Business Has No Limits with a Virtual Office

Instead of spending dollars in bricks-and-mortar retail or service space, invest heavily in transferring your place-of-business assets to an online, virtual site.

Dirks on Strategy: Business has no limits with a virtual office
By David Dirks

Want to save a significant amount of annual expense, increase your profitability, and lower your cost of goods and services so you can remain competitive?

Sure you do. However, many of us are still married to the concept of having a retail or service space to conduct business.

I'm challenging that "bricks-and-mortar" strategy right here and now. One size does not fit all, but this strategy is worth taking a good, hard look at.

Think of having a virtual office. Instead of spending dollars in bricks-and-mortar retail or service space, invest heavily in transferring your place-of-business assets to an online, virtual site.

A virtual business strategy allows your customers to conduct business and your employees to work without the need for expensive office space.

This is a strategy of moving your infrastructure investments in maintaining a bricks-and-mortar site into creating a better user experience on the Web and being able to conduct their business via the Web.

Invest and make your Web site so customer-friendly and seamless to use (for navigation and purchase orientations) that you no longer rely on a physical presence in order to be able to conduct business.

For a great example of a virtual office on a national scale, check out virtuallawpartners.com. Virtual Law Partners provides a model for how service providers can scale a national business on a virtual office platform.

Some key advantages to this strategy:

1. Dramatically reduced expenses (after an initial investment for upgrading your distributive work environment and your Web site experience) means you have more capital to work with. Freeing up cash flow is critical in any economy.

2. Lower operating expenses means you can re-direct those funds to build up cash reserves, lower your cost of goods/services, hire more people and expand your product/service offerings. If you need storage space for product (and can't have it drop-shipped from the manufacturer to your customer directly), you might need to rent space. Storage space can be far less expensive to maintain than premium retail or office space.

3. No geographic limitations. This is my favorite one of all. The infrastructure investments you make to create a Web site that is customer-centric, user-friendly and seamlessly allows people to buy from you from anywhere in the world. Thinking of that kind of Web site married to a distributive work environment takes the shackles off your "local" business. You're not local anymore.

4. You can take the infrastructure savings of reduced or eliminated reliance on "bricks-and-mortar" and apply that to a powerful and robust marketing budget to expand both your local and Web-wide ability to sell products and services.

Start with a clean sheet of paper and begin thinking through how you could design a way to conduct business without the bricks-and-mortar. Force yourself to think it through with the attitude of "How can I do this" versus "How many excuses for not doing it can I come up with?"

David Dirks of Port Jervis is the author of "Job Search Marketing: Finding Job Opportunities in Any Economy." He can be reached at 940-5224 or by visiting www.jobsearchmarketing.net. His column appears Wednesdays.