Running Your Business While Refurbishing Your Practice

Extending or refurbishing your practice doesn’t mean that you’ll have to shut your business down during the project’s duration.  Increasingly, many fitouts are being delivered as staged projects, allowing your practice to continue functioning while still receiving the facelift or extension it needs.

Refurbishing your practice in carefully isolated stages not only facilitates business continuity, but also means your practice can continue to treat patients. This is important for you, and your patients as well.

Planning Ahead

Before your project kicks off, your fitout team liaises with you to help you understand how it could potentially impact your practice operations.  By understanding how – and when – you can allocate different rooms or areas to be temporarily unavailable, you’ll also be able to plan ahead and implement any workarounds required.

It’s important that you ask lots of questions and explain any concerns to ensure that any issues can be solved before the project gets underway.

YP Vets Staged Project

The recent fitout of the YP Vets Kadina practice in South Australia was delivered as a staged project to ensure minimal disruption to the running of the business.

Located in a 100-year-old paddock stone building, the building was converted to a vet practice approximately 10 years ago.  The age of the building presented some construction challenges, requiring the replacement of certain elements to meet current Australian standards.  

For the vet clinic to stay open during refurbishment, and to also be updated to current building standards, the project was managed in two stages.

The first stage focused on the rear of the building, allowing operations to continue in the front half of the clinic.  In addition to updating the layout, stage 1 also included construction works to extend the size of the clinic.

The second stage was undertaken in the front part of the building, which required a temporary reception to be set up in the freshly refurbished part of the practice.  Stage 2 included refurbishment of the reception and waiting areas, as well as new flooring and finishes throughout.

The staging of the project provided a very successful outcome for the business.

John Olding, owner of YP Vets, commented “I was sceptical when I was told the build was going to take 8 weeks – a regular watcher of “Grand Designs”, the projects there always take twice as long and end up 20% over budget or more. Imagine my surprise when the handover took place after 7 weeks and was a mere 1.4% over budget with some of that due to our own changes and the rest due to unavoidable changes that couldn’t have been known up-front.”

See more projects like this or contact us to talk about your new design, fitout or build project.