A virtual office offers benefits to businesses of all sizes, including small startups and large corporations looking to expand operations into new areas. The fact is that in the era of digital, there’s no reason to rent, furnish and maintain an expensive office location, when a virtual office offers all the advantages at a fraction of the cost.
A virtual office gives you a professional address to put on your business card; a place to receive mail, faxes, and even receive visitors; and a facility that’s open for you, your colleagues, and clients to conduct meetings in at your convenience.
Other advantages like virtual answering service and access to virtual assistants for pressing projects means you can, for instance, work in rural Thailand while maintaining your business’s headquarters on Bay Street in Toronto, or Silicon Valley in San Francisco.
Here’s just a few ways a virtual office can help you cut costs while maintaining the air of ultimate professionalism for your business.
Corporate office address without the crazy leasing costs
A major setback when starting a business or trying to expand is strengthening and maintaining your company image. A good image is dependent on a number of factors, one such element being where your company headquarters is located. A virtual office provider can hook you up with an office in some of the swankiest business districts around the world, at prices that you can live with. Packages and even customer walk-in inquiries are taken care of via a virtual receptionist, and nobody is the wiser that you’re saving hundreds, even thousands a month on leasing costs.
Consider a financial services company looking to set up shop on Wall Street in New York. A traditional small, dedicated managed space starts at $1,500 on the low end, with coworking spaces starting out at over $500. Either price option could be an issue for a small company looking to save money, making a virtual office priced at usually less than half the cost of a stuffy coworking space a very attractive cost-cutting option.
Virtual reception services minus yearly salaries and benefits
A full time receptionist will run the typical business on average $30,000 — $35,000 a year when factoring in both salary, benefits, and other employment costs. They also require a place to sit, a telephone, computer, and other various office supplies to do their day-to-day tasks. As operations ramp up, you’ll need to double, triple and quadruple that cost in order to hire more staff to take on new tasks.
This can get tricky if your staffing needs aren’t certain 3, 6, or 12 months down the road. Sometimes you just need short term help, without the associated expense of hiring official staff to help out with growing pains until the future becomes more clear. Hiring, then laying off staff gets rather expensive, which is why the flexibility of signing up with a virtual office service and using their virtual receptionists and assistants makes perfect cost-cutting sense.
Affordable meeting spaces across the globe whenever you need them
Why rent office space all over the country (or globe) when you can take advantages of multiple virtual office locations as needed? Office rental costs can range into the thousands per month, depending on location. Meeting places, such as hotel conference rooms can cost hundreds of dollars per hour.
The majority of virtual office services offer clean and fully outfitted offices, conference rooms, and even lounges where you can meet clients and partners, in nearly every major business center (Eg., NY, LA, Tokyo, London, Singapore, etc.) around the world for a much lower fee. Best, you’re never locked into a set location, unless you want to be.
Fewer missed leads
When your business misses incoming phone calls, you can bet it’s costing you money. How much? That depends on the type of business you’re running and what scale you’re at currently. Consider all the possible situations when you, your partners, or other busy staff members might not be able to answer phones, such as when you’re in the middle of an important meeting, or (God forbid) need to catch a few ZZZZs at nighttime!
With a virtual office running 24/7 you never miss an important call. Your receptionist answers the phone just as an official employee would, greets callers, takes messages, and forwards them to your phone or email as to your preferences. The cost-cutting being done here is in fact cutting the cost of lost calls!
Reduced office overhead expenses
The costs of outfitting an actual business office can really put the hurt on a small business. Large businesses also feel the impact when seeking to set up multiple locations to increase their presence. Furniture, appliances, fax machines, computers, phones, Internet, catering costs, cleaning services, and much more all add up to thousands in initial setup overhead and hundreds in monthly expenses.
Whether your business requires you to stay hyper-mobile, or you simply want to work from your home using a laptop and a smartphone, virtual offices give you access to the services and amenities an office provides, without the overhead expenses. Your calls, faxes and lettermail can all be received at your official office, then forwarded to your email or current physical location without the need to outfit and maintain an office with pricey equipment that starts depreciating in value the minute you purchase.
Is the cost of doing business weighing you down?
As you’ve learned, there’s no reason to succumb to avoidable business expenses such as office rental, furniture and other overhead — or salaries, missed leads and conference room rentals that cost you money.
Renting a virtual office is much more cost-effective for on-the-go businesses who don’t need to maintain a storefront to sell products or services their clients.
