March 26th, 2010 
Maria Helm 
As many business owners jostle to keep overhead costs low, the cost of leasing an office is something that we rarely consider cutting. However, depending on how your business is structured, going virtual – aka, not having a physical office – may be a practical option.
I’ll use a small design firm I work with of about six employees, as a case study. Here are the many needs that we considered, and that you’ll want to dwell on, if you’re thinking about going virtual:
Time tracking. When it comes to documenting your team’s hours for billing and payroll purposes, there are plenty of time tracking systems with a wide array of features available online. Mashable has a great rundown of online time trackers that range from free to reasonably-priced. I use FreshBooks for my virtual assistance business and I find it efficient and user-friendly. I also recommend Harvest and Freckle – both are robust, well-designed, and reasonably priced.
Project management. Keeping track of tasks, deadlines, and dependencies is crucial, and online project management is a big space with many options. You should budget significant time for investigating and testing as many of these services as possible to determine what best matches your business processes.
Phone system. Sign up for a “virtual switchboard” service, which sets up phone extensions that forward to individual home phone lines. We chose Aptela, because it was affordable and gave us the options we needed, but there are a number of alternatives including RingCentral.
VPN. We bought special Linksys VPN routers to give us secure and easy-to-maintain access to our internal servers and shared files from our homes. It’s worth noting, however, that the setup required some substantial technical knowledge, so I’d suggest speaking with your IT director (or a freelance techie – let me know if you need one) to evaluate how best to affect this change.
Chat. To allow for real-time communication amongst the team, we signed everyone up for a chat service. We selected MSN Live Messenger because it has dependable group chat features, but most other chat services would work just as well.
Screen sharing. Screen sharing has been a huge part of what made it possible for us to go virtual. It allowed us to easily simulate looking over each others’ shoulders while collaborating on a project, as well as easily show a client what we’re working on without being in the same room together. We use GoToMeeting for walking clients through product demos and for collaborating on projects internally. A good option if you don’t want to pay monthly subscription is Glance.
A year and a half later, the firm is still virtual and running more efficiently than ever, all while working from our respective homes, coworking spaces, or wherever we prefer.
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If the people already know you, buy from you and trust you, you can ask them to do things like sign up for a managed or retained service, or perhaps buy additional or upgraded products. That same request on a cold list (or list of people who don’t know you) is very difficult and in most times will not work. You’ll need to use email to drive them to a website to sign up for a free “something”, download a free report, sign up for a seminar, or some other ‘baby step’ action that will lead toward making the sale.
It would be wonderful if we could simply walk up to a cosmetic counter and purchase a bottle of self-confidence the way we can buy “revitalizing” or “lifting” creams for our faces. Unfortunately this spiritual elixir, like an expensive perfume, is different on every woman because of individual chemistry.
