A Relocation Is Not a Leasing Decision

By Rashid Masood Rizvi, Founder, AM Masons Advisory. 18 years leading global workplace and physical security portfolios at Procter & Gamble across 20+ markets. MCR, PMP

Most companies treat a relocation as a leasing decision. Find the right amount of space, sign the lease, hire a designer, done. That order of operations is exactly how a growing company ends up with an office that quietly costs money and goodwill for years past the day the ribbon gets cut.

DCD Technologies, a Dubai-based technology company with a team under 30 seats, avoided that order entirely. They came to us with a simple question: they knew they needed a new office, and they wanted to know how we could help before they got any further into the search. That question, asked before a single space had been toured, is the reason this engagement produced a very different outcome than most relocations do.

DCD does not carry a dedicated workplace or real estate function, which is normal at this size. It is also exactly why the questions below usually go unanswered until a lease is already signed and whatever the answer turns out to be is locked in for the length of the term.

DCD engaged us for Workplace Direction and Alignment, to get strategic clarity and a decision framework before committing to anything, followed by Workplace Blueprint, to turn that direction into a practical, executable plan their design team could work from directly. That is how we work: a qualification call and an assessment first, so the path forward comes from what we actually find, not from a pricing conversation. DCD has not signed a lease yet, and has not built the new space out. Both are still ahead of them. What already exists is the framework these two engagements produced.

In short: DCD Technologies engaged AM Masons Advisory for a pre-lease workplace strategy that reconciled real utilization data with local regulatory space requirements, redesigned the floorplate around actual client contact and desk-time patterns, rethought furniture cost and lifespan, and redirected the resulting savings into employee experience initiatives.

The Situation

A team under 30 seats, growing, with a relocation on the horizon and no one internally whose job it was to plan for it properly. The default path for a company like this is to start with a broker and figure out the rest once something looks appealing. DCD asked us to help them start somewhere else instead.

What that different starting point ended up producing was not only a smaller, smarter footprint. It also produced a clear answer to a question DCD had not asked yet: once you stop overspending on space and finishes nobody needs, where should that money actually go. The answer, and the research behind it, sits later in this piece, but it shaped every recommendation from the beginning.

The Approach

We spent time in DCD’s current space directly, rather than working from a floor plan or a headcount spreadsheet. Alongside that, we spoke with the owner, since decisions at this size sit with one person, not a facilities committee, about how many people actually work at DCD, what each person’s role requires, where they are expected to spend their time, and how often they are actually in the office versus with clients or working remotely. We also worked through the local regulatory requirements that would apply to any space DCD leases, since those requirements set constraints that exist regardless of how the team actually uses space day to day.

The recommendations that followed came directly out of that combination of observation, conversation, and regulatory review, not from a template applied to a headcount number. That is the part of the method that repeats from client to client. What it produces does not, because the inputs are never the same twice.

What The Process Surfaced

How Much Space To Actually Look For

Most companies think about the right amount of space purely in terms of headcount and a growth cushion. Local regulations, including things like minimum requirements tied to employee permits, are a normal part of that picture in most jurisdictions, and we factor them in as a matter of course wherever we work, not something specific to Dubai. That gave DCD’s search a floor that had nothing to do with utilization alone. The observation and interviews showed how little space several roles actually needed day to day, while local regulatory requirements set a separate minimum on top of that. The right target sat between the two, not simply at whichever number looked most efficient on paper. Get only the utilization side right and you risk landing under what regulation requires. Get only the regulatory side right and you overpay for space nobody uses. Most companies planning a relocation never realize there are two numbers to reconcile in the first place.

What Floorplate Style Actually Fits How DCD Works

The conversations surfaced how differently people at DCD actually use space. Some spend most of their time with clients or off-site. Some are in daily. Some of the most senior roles are rarely at their own desk. That pattern, not title, shaped our recommendation: a layout weighted toward flexible, shared space rather than one built around fixed private offices and assigned desks for every role.

Anyone expected to spend most of their time with clients or off-site got touchdown space instead of a fixed desk. Private offices got the harder version of the same logic. The people they were built for were, by their own account, rarely in them, so we advised giving leadership a workstation like everyone else, and putting a small meeting or huddle room where the private office would have gone, something usable for a private call and by the wider team for meetings the rest of the time. A different mix of client-facing versus desk-based roles would have produced a different floorplate entirely. It is a question most companies have never actually asked about their own team.

An Office Built To Host, Not Tidied Up For Hosting

DCD wants a space that can handle client visits without notice. That is a design decision, not a housekeeping one. How often DCD actually expects clients on site shaped the size and specification of a dedicated client experience space, so the office holds up on an ordinary Tuesday, not just the day a client is scheduled to walk through.

We also worked through whether a staffed reception desk was actually necessary at this size, since it is usually inherited habit rather than a real requirement, and what a technology-led check-in approach would have to deliver, given DCD’s actual visitor volume, to hold the experience of a functioning office without the fixed headcount behind the desk.

The Cost Optimization Strategy Behind The Space Decision

Sizing the search correctly is the first cost lever. Getting the floorplate right, so DCD is not paying to build and maintain private offices and a full reception setup the team’s working pattern does not need, is the second. Together they set a ceiling on what DCD needs to lease and build before a single furniture or finish decision gets made, something most cost conversations in a relocation only address after the space is already chosen.

Furniture Strategy, What To Buy And How To Place It

Most companies default to whichever furniture brand their designer recommends, often chosen for how the space photographs rather than how it actually performs for the people using it. We took a different starting question with DCD: what would give the team the right day-to-day experience at the right price point, not which brand name would look most impressive in a fit-out portfolio.

That logic extended to furniture lifespan, not just furniture cost. The common default, on chairs, on soft seating, on anything meant to anchor the space, is one expensive purchase built to last ten to fifteen years. We advised DCD to do the opposite: buy at a meaningfully lower price point, something in the range of a five hundred dollar chair instead of a fifteen hundred dollar one, and plan to replace it roughly every five years instead of every ten or fifteen. Run the numbers over the same time horizon and the total spend lands in the same range, sometimes lower, not higher. What changes is what the office feels like along the way. A company on the longer cycle sits on the same aging chairs for over a decade, watching them wear down in plain sight the entire time. A company on the shorter cycle gets a renewed, refreshed environment every five years for a comparable total cost, and a renewed environment is something people notice and respond to daily, not just a side effect of a purchasing decision.

We paired that sourcing and renewal approach with guidance on how the furniture should actually be placed against the floorplate, so the layout supports the way people move between focus work, client meetings, and collaboration.

A Design Brief DCD Can Actually Hand To A Designer

One of the most practical outputs of this engagement is a basic design brief, built from everything the observation, interviews, and sizing work surfaced. It gives DCD a clear, written way to explain to a designer what they actually need, instead of relying on a verbal conversation that gets reinterpreted somewhere in the process. A designer working from a real brief makes fewer wrong assumptions, which means fewer expensive revisions once drawings are underway. Most companies discover what they actually wanted midway through a design process, after paying for work that has to be redone. This brief moves that discovery earlier, when it is still free.

Where The Reinvestment Goes

Two decisions in this framework free up budget without touching headcount or scope. Right-sizing the footprint against both constraints means DCD will be quoting on, and eventually paying rent on, a number that reflects how the team actually works rather than a default assumption. Choosing furniture for the experience it delivers rather than the brand name attached to it does the same thing from a different angle. Neither decision costs DCD anything it was actually using or actually needed.

The shorter furniture replacement cycle works differently and is worth separating out. It does not necessarily free up new budget the way the footprint and brand decisions do, since the total spend over time lands in a similar range either way. What it does instead is compound the employee experience argument directly. DCD’s office renews itself every five years instead of aging quietly for over a decade, which means the experience case is not only funded by where the savings from the other two decisions go, it is also built into how the furniture itself gets chosen and replaced in the first place.

What we did with that freed-up budget is the part most relocation plans skip entirely. Instead of quietly returning to the bottom line, it goes into a properly stocked pantry and subsidized access to neighboring gyms and clinics, things a team of under 30 people feels every single day, long after anyone remembers what the reception desk or the private office would have looked like.

This is not a soft add-on. The research on this is consistent: organizations that perform well at designing the employee experience are meaningfully more likely to report strong outcomes across the board, including innovation and workforce productivity, not just employee sentiment. Separate research points to the same conclusion from a different angle: engaged employees are dramatically less likely to leave their organization than disengaged ones, which for a 30-person company is not an abstract statistic. Losing even one or two people a year to a competitor with a marginally better offer is a direct, repeated cost most companies never trace back to how the office made people feel day to day.

We are not going to hand you a number here and tell you it is universal, because it is not. What the rent line and the furniture budget free up depends on the lease DCD signs and the market they sign it in. What is not in question is the direction: money that was going to finishes and square footage nobody was using now goes toward something with a documented link to whether people stay, and whether they perform while they are there. Where exactly that lands for DCD is a number worth asking us about directly.

The Method Repeats. The Answer Doesn’t.

Spend time in the space. Ask about the people who use it, not just how many there are. Let what actually turns up decide the recommendation. That process is the same for every client.

What it produced for DCD, a search bounded by local regulatory requirements most companies never think to check and an operational ceiling most companies never measure, would look different for another company with a different permit count, a different client cadence, or a different mix of roles. The process is consistent. The answer never is.

The goal was never simply to find DCD a new address. It was to arrive at a space that drives employee experience, supports productivity, and optimizes cost at the same time, without treating any one as the tradeoff for the other two.

Ask yourself plainly: do you know what percentage of your own desks or offices actually sit empty on a given day. Most leadership teams do not, because nobody tracks it until a lease renewal forces the question.

If you do not have an answer to that, that is the conversation worth having before the broker call, not after.