What are the advantages and disadvantages of virtual offices, including telecommuting?.
A Virtual Office allows you the ability to establish a local business presence in a new market without leaving your desk. You can also provide your business with a prestigious physical mailing address and local telephone numbers in any top US markets. You will gain the appearance of a local presence while operating your business from anywhere in the world. All of the office information can be handled locally by a contracted source that handles this kind of service or it can be handled remotely by your business. You can also choose to have all your calls answered with your company name locally if you choose to hire a contractor to do this part or you can. You can also set up your virtual office phone number to be forwarded to your normal location through web software so you can run several virtual offices in several different cities. This allows you to capture a larger market clientele and produce larger profit margins. Some of the benefits from having a virtual office in several city's throughout the world are that you can capture a larger market share depending on what type of business that you are operating. You can also advertise throughout the world as an international business. Some of the disadvantages of having a virtual office are that you may have to hire personnel in each of the cities that you have a virtual office so that if you need to have a contact person. You also may have to have people to do estimates or actually do the work because it may be more cost effective to out source the work than to have your normal people in the business travel to where the work needs to be done. From a telecommuting perspective you would have to hire a company in that city to handle the calls and this would be an added expense. I would suggest having a contact person in each of the places you have a virtual office at the top of your organization and he or she continuously sets clear goals and requirements for because this will allow a physical contact for anyone or anything that needs to be done or different locations.