Imagine being a business owner and being told by a landlord that you can move into your new, beautiful, city-centre office and have the broadband switched on the same day. In Liverpool, it’s now a reality…
Landlords are constantly having to change with the times to attract new companies to their offices in city centres. Although from the outside of a building, a business may want a beautiful Georgian facade, a well-polished brass nameplate and immediate access into the city itself, once inside the property, their needs change dramatically. They may want traditional thick carpets. The lighting may need to be adjustable. The kitchen may need more than a kettle and a microwave. But the broadband? Well, the broadband just needs to be fast, stable, and if anything goes wrong it better be fixed. Quickly.
This is the challenge faced by multiple landlords in Liverpool city centre. Whilst the building they own may be beautiful, filled with history and ornate touches, the modern tenant needs it to reflect the reality of their working day. A day in which their teams are using email, VOIP, sending large files, video conferencing, accessing cloud-based software packages and possibly checking into the metaverse. All at the same time.
The reality of this was a challenge faced by a Baltic Broadband customer who was beginning to see tenants moving to new offices. And these tenants weren’t moving just because they preferred the warehouse aesthetic, or the cost, or having better transport links. They moved because these modern offices offered high-speed internet connections so they could actually do their jobs.
So the landlord faced a challenge. Sell a property that had been in their family for generations, or take on the challenge: invest in infrastructure that made it impossible for a new company to turn down their city-centre office space. The next challenge was minimising the amount of time the property was closed for them to update the building and have to wait for paying tenants to return. The final challenge was to find someone who could offer value to the building and tenants which would make them sign the tenancy agreement.
At this point, the landlord did the traditional thing a landlord would do in this situation. Contacted BT, Virgin, all the usual business broadband suppliers they had seen in adverts and asked for the biggest, best broadband available. Money was no object.
“No problem, Landlord’ they all replied, “In six to nine months you will have a cable installed at a cost of thousands and then your customers can call us when they move in and we will have them installed in four to six weeks and they can sign up to 3-year packages”
This didn’t sound like a brilliant plan to the landlord. Having taken the building back to brick, the broadband companies were then going to be smashing holes in freshly plastered walls, which would need to be replaced. Additionally, tenants moving to the building would either wait until broadband connections could be arranged or move into an office without a connection for some period, which seemed an unlikely scenario. Doing the maths, it would mean the building was generating no income for nearly 12 months.
So, by chance, as this particular company did zero marketing, a colleague recommended a local business called Baltic Broadband and asked if they could help.
The solution provided was to make their building a Baltic Broadband Enabled Building (BBEB). As a company led by a Chartered Engineer, Baltic Broadband was able to work with builders to pre-install cables whilst waiting for a fixed-line, reducing waste and cost. Furthermore, by backing up bandwidth power by using their wireless business broadband via the roof, tenants would be able to move in almost as soon as the paint dried.
By using the Baltic Broadband network, the property was now capable of supplying speeds of up to 10Gbps which could be switched on in a day to any business moving into their new office. In addition, Baltic Broadband helped market this service to potential tenants, liaising with business owners, IT departments and managed service suppliers to talk through their individual needs and shopping lists.
Baltic Broadband took the hassle away from the landlord, added value to their sales pitches and, most importantly, offered a service to tenants that kept them happy and in the building. Because that’s the thing that never changes for landlords. They want happy tenants who pay their bills. Baltic Broadband help make that happen.