Getting Ahead: Virtual Offices

PHONG LAM RUNS A seven-person company from his Columbia, Md., basement. Yet when he meets with clients, they find him in a conference room in Northern Virginia, in an office building complete with all the amenities. He has a receptionist, a break room with coffee and tea, and Wi-Fi.

Lam has a virtual office. The idea isn't new — it's been around since the 1980s — but in recent years, the concept has grown rapidly, with companies opening new locations all the time.

Here's how it works: For a monthly fee, you get a mailing address, someone to sign for your packages, a receptionist to forward your calls to a land line, cellphone or Blackberry, and other goodies — usually access to a conference room or work area, a copier and coffee. There are as many types of virtual offices as there are businesses, from nurturing, collaborative environments to showy, high-class buildings and impeccably decorated spaces. For these services, you'll pay from $75 to $300 per month.

"This ... is probably nicer than what most of our clients have," says Charlie Tramazzo of the Regus center he uses for his two-person marketing-to-nonprofits business, Kingdom Communications. Before he made the leap to virtual two years ago, he says, "We were in a [class] C building. The air conditioning didn't work, the heat didn't work, and we were paying 10 times what we pay now." Tramazzo now works from home almost all the time, but he hops down to D.C. from Clarksburg, Md., meeting clients at a Regus facility just blocks from the White House.

Regus was founded in Belgium 30 years ago by a British entrepreneur. The company now has more than 950 centers in 400 cities worldwide, making it the largest provider of outsourced — virtual and shared — office space in the world. Even so, Tom Chevins, a Regus senior vice president of sales and marketing, says the company is expanding by 20 percent per year — and that January was a "record month" where virtual offices were concerned.

There are reasons for this, Chevins says, such as how easy it is to get started (it's just a matter of entering some data into a computer system, which takes about 15 minutes), or how using a centralized phone system, rather than giving employees cellphones, gives business owners more control.

Tramazzo has another thought. "I like chuckling when I listen to WTOP," he says. "I just love not spending the time in the car. All that time wasted ... was killing me. It would have to be something very drastic that would make me get on 270 again to come to an office."

For small businesses, virtual offices offer advantages beyond nixing the commute. "We get as little or much as we need," says Kevin Tucker, vice president of Tiboni Associates, a Harrisburg, Pa.-based public policy firm. And, according to Chevins, office space is only 42 percent used — meaning that 60 percent of the time, business owners are paying for chairs nobody's sitting in, lights nobody's using and a copier sitting in standby mode. In addition, the flexibility — many virtual office solutions offer month-to-month payment plans — helps businesses that may be expanding or changing. "We can't afford to sign a five-year lease," says Lam, owner of Zecontech and a virtual client at Teqcorner in McLean, Va., "and, plus, the number of employees fluctuates."

And, at least in some instances, virtual office space can foster creativity and growth. Teqcorner, for example, provides an incubator-esque environment, where start-ups can get help applying for government contracts or network with each other. Lam says that the variety of businesses in Teqcorner's center make it easy to tackle government projects that require a variety of skills, with each business working on the part of the project it knows best.

All said, however, there are some cases where going virtual might not be best for business. Mike McKean used a virtual office for his company, the Knowland Group, briefly before moving from physical office to physical office. (He finally settled on a permanent office at Teqcorner last year.) "They nickel-and-dimed us," he says of the virtual company, which he declined to name.

Working at home can be lonely, too. Lam says he initially thought his seven employees would love working from home, but "it turns out people do want to interact with each other." Zecontech solved that problem by having everyone in for a meeting every other week. But for some businesses, more face-to-face time might be needed.

Then, some folks believe you just don't need the services. If you can work from home or from Starbucks, popping into the neighborhood copy shop to send faxes or photocopy the occasional document, maybe the extra expense is one you can afford to lose.
"I don't know that it would really make a difference to [clients] that you had some sort of prestigious address," says Peter Bowerman, freelance writer and author of "The Well-Fed Writer." "What's far more important is just, 'Can you get the job done?' I tell people this all the time when they're starting a new business and they're wrestling with a name for their company or a business card design. My standard answer to that is, you know, you're stalling." He adds, "I've just always been cheap. I don't feel like paying" for virtual office amenities.

But even despite these objections, the virtual office industry is clearly growing, with the D.C. area being one of the centers of activity. In addition to Regus and Teqcorner, other companies setting up facilities here include Intelligent Office, Preferred Offices, Davinci Virtual, and Metro Offices — the list continues, albeit with similarly bland names. Many of these companies opened their first location here within the last five years; many are still growing. Cheri Reid, a Metro Offices director of sales, says her company has opened another center every year since 2000.

Most business owners are pleased with their virtual services. "It gives us a whole variety of advantages. It's just perfect for us," says Tramazzo, whose very real business, like so many others, has found a home among the bits and bytes of the Web.

Written by Express contributor Rachel Kaufman
Photos courtesy Lawrence Luk