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Steps To Change From Brick-And-Mortar To A Virtual Office

Guest post by: Gourab Nanda

Article Overview: Thanks to the Internet and its ecosystem, many current businesses are now operational without even physically existing, and with all due respect to the traditional way of setting up businesses, current small businesses are going virtual, and embracing its cost and growth benefits.

Steps To Change From Brick-And-Mortar To A Virtual Office

Thanks to the Internet and its ecosystem, many current businesses are now operational without even physically existing, and with all due respect to the traditional way of setting up businesses, current small businesses are going virtual, and embracing its cost and growth benefits. If you are interested in hopping on to the bus then go through the below steps; analyze and relate with them; and you surely will be ready to go virtual. Assess current resources and then outsource:

One of the most obvious and primary steps leading to outsourcing is to assess your resources. Start with preparing a chart with the resource names and their utilities, assign priorities to them based on their ability to directly generate income for your business; this will put them either under core, money generating resources or non-core resources. This is just the basic idea, you can build on this as per your considerations and then arrive at a list of resources that are non-core or not directly income-generating.

Now you have the option of removing these non-core resources and outsource their tasks to freelancers or virtual assistants based on your financial and growth objectives. Your benefits range from cost savings, lower managerial challenges, greater expertise to growth-bound association and the feeling of being an outsourcer.

Identify activities that can be done virtually:

You can follow similar steps that you used for the resource assessment process, the variable here being your business tasks. "Some prominent business minds, such as "lifestyle design" authority Timothy Ferris, contend that everything but a company's core skill can be outsourced". You have to be extra careful here when processing these tasks as these are the ones that you may ultimately outsource.

Reallocate work - offer flexibility to work from home:

This leads to further reduction in the consumption of office infrastructure and also gives your staff the flexibility of working from home. This may go particularly well with employees who have to travel miles to reach your office and for employees who have families to take care of. "The current data suggests that technology is no longer a barrier to telework," says Rose Stanley, work-life practice leader at WorldatWork. "We estimate that 100 million U.S. workers will telework by 2011.

Hire virtual resources/vendors:

This is a pretty straight thing to do, with more and more virtual assistants offering value added services, you are the one who gets benefitted. This removes may troubles that you may have to bear with if you decide to keep these tasks to yourselves. You can completely do away with hiring, training, and retention worries. Additionally, if you hire virtual assistants through a dedicated service provider, then you can be assured of service continuity/no off-days and professional quality work.

Centralize virtual operations:

This is a post-outsourcing activity to consider. Once you identify and outsource the non-core activities it is recommended that you centralize all the activities under a single umbrella. This will help you give greater association, systematic work allocation, and less management hassle. Centralizing your outsourced tasks can save an additional 40% of your overhead costs.

Keep analyzing and planning for the future:

Do not just outsource and rest assured. You have to be proactive in constantly monitoring your outsourced tasks and also keep analyzing the need for further outsourcing, and take necessary periodic measures to meet set financial and growth based objectives. You should also think ahead and plan for the future and set targets including outsourcing volumes, setting financial targets that needs to be achieved using outsourcing and so on.

These basic set of steps will surely inch you closer towards virtualized business model, however you can improvise based on your specific needs and achieve virtualization and make a remarkable difference in cost savings and overall growth.

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Article Tags: small business growth, small business management, small business outsourcing, small business tips, virtual assistants



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