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Does Your Business Really Need an Office?

We’re hearing more and more about people working from their laptops – from wherever they happen to be.

The virtual office has arrived – for some

Since from around the time of the first dotcom boom a decade ago, a new trend has been emerging. High-tech – and not so high-tech business start ups and freelancers who work without having physical office premises.

These people depend on their laptop, Skype and smartphones to get their work done. These devices are in a sense where their businesses are based, rather than in an office building. For these entrepreneurs, the idea of having physical office premises is irrelevant. It would be a burden that brings little advantage and just isn’t necessary any more.

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Having offices mean incurring a whole load of costs and infrastructure that are only of marginal benefit. If you have employees you next need parking spaces, you need restroom facilities, and so on. It sets of a chain reaction of additional costs with virtually no end.

If you need staff, then you can outsource. You can use freelancers hired via the Internet. There are now job and contract bourses on the Net that make it possible to hire-in on a contract basis practically any expertise you need – and from anywhere in the world.

You save on office space and all the extra costs. You save on hiring expensive conventional employees with the social insurance overheads that governments now burden businesses with.

Attitudes Towards Being Virtual Sometimes Lag Behind

The “virtual office” is almost tailor made for the small business. But not having a conventional office isn’t always so easy for small businesses. The older generation still expect a business to mean having a physical commercial address. Many still find the idea of a virtual office hard to grasp.

You can also still encounter problems with attitudes of government authorities and banks, as well as other businesses that you come into contact with. And if you’re applying for government grants or funding loans, these old attitudes can make not having a commercial address a disadvantage in your relationship with them.

But you can find ways around this. You can also at least have a registered business address – this is usually still a legal requirement for establishing a business entity in most countries.

I too have experienced these old mentalities at first hand. I worked as a freelancer with a home office in my apartment in Germany for many years. Officially in doing this I was treading a risky tightrope and the lengths of concealment and subterfuge it led me to at times were almost like something out of a situation comedy.

Because of the terms of the apartment lease, whenever the management agent or caretaker of the apartment block called by, I had to ensure my home office looked like a living room with no tell-tale sign of an “office” in evidence.

But when the accountant or the tax inspector called by, for tax deduction purposes I had to make quite sure it did look like an office – and nothing like a living room. Why can’t people just accept that some of us work from home, or even on the road, or virtually. Crazy world…

I also had a Berlin accountant who couldn’t understand the concept of an online bank - they looked flummoxed and baffled when I told them it had no branch address - even though it was the online subsidiary of one of Germany’s – and the world’s – biggest banks. But that’s another story.

Starting a Virtual Business

If you’re an online entrepreneur, to some extent you can pick and choose in which country and city you wish to locate your business. You can also obtain a virtual telephone number for a particular city, linked to your phone or mobile wherever you are physically located. And you can register an Internet domain name in practically any country in the world. This means business can be global, regardless of all the border and nation stuff.

As for the bricks and mortar aspect: there can be cases where you need an office location. But even then you can keep costs down by just hiring a serviced office suite as and when you require it.

Virtual is the Business Path of the Future

I think virtual is clearly the way forward. It’s much cheaper and simpler than old office model. The technology – webinars, groupware such as Basecamp, Skype, Video, Google Docs, online cloud storage and so on is already there. And the advances still to come will also accelerate this process further. Plus telecommunications and Internet will make borders and local restrictions more and more irrelevant.

There’s no need to do business the old way with an office or shop open only 9 to 5. On the net you can be virtual – and you can also be global.

So when you go to your local Starbucks and see people sitting on the sofas tapping away on laptops, bear in mind they could be Internet entrepreneurs working on their latest new project.