Thinking of renting office space for your business? You probably don’t need to. As many companies are starting to realize, it makes more practical sense to do without an office and work from home. There may well be a certain prestige to having an office, but otherwise there’s no real need to have an office in this day and age. Here are a few reasons why your business probably doesn’t need office space.
One of the biggest reasons that company owners rent office space is so that they can hire employees. However, thanks to the internet, it’s now possible to hire employees remotely. In fact, some companies now have entire workforces of remote employees.
Hiring remotely has lots of advantages. Without the distractions of an office, workers are able to concentrate more. Meanwhile, studies such as this one at FlexJobs.com have found that a lack of commute and more time with family result in many remote workers being a lot happier. Remote workers have also been found to take fewer sick days.
You can communicate with your employees via phone, video-communication and instant messaging. Cloud computing meanwhile has made it easier to share files with employees around the world, including the option to edit an annotate documents.
Some company owners feel that they need office space so that they don’t have to give out their home address to clients for mailing and marketing purposes. However, the likes of physicaladdress.com have solved this issue by allowing company owners to outsource a virtual address. This is an address that you rent from another company – all your mail gets sent here and it can then be forwarded onto your real address. This give you the benefits of having an office address without actually renting an office.
A lot of company owners also rent an office so that they have somewhere to hold meetings with clients and employees. Whilst video-communication is always an option in such cases, there may be times when a client asks to meet you in person. Meetings in coffee bars can be a great solution to this – many companies have made this their go-to environment because it’s somewhere that you can sit down and talk for free, whilst having the option to buy a coffee.
Office space can be a huge expense. Not only is there the cost of rent to consider, but also various utility bills as well as cleaning and maintenance fees. When you run a business from home, you save money on all these costs. This could be money that you could pour into other aspects of your business, or it could be extra money that you take home as profit.
For a lot of companies, going without an office could make it possible to work on a much smaller budget. It could even be a way of avoid debt later down the line or to get out of current debt faster.
Commuting to and from an office can take up valuable time for you and your employees. When you work from home, you can get up in the morning and be at your desk in a matter of seconds. Some people can spend up to ten hours a week commuting – that’s a lot of hours that could be spent doing something more enjoyable or something more productive. If you’re the type of person that is able to concentrate more first thing in the morning, you may also find that not having to commute to an office allows you to start work earlier. Alternatively, a lack of a commute could be an excuse to lie in later and get more sleep. Whatever the case, you’ll have more time left to play with.