Three reminders weren't enough
Contracts with notice periods are everywhere - office leases, supplier agreements, trial employments. Cancel on time and it's a five-minute task. Forget and you've created many hours of extra work, lost money, and a distraction that can drag on for weeks or months.
The person responsible forgot to cancel our office lease. I had reminded him three times. He says he delegated it to the office manager. Either way, that single missed deadline locked us into three more years with a landlord we wanted to leave - and cost us all our negotiating leverage.
In Sweden, a commercial lease is typically three years. In most EU countries it's even longer - five to ten years. Miss the notice window and your lease auto-renews for another full term. Get it right and life goes on. Forget it and you've handed your landlord a gift-wrapped hostage situation.
How we got locked in
We had a nice office in Malmö's old town, but we were bursting at the seams. Growing fast, we knew we'd need to move within a year. As the notice deadline approached, I reminded the person responsible on three separate occasions: do not forget to give notice or we're locked in for another three years.
He forgot.
Blamed the office manager he'd supposedly delegated it to. Whether that was true, I never found out.
The landlord's favourite situation
Now we needed a bigger office but were shackled to our current landlord for three more years. Landlords love this not uncommon scenario, because you're negotiating from a position of zero leverage.
First came the unproductive but inevitable task of assigning blame. Then several meetings to figure out how to salvage the situation. Fortunately we'd signed with one of the larger property firms, so they had other offices to offer. And we wanted a bigger space, which they're always happy about.
The real cost wasn't the money
For us it meant choosing only between our current landlord's offices instead of everything available in the city. No leverage in negotiations. A new landlord would have been keen to sign a fast-growing tech company - we could have negotiated a good deal.
But the biggest cost wasn't the money or the less-than-ideal office. It was the distraction. As a fast-growing company, focus is everything. This was a completely avoidable, self-inflicted wound. Some tasks give a team energy. This one just drained it - a demoralizing mess that consumed attention for weeks.
Reminders don't cut it
So what would have prevented this?
- My reminders didn't work.
- Delegation didn't work.
- The person responsible and/or the office manager probably had some reminders that didn't work.
You need a system with a clear dashboard showing every critical deadline, who owns it, and when it's overdue. Not a system that sends one reminder and considers its job done. A system that keeps reminding - day after day - until someone actually does the thing. And if the assigned person doesn't act, it needs to escalate so more eyes are on it.
This very avoidable event is one of the reasons I'm building Process Oak. We launch Q1 2026 - join the waitlist at processoak.com.
