The Sounding Board

It would seem that office-in-a-box solutions are becoming the way to go for many small businesses. Most of us have heard of virtual offices and office centers. For a fee, you can access a fully functional office location when and where you need it.

Going to be in Vegas for a convention? Need Las Vegas office space? Need somewhere professional to meet prospective clients while you’re in Austin, TX? Someplace to ’set up shop’ for a few days so you can work with more than just the utilitarian desk and WiFi the hotel offers? Have a home office in Baltimore, but need a place to hold meetings with a more professional appearance? These are the scenarios virtual offices and office centers are intended to resolve for small business owners. Many office centers even offer the use of an on-site administrative assistant to route calls, greet visitors, dictate memos, etc. It’s like renting a fully functional disposable office. Kind of neat for the traveling executive or the SOHO business owner who doesn’t need a 6 month lease plus monthly utility and employee costs.

One of the companies I’ve looked at in researching this “newer” trend is Business Suites. They’re primarily located out West, but they do have locations in Virginia (a  little closer to my neck of the woods) and Maryland. Here’s some ad info from their site:

“Businessuites (BSS) offers office center space to corporations and professionals throughout the Continental United States. These executive suites are fully-furnished with an optional administrative assistant. Office space can be leased in any fashion of time.”

You can learn more about Business Suites at their site: www.businesssuites.com. Too bad they don’t have locations near me. I could use my own office space once in awhile when I need to get out of the house, but still get some work done. (I had an outside office at one point, but gave it up due to the cost vs. amount of use I was actually getting out of it - wasn’t worth $1,400 per month in rent & utilities just to have an office I used 4-8 hours a week at the most.)

As many of my colleagues, readers, and clients know, I have been heavily involved with a professional organization devoted to Virtual Assistants for a few years now. I’ve done a great deal of volunteer work for that organization including giving permission to publish my articles, assisting other members with article submissions for the organization’s own publication, providing text and audio testimonials, assisting with planning virtual events, making connections with speakers for seminars, etc. I did all of those things because I believed in the values and objectives the organization’s founder proposed. I wanted to help promote what I thought was a great and noble cause - elevating our profession and giving like-minded professionals a place to freely share ideas, inspiration, successes, failures, and mutual support.

We all know that any healthy organization must change and evolve over time in order to stay current and responsive to the community it serves. That is paramount to a healthy, sustainable business. However, when the organization’s core values, beliefs, and objectives evolve to such a degree that the organization is no longer recognizable from its original roots? Unfortunately, then it’s often time for key members to disengage and move on. This is the path I have found myself on over the last year - increasingly distancing myself from an organization whose core beliefs and objectives are no longer in line with my own. I simply cannot support, nor sit idly by, while a once vibrant and open community that celebrated critical thinking and intelligent debate becomes a community of censorship driven by a single dictator who makes no room for any opinion not in line with hers.

You would think that growth would be a positive thing and that growth which causes a separation in ideals is simply healthy maturation of an organization. Separation should be dignified and professional. You simply agree that you no longer see eye to eye and the best course of action would be to part ways and wish each other the best. Unfortunately, this is not the case with this particular parting. Instead, I find myself feeling betrayed and used. In the beginning, there were specific boundaries for where the organization would and would not go in terms of growth. There were things each of us understood to be unacceptable in terms of the kind of community we all wanted to help create and foster. I have operated under that understanding since the very beginning.  I have given freely of my time and my expertise in support of that goal…only to find that I was misled. The goals we all work so diligently towards were never the “real” intended goals. What was deemed “unacceptable” in the beginning is now the status quo and the goals for the whole organization. The “community” we helped to create has become the vehicle for promoting only one.

I cannot help but feel betrayed and saddened that one person could take such advantage of all those who gave so freely of their time and effort to build a noble, elevated community - only to have that community stripped from us so that one and only one person can reap the benefit of a combined effort. That, in my opinion, is the epitome of unethical behavior. It has also been a hard, painful lesson learned in terms of volunteering the time and energy, much less the image and integrity of my business.

Have you learned a similar lesson in your business? By all means, feel free to share your experience by posting your comments below.

I’ve finally done it! I finally updated The Sounding Board to Wordpress 2.5.1. (Thank you LunarPages - my host provider - for making the upgrade easy via their one-click install.)

I’m getting used to the new dashboard…trying to navigate and find all my favorite stuff. Not bad. It’s nice to see a new environment once in awhile. Like Spring cleaning and re-arranging the living room furniture. It’s nice to make an old space feel ‘new’ again.

There’s nifty new stuff you can do too! For one, no more do you need a URL for images in order to add them to a post. You can just upload the image directly from your PC. Cool. (See the image below? I did that by just uploading it from the company folder on my laptop.) Yeah! So many times I’ve wanted to add an image to a post, but I don’t have time to upload it to my site folder, or to a photo host, or whatever just so I can insert it. Now I don’t have to mess with that stuff anymore. Great time saver for me! :)

And I love the “kitchen sink!”

So many options that are easier to use now. I might have to play a little now…«»  (Can you tell I’m tinkering? lol…)