Virtual Office Space: Is Google Drive Worth Your Time?

Virtual Office Space: Is Google Drive Worth Your Time?: It seems like the online business community can’t go a month without seeing the release of a new tool or platform that is supposed to rev...

How to Select a Virtual Office Location

With a virtual office, it doesn’t matter where in the world your work takes you. You can do business with people in your hometown or across the world through one of these shared workspaces. For many businesses, one of the biggest benefits of this arrangement is that you can choose a prestigious location to house your temporary office. While most of your business may be done at home or on the road, you still benefit from a prestigious address and a stylish office space.

Choosing a Location      
               
Once you make the decision to use a virtual office solution, the next decision is location. As they say in real estate – it’s all about location, location, location. Take into account the place where you are most likely to be when you are in the office. Is it in your hometown? A nearby city? Somewhere that you travel to frequently?

Another consideration is the location of your major clients. If they are grouped in an area far from your home, you might consider using a virtual office location that is nearer to your clients than to your home. This makes it convenient for clients to meet with you when needed. It also gives them a sense of comfort knowing they are doing business with someone with an office close to theirs. That type of local accessibility is likely to be important to many of your clients.

Business Potential

In addition to considering your own location and the location of your major clients, also consider areas that hold the most business potential for you. There may be an untapped market that could yield many new clients for your business. Setting up a virtual office in a place that you have never done business before may help you tap into an entirely new market.

Think about your target audience, and where they live and work. Even if it is far from your home, you can still benefit from the address and phone number that you are afforded by using this virtual location. And by traveling there occasionally for meetings, you also have a physical presence in the area.

Using Virtual Resources

With a prestigious location, perhaps on a well-known street or near an important local landmark, your business gains instant credibility. This is particularly useful to those who work from their homes or vehicles. The stability of having a prestigious office gives your business a professionalism that is difficult for many entrepreneurs to gain. It shows clients that your business is there to stay, and it’s ready to meet them with professionalism.

The reception desk is one of the many resources afforded by these locations. Your guests can be greeted and shown to your temporary space as with any professional office. You will also have access to the necessary office machines that will make your office time convenient. Set up your computer, give a Power Point presentation and fax documents wherever they are needed. You can do all of this and more in a shared space and still do most of your work from home or the road.

Is Google Drive Worth Your Time?

It seems like the online business community can’t go a month without seeing the release of a new tool or platform that is supposed to revolutionize the way that we do business. The latest entry is Google Drive, an online collaboration studio and storage suite. Before you invest the energy to begin using Google Drive for team collaboration, it’s important to ask “Is Google Drive worth your time?”

What is Google Drive?
Google Drive is a place to create, share, collaborate and store all of the important online documents that help you get business done. It is an efficient and effective way to work with virtual teams especially when utilizing a virtual office.

Google Docs is part of the Google Drive platform, so you can work with others to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations within Google Docs and store them. Although Google Docs currently allows sharing and collaborative editing of documents, Drive takes your capabilities one step further. In the new platform, you can add and reply with comments on any media – including PDF, image and video files, as well as receive notifications when comments show up on shared items.

Google Drive allows you to store up to 5GB of documents, data and other digital “stuff” – all for free. Larger storage space options are available – 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month and 1TB for $49.99/month. Images, spreadsheets, docs and other documents are searchable together. You can tag items by keywords to make searching easy. In addition, Google Drive can recognize text in scanned documents using a special technology that locates words within an image file.

Google Drive is a native application – it installs right on your computer and is compatible with Mac or PC. In addition, if you have an Android phone or tablet that you can also use Google Drive. There are plans for on iOS app in the future so Drive will be accessible on the iPhone and iPad.

Should You Use Google Drive?
Google Drive can be a valuable collaborative tool that fits a niche that isn’t exactly met online. DropBox and Evernote are similar tools but they don’t do quite the same thing. DropBox allows people to share documents across the cloud, but there aren’t live editing capabilities. Evernote can help you save notes, scan in documents and create saved pages and posts online, but doesn’t have the collaborative capabilities that are part of Google Drive. If your team is already using Google Docs, Drive may be a good add on to your arsenal. Since you can browse through existing docs and engage with them in a new way, Drive will integrate almost seamlessly into your existing method of working.

The search functions along may make it a good option even if you already use DropBox or another solution (there are 10 current competitors). If you and your team create a large amount of documents each month, the search features will help save time when you need to pinpoint the exact conversation, scan or document you’re looking for.

5 Keys to a Successful Lean Start Up

If your business is starting small and wants to test and refine their products as quickly as possible, you fall into the category of “lean start-up.” The term, coined and trademarked by entrepreneur and author Eric Reis, has become a Bible of sorts to many young entrepreneurs hoping to launch the next Groupon, Facebook or InstaGram. But the principles can apply to you no matter what your age or your market.

Running a lean start up encompasses a lot of basic principles, but chief among them is capital efficiency. Rather than spending a billion dollars doing market research on the coupon phenomenon, the founders of Groupon tested the idea out in their own office complex first.
According to Reis, being lean isn’t about being cheap. “It’s about being less wasteful and still doing things that are big.”

Even if you’re an established business, you can start bringing some of the lean start up principles into your business, so you’re more innovative, more appealing to customers, and more profitable.

Focus on reducing waste – The prime goal of Lean Thinking (which fuels the Lean Start-up model) is reducing waste wherever possible. By increasing the frequency of connecting with customers, testing new ideas, and launching products or service with a minimum of features, it’s possible the time, money and resources spent on a typical start-up can be greatly reduced.

One of the most basic ways start-ups are reducing their overhead these days is by utilizing a Virtual Office or Coworking facility. By reducing their short and long term obligation to rent and facility amenities, they are slowing their “burn rate” while tapping into the intellectual ideas and collaboration a community of entrepreneurs provides.

New ideas are the lifeblood of your business – It’s important to always generate ideas to work with. Lean start-ups look for ways to innovate what they are doing and not just improve upon it. If a spark of an idea means you need to rethink your entire target market, it might be just the idea that will take your sales from ho hum to skyrocketing. If it means abandoning an old project or creating a new product that competes with your existing products, it may be worth the risk.

Pull your customers in, don’t push them into buying – Starting with a proven customer need is the best way to innovate a solution that will be successful and profitable. The result is better products that speak directly to the needs of your market. Instead of trying to manipulate people into buying, find ways to create the exact solutions to specific problems.

Let your customers define your value. – If someone buys your product and never uses it, do you consider it a win or a loss? In the Lean methodology, it’s a loss and needs to be fixed. Resources were spent but the value wasn’t achieved. Letting customers define the value – and focusing on use rather than just the sale – makes it easy to create a body of raving fans who evangelize your product. Look for the reasons why the product was never used and make changes in future generations to fix those problems.

Continuously improve the system that creates your business – It’s not just about maximizing the results. Success with a lean start-up means that you’re focused on improving the system that gets those results. You’ll need to focus on the processes, steps and systems that get you the results for which you are looking.

With these lean start-up ideas, you can innovate your current business, or be set to tackle a new venture without the bloated budget associated with many start-ups.

How to Collaborate with Mobile Workers

According to industry statistics, nearly 90% of companies have a mobile workforce of some kind. Mobile workers are using smart phones, pads and tablets to perform business functions in and outside of normal office spaces, or even in tandem with them. No matter the situation, all mobile workers have the same focus- using technology to stay connected with their work.



Sales people are traveling with virtual offices to meet clients, give presentations and share digital documentation. They are offering capabilities such as digital payments and paperless signature pads on mobile devices like tablets or smart phones for unparalleled ease in meeting client’s needs and closing sales in any location. Web-based payroll and HR platforms offer streamlined mission critical tools that employers can offer their mobile workforce. And email and social media remain the most used methods of connecting mobile workers. Staying connected anywhere, anytime is the key.

Advantages of Mobility

Employing a mobile workforce lends itself to remaining competitive in the marketplace. Many companies are using the latest devices and tools to empower their workers to increase productivity. Employees are even electing to bring their own devices (BYOD) of choice to work, and integrate them into their business systems. Companies are finding this advantageous in recruiting and retaining younger workers.

Business owners may also find additional ways to save capital by employing and empowering mobile employees. Mobility allows employees to work from anywhere and at anytime. This built in flexibility can be a benefit to both employers because it offers advantages such as saving money on leasing/purchasing office space, equipment, utilities, etc. Using on demand office spaces for meetings and allowing employees to use their own mobile devices to connect to their work can impact the bottom line significantly.

Trending Mobility

With ever increasing sales of mobile devices, consumers and employees alike are saying they want to stay connected. Business owners must respond by staying connected to industry trends as well. Understanding your mobile worker’s technological needs keeps you in sync with your growing business needs as well. Staying connecting and meeting the needs of the mobile workforce increases productivity, collaboration and effectiveness. This also increases your ability to compete in the digital marketplace, and to change to meet its ever evolving technological needs.

Creative Collaboration

Understanding your employees has always been important, particularly to small business or emerging business owners. Having the right team in place to jump start your business, build its infrastructure and grow its potential is part of successfully establishing any endeavor. Knowing how to help those employees do their best work and giving them the best tools they need to get the job done is the key. Younger employees are using social media as a large part of their mobile business work mode. Yet other employees need incentives to embrace new mobile technologies in the workplace. Meeting your employees where they are in the mobile workspace offers a better opportunity for creative collaboration and success in adapting your business to meet the demands of the market.

Outsourcing: 5 Ways to Vet a Service Provider

Outsourcing work to freelancers is becoming as much a part of the normal way to do business as hiring employees. While outsourcing has always been around, the advent of reliable remote connectivity tools has fueled a new freelance economy which has made outsourcing easier and more effective than ever.

Virtual offices are helping freelancers be effective performing their contractor work in a more cost effective manner than if the job was performed in-house. It makes sense for companies, big and small, to outsource non core-activities. To find the best service provider for your needs, there are several ways to weed through the available providers.

• Find out how the provider is able to communicate with you about the project. You may need nothing more than to communicate through email during business hours. However, many business owners need to be able to get a hold of their providers at other times and in other ways. If you anticipate needing Skype or cell communications with someone, ask just how you can get a hold of the provider as well as exactly what hours they are available.

• What kind of guarantees do you get from the provider? Some providers will guarantee a certain performance from the work they provide. Some guarantee that your satisfaction will be met when the work is completed or that further steps will be taken. If you are outsourcing written work, finding out whether rewrites are included in the price is necessary. If you are outsourcing software or Website design, you will need a guarantee of usability. For product manufacturing, product specification guarantees are in order.

• How does the price stack up with the competition? As any business owner knows, choosing a provider based exclusively on the lowest price isn’t always wise. However, choosing the most expensive from among comparable providers may not be any wiser. Take a look at how prices average for providers with the same level of expertise and experience. Providers who charge very little for very complex work may be in over their heads. Those who charge far too much for moderate skills may not be worth the price.

• Ask to see examples of past work when possible. If you’re outsourcing VA tasks, that may not be possible, but for many other industries it shouldn’t be a challenge for a provider to show you a few recent work examples. If you aren’t able to directly see past samples, ask for references. Past clients should be able to tell you how competent the provider is.

• How well does each prospective provider understand your project needs? If your project is unusual or one far outside the usual scope of a provider, communicate directly with that provider with specific questions about the range of services available. If the company seems to need far more direction than necessary, a virtual form of hand holding, you may not save as much time as you should by hiring that provider. There may even be misunderstandings about what the company is expected to provide. It may be worthwhile to seek out a company with more direct experience with what you want. It may also be necessary to draw up a highly detailed contract so that neither party is surprised with the outcome of the work done by the provider.

What is a Virtual Office Space? "From Boxers to the Boardroom"

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