Do You Really Need An Office?

How much time do you spend being productive each day? Take out the commute to work, trudging to the office, getting settled in, being interrupted, grabbing coffee, jumping online, having lunch, ramping up again, more chit-chat, packing up, walking to your transportation, and then the commute home. Is that 3, maybe 4 hours of your day? In addition to that, what frame of mind does each of these steps put you in? There’s a solid chance that they have a negative effect on your outlook and productivity.

Ok, so if you are running a small business, what are you paying for rent, utilities, insurance, network, T1 lines, servers? Forget about the costs – how do you like dealing with the day to day management of all of these and the frustration that many of them bring to the table. All of these things are a time and money suck. And being a small business, it’s all about cash flow and productivity; being a small business, you cannot absorb either.

So why do you have an office space? Sure, some types of companies need equipment and common space for interaction. But if you are a service-oriented company, do you really need the aggravations and expenditures outlined above? At TrinityOne, we existed under those chains for almost 4 1/2 years, and we would have told you adamantly it had to be that way. We were so wrong… We went virtual in September of 2010 and have experienced, in just a short time, more productivity, more cost savings, improved overall cash flow, and much happier employees. The virtual work existence has been a huge positive to our small business.

Becoming virtual has enabled us to plan better and to use our time more efficiently, which has allowed us to be much more productive in shorter periods of time. The virtual network and phone system we now have costs significantly less than our old system, and we spend less time managing issues; we have had zero down time, which I cannot say for the hard wired systems we had before. It has also allows us to focus most of our time and attention on our clients, and not on operations issues. All of this is wonderful, but it doesn’t come close to the luxury of now being able to spend more time with our families and having real, battery-charging down time.

We would be the first to admit that our old set up was all wrong, and highly recommend a virtual office environment, or a virtual hybrid if you do need some type of workspace. We are happy to share our insights with you; if you have an interest in exploring a virtual work existence, just email us at info@trinity1.com

Do you really need an office?