Social Bods is a start-up. While we are starting as we mean to go on in terms of our operations and what we offer our clients, we’ve had to compromise in other areas. Just for now. Our office is probably the most obvious physical representation of Social Bods the company. And it’s not pretty.
I’m not saying our office is cheap, but we certainly don’t have the budget to make it our dream workspace. Yet. We will have our glass-fronted, trendy city centre office. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of our lives.
For now, we are happy despite our mismatched office furniture, magnolia walls, and strip lighting. We are based in the East Riding Small Business Centre in Beverley, East Yorkshire. It’s great. There’s a good business community here, and we have the on-tap advice and support from the council’s business support team. It’s fantastic value, which is important to a start-up. It’s secure and clean, and we have access to communal areas, such as a kitchen and the loos. There is a nice mix of companies here – as well as us, there is a web development company, a payroll support company, an office supplies company, and a double glazing company amongst others. We’ve been here over a year.
We started off as a two-man team in Unit 7. Unit 7 was homage to breeze block and it was alright as long as you didn’t need to know what was going on in the outside world. This is the day we moved in before we got sorted out. Not that there was much to sort.
We plodded along here for a few months and then another unit became available. And it had a window! Couldn’t say no to that opportunity. So here we are in Unit 17. It’s not our dream office, but it works for us.
What would our dream office look like?
We have a vision for our future. It involves being one of the best social media customer service companies around. It involves a growth in clients so that we can grow from being a team of four part-time staff to being able to provide decent full-time jobs. We want to be able to offer apprenticeships and to have a culture of learning and development for all our people.
We want to be one of the best social media management companies in the UK. This means we need to be able to attract skilled people who want to work here. It means a continuous programme of training and professional HR support for everyone. It means real collaborative working, and it means continuing to pay a proper wage. We firmly believe that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
The office that needs to deliver this vision needs to be more than the 150 sq ft we have right now. It requires breakout spaces, quiet rooms, training rooms, and probably a slide to take us from the penthouse meeting rooms down to the games room in the basement. It at least needs decent loos and a kitchen with a top-notch coffee machine.
It’s a far cry from what we have now. But it will happen.
What do we have now, I hear you ask?
Well, we have 150 sq ft. Three desks and chairs. A shelf unit full of very important things, and some not-so-important things. And some bins.
We could do some things around here to move us a step closer to those trendy offices of the future. For a start we could have matching desks and chairs. We have a team of four but we work on a rota to make sure all the clients are covered every weekday. We have three desks and chairs, but none match. We inherited some when we moved into Unit 7 and then into Unit 17, and another set Joanne brought from home. They’re fine but wouldn’t it be better if they all matched.
This is what we have….
Three desks, three chairs. None the same and all pretty dull.
Wouldn’t three of these all matching be much nicer? Look they even have cable holes and lots of leg room underneath. Sorted.
From Euroffice
And how about some chairs with a bit of a kick to them? We love these red wheely spinny chairs.
From Euroffice
Our office gang will need somewhere to live. Headed up by Ducky McDuckface with a strong challenge to leadership from Luigi, the gang keep watch on our social media management. If there’s something amiss with our tweeting, they know it.
At the moment, the gang live on a battered old ratten shelving unit but we feel they may be more ‘at home’ on something like this. Which is basically a battered old iron shelving unit, but it’s beautiful and we have all the feels.
From Swoon Editions
And we have NO idea what we’d use this for, but we love it and need it. Probably for Mandy and Zoe’s tea-bag stash.
From Euroffice
For Joanne and Mike, we would need a fridge for all our soft drinks please. This is what we have at the moment!
And we would like something like this. Nothing but the best for the liquid that keeps us fuelled!
From Thinkgeek
We couldn’t fit much else in our bijou office at the moment. But once we’re in our spanking glass-walled waterfront penthouse offices, then things will be very different. Our meeting room, for example, will look like this. Yes, we do need a MASSIVE screen. Why are you even asking?
So that’s us and our journey so far in office furnishings. Stay with us as we develop and soon we will be sharing pics from our Social Bods Instagram of our Rubik’s cube fridges and all the amazing things we’ll be doing in our swanky new training room! For now, we’d be over the moon for chairs that match.
This is an entry into the Euroffice #EurofficeTrends17 competition to win a £300 makeover for your company’s office
