Media Centre: News Coverage
Surfing Conditions
in Cornwall
An
article by Lucy Cokes, Neutralize
Online marketing agency Neutralize (*\*) part of Nuera Limited made the plunge three weeks ago and hit the road out of London to move to scenic and slow Cornwall. Can tele-working become a reality, is this going to be the first of many moves for new media agencies?
The present trend in moving away from expensive city centre offices towards the outlying districts or even working from home is proving to be a major cost saving for businesses. Advances in communications technology mean that there is no longer any physical reason for many kinds of office work to be done in one location rather than another.
It is estimated that there will be 10 million Tele-workers in UK by year 2010. Our employees are not tele-working as individuals, but the whole company is tele-working, this works in the same way as call centers which are often based in very rural locations.
In London there are “clusters” of new media agencies, this can be seen in NoHo (North of SoHo, the other side of Oxford Street), Regents Street, Carnaby Street and, of course, Old Street which has recently become a very fashionable new media zone.
There are many obvious reasons for being located in London. we are going to miss many of the net-related networking events and the chance to meet up with clients and prospects at the drop of a hat. We will also be lacking the prestige of a London address and will not have ready access to the base of investors. Despite these advantages, there are some serious drawbacks.
Most important of all, are the property prices. Office rent in London is forever on the increase, with £1000 a month only buying you enough room for about four desks. Having gone through the process of contacting all the main office rental firms we established that:
They wanted to look at our last three years accounts - something we could not provide them with. They wanted us to sign up to a five year lease (some agents offered two year leases), something we didn’t want to commit to - we didn’t know how fast our company would be growing or how necessary it was for us to even remain in central London.
Nuera has close links with Cornwall and over half of its clients are based in the South West. A little over two months ago when visiting one of our clients in Cornwall we were explaining our dilemmas over getting larger office space. Our client was amazed at the cost of office space in London and showed us a warehouse next door that had been empty for over a year and was previously used as a garage. There was space for about 20 employees which meant we could expand to this size easily and there was even a separate kitchen and bathroom with a shower. It was in complete disrepair, but for just £300 a month we thought we had no basis for complaint.
We spent about two weeks discussing how detrimental to our business a move out of the city would be. We reasoned that as most of our communication was via email, phone or video conferencing, so long as we kept a base in London it would be simple for one of us to travel up to London once or twice a month to conduct face-to-face meetings over the space of a few days.
Two weeks after viewing the warehouse we packed all the office equipment, desks computers and files into a van and drove to Cornwall. After spending three whole weeks sorting out the phone system, our internet connection, getting the networking installed, an alarm system, cleaning, painting, decorating, laying carpets, fitting additional power points to name but a few, we are now back up and running at full speed.
So far we have not lost any clients because of the move and most of our London based clients actually seem quite jealous of us! Where else can you have absolute peace and quiet while you work, go to the beach at weekends and see the ocean every day?
It is true we are not in a cluster of related businesses, but with the space we have acquired we intend to rent out desk space to other complementary small companies that require a proper address and speedy net access. Our outgoings have been reduced significantly meaning profit margins will be up, once we have overcome the initial costs of the move.
Some might say we will be unable to keep up with the latest marketplace trends and technological developments, however since nearly all our research and reading is done on the Internet we do not believe this could be affected. Of course for clients that already know and trust us this is not going to be an issue and although it seems a positive statement to say you are a London based company, location should not be important when competing in the global market place.
Will this be the start of a new trend? Will net-based companies move out of the city and into the countryside where they can enjoy a better quality of life and lower overheads? We doubt it. Tele-working has been about to happen for the past 10 years and although more and more people are taking their work home with them, it doesn’t seem likely that whole companies will be able to make the move. A move within London is disruptive enough and to try and relocate to the countryside would be nearly impossible for many established companies, it simply would not work.
Cornwall
Cornwall is a remarkably well-networked county, however this is not currently benefiting any of the businesses or individuals who live in the county. Fibre optic cables run out of the UK to the USA from Cornwall, but the nearest Internet ‘node’ is in London. Digital information travels from America through Cornwall (without stopping) to London before it can be routed back to Cornwall again. For local tele-workers, this is the equivalent of having to drive to London to get onto a motorway that goes right past our back gardens.
Cornwall's location at the SW tip of England makes it an ideal spot for Britain’s third Internet node center, linking USA with Britain. All businesses south west of London would benefit from this, as it would speed up their links. If such a centre could be established here, it would help bolster the potential of marketing Cornwall as the ‘digital peninsula’.
Physical connectivity between London and Cornwall is not great - it takes about five hours by car or by train or you can catch a plane from Newquay Airport to London. Prices of travel from London to Cornwall compare with taking the EuroStar to Paris or flying to the Canary Islands making travel on a regular basis prohibitively expensive for most people.
Increasing Cornwalls’ digital connectivity and video conferencing facilities will reduce the need to travel significantly. Currently Objective One funding from the European Union is about to pump £303 million (€480m) into the county and there is now a big push for funding in New Technologies.
Benefits that we see of moving to a smaller community include:
- Trying to get rid of the “brain drain” that occurs in rural areas such as Cornwall
- Give employment to local people
- Better quality of life, with no more mornings spent in traffic jams or in an overcrowded tube train
- Lower overheads
As we are not looking for ridiculous amounts of dot.com style funding, but to produce a profitable internet based business model , fresh air and less stress could be just the ticket. The key being competitive in an increasingly hi-tech and global marketplace, both for goods and services, so where they are produced matters increasingly less.
See the article on the New Media Knowlege website.
