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.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 3:21 pm and is filed under General Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.