The Customer’s Question
A business owner came to us while preparing for an office move and asked a question we hear often:
“We’re moving into a smaller office, and we have about 15 years of old records in filing cabinets, boxes, and storage closets. We know we can’t take all of it with us. What should we do?”
The move had already created enough work. The last thing the company wanted was to move years of old paperwork into a new building just because nobody had time to decide what should stay and what should go.
What Was Going On
The business had grown over the years, and so had its paper records.
Some files were current and clearly needed to move with the company. Others were old customer records, accounting paperwork, employee documents, contracts, invoices, copies of identification, and boxes that had not been opened in years.
The biggest problem was that nobody wanted to make the wrong decision.
The owner was worried about destroying something the company might still be required to keep. At the same time, paying movers to transport old records into the new office did not make much sense.
That is a common situation during an office move. A deadline suddenly forces a business to deal with records that may have been quietly accumulating for years.
Our Conversation With the Customer
The first thing we explained was that moving day should not become the company’s records-retention policy.
Before anything is destroyed, the business should identify which records still need to be retained based on its own retention schedule, legal requirements, tax needs, contracts, or industry rules. Different types of records may have different retention periods, so we do not recommend treating every box the same.
Once the company knew which records were approved for destruction, the process became much simpler.
The owner then asked whether employees could just spend a few afternoons using the office shredder.
With 15 years of records, that would have created another problem.
Small office shredders are useful for occasional documents, but they are not designed for a large office cleanout. Employees would need to remove staples, feed paper in small batches, empty shredder bags, clear jams, and spend hours doing work that had nothing to do with the move itself.
There was also the question of what happened to confidential records while employees were sorting everything.
We recommended creating a clear separation between records that were moving to the new office and records that had been approved for destruction. Approved records could then be placed directly into secure containers rather than sitting in open boxes or trash bags around the office.
What We Recommended
For this company, a one-time purge shredding service made the most sense.
Instead of moving old records to the new location or asking employees to shred thousands of pages themselves, the company could gather the approved material and have it professionally destroyed as part of the move.
For businesses that want the destruction performed at their location, mobile shredding can also allow the material to be destroyed on-site. This helps maintain a clear chain of custody and keeps sensitive information under controlled handling throughout the process.
We also encouraged the company to look beyond paper.
Office moves often uncover old hard drives, backup media, CDs, DVDs, data tapes, obsolete electronics, employee badges, and other items that may still contain company information. Simply throwing those materials into a dumpster can create an unnecessary privacy risk.
RW Lone Star Security provides secure destruction for paper records as well as hard drives and other media, which can make an office move a good opportunity to clean out several types of sensitive material at once.
The final recommendation was to avoid rebuilding the same problem in the new office.
Once the move was complete, the company could put a regular document-destruction process in place so records were reviewed and securely destroyed as they reached the end of their useful life.
What Other Businesses Can Take From This
An office move is one of the best times to take a serious look at the records your business has been storing.
The goal is not to destroy everything simply because it is old. The goal is to determine what still needs to be retained, securely destroy what no longer needs to be kept, and avoid paying to move unnecessary confidential material from one building to another.
If your office has filing cabinets, storage rooms, or boxes filled with years of old records, RW Lone Star Security can help handle the secure destruction side of the process.
That means fewer boxes going onto the moving truck, less sensitive information sitting around the new office, and a cleaner start in your new location.