businesses of all sizes operating with any size budget. At Office Furniture Warehouse, we pride ourselves on this, and even take it a step beyond by looking to save our customers money wherever possible.
One way this is done is through our office design services which are focused on value-engineering an office space. Depending on the layout of an office, certain components of office furniture may not be necessary. For example, if an office is placing a series of new workstations against a wall, OFW will recommend excluding or choosing less expensive elements (e.g. trim, fabric) in order to save money since the entirety of these workstations won’t be visible.
If you’re just beginning to develop your office furniture budget or are ready to begin finding solutions, contact us today. We’ve been helping businesses in the Greater Pittsburgh area find the right office furniture at the right price since 1999.