Happy New year to everybody! Hope the year turns out a little better than the weather we have been having here in Auckland. Bet a few people are going back to work frustrated that their annual holidays have passed without any sun.

Well the New Year brings new premises for Switch Business. We are now firmly ensconced in new digs at Level 4, 12 O’Connell Street. Hopefully we are a little easier to find now than in our previous location. For some reason people couldn’t find Chancery Lane, The Chancery no problem, but Chancery Lane impossible.

We tried to purchase the Chancery Lane office but the owner wasn’t keen to sell so after a little search we were to find this O’Connell street site. Paul did wonderfully well co-ordinating the design and fit out of our new offices, all was completed on budget and on time and here we are.

An interesting side note is that the reason the building was available was that there was a gym business already in place and interested parties couldn’t see past that. This was good for us because we are now gym owners as well. So should any of you live or work in the city and are looking for a gym stop by and have a look. The orange BalanceCBD sign out front will point you in our direction.

We were able to split off 100 square metres from the gym for Switch with a separate entrance.

While I have only been back a few days it certainly seems to me people are trying to make up for lost time after the being sidetracked during the September-December quarter with Rugby World Cup, the Election and then straight into Christmas. I have found that people are answering the phones, returning messages and coming in for appointments. This is not normal in our line of work, normally things don’t really return to normal until after Waitangi Day.

We are talking to numerous business owners at present and hope to have 4-5 new opportunities to go to market with over the next few weeks. Not too much of scale though with most of the opportunities we are seeing are under the $1m EV. As mentioned numerous times in my posts last year we are still looking for businesses with EBIT over the $1m on behalf of a number of parties.