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Flexibility, Accessibility, Affordability Make Office Business Centers the Wave of the Future

Fri, 20 Oct 2006 17:46:23 -0800

Ready to make the switch from home-based business to professional office, but not quite ready to take on the financial burden of rent, furniture, technology and staffing? An Office Business Center might be the next logical step for you.

Office Business Centers offer shared business space and services for companies in a variety of situations. According to the Office Business Center Association International (OBCAI), the Centers are used by small businesses and organizations that may not be able to buy or lease space affordably on their own. Advantages include:

A professional environment, complete with office furniture, conference rooms, phone and Internet access and even a receptionist.
Flexible leases, so you have the ability to expand your physical space as your client base grows.
No permanent overhead. You pay rent to the Office Business Center manager, who takes care of all the utilities, grounds keeping and other ancillary expenses.
An affordable price that's about half of what it would take to equip and staff a commercial space on your own.
Key locations that are convenient for both you and your customers.
Networking opportunities with other tenants - Business opportunities, support and/or friendships, or just stimulation.
A psychological separation between work and personal lives, the benefits are enormous.

Space that Grows with your Business Four years ago, Richard Sanchez rented one of the smallest available offices in an Office Business Center after starting his own vision benefit company in Pinellas County, Florida. After his business multiplied several times over, he's expanded to the largest suite in the complex and added the adjacent office.

Sanchez said what first drew him to the Office Business Center was the immediate availability of accommodations. The first day he moved into the fully furnished office, he had a receptionist available, seven to eight conference rooms and phone and Internet accessibility.

Sanchez knew he had a flexible lease, so if his business grew, he could move within the Office Business Center to grow along with it. Four years ago, he rented 138 square feet; today he rents 1,650 square feet. Sanchez attributes much of his success to the flexibility, accessibility and location of the Office Business Center.

The Bottom Line: Centers Help Small Businesses

Jake Fisher, OBCAI's president and an Office Business Center Owner, said the business center concept has taken off in recent years with the increase of service and self-started businesses. Office Business Centers provide space, technology and support so their clients will be more productive, profitable and successful.

"Some people find they simply can't work at home," Fisher said. "There are just too many distractions. They are far more productive in a work environment. It's all about compression and decompression. On our way to work we get wound up so when we get there we are ready to go. When the day is done, on our way home we unwind. It's very simple, when we are work we work and when we are at home, we can enjoy our personal lives better. It is healthier mentally and far more productive."

"However, while each person's reasons for using an Office Business Center may vary, the real issues are success, productivity and profitability," Fisher said.

OBCAI Can Get You Started

If you've decided an Office Business Center is for you, how can you find one?

There are more than 600 Office Business Centers worldwide. Many of these belong to the Office Business Center Association International. OBCAI's comprehensive Web site will enable you to get started with no hassles. Just visit http://www.officebusinesscenters.org and click on the link "Finding an Office Business Center near you." You'll find the closest Office Business Center in your area. You can also search for specific services such as videoconferencing, software products, phone systems and other offerings. Once you choose a Center, the manager can help you:

Determine how much space you'll need.
Decide on the length and terms of your lease. Some centers even offer month-to-month.
Pick your equipment needs, which are often offered on a cost-per-use basis. Office Business Centers offer the latest technology including Internet access, phone service, copiers, fax machines and other business necessities.
Assess the level of staffing your business will need; whether you need a receptionist, secretary or other office worker. Again, these services are offered on a cost-per-use basis.

Article courtesy of PR Newswire

Virtual Anywhere: The Benefits of a Virtual Office

Sat, 17 Sep 2005 13:24:57 -0800

By Kelly Yamanouchi
Special thanks to our Affiliate, YOUR OFFICE USA, for this article.

August 15 - When Jim Chaves launched Businessgems.com, a high-tech consulting startup, he chose Denver as the headquarters. It made sense. The Mile-High City, he said, had become a "technology place.'' Four months later, Chaves takes phone calls and receives mail through Businessgems.com's headquarters at 600 17th St., Suite 2800 South. Visitors to the company's Web site learn that the company is based here. But there's a twist: Chaves lives in Toronto, and his company has no employees in Denver. He has commissioned Executive Suites/Virtual Office Services - Your Office USA in Denver - a company that rents out office space and provides small businesses with a corporate image - to take voice-mail messages, receive faxes and mail, and transfer calls to him in Canada. "I was looking for a presence in the Denver area,'' Chaves said. "We operate from the facilities that they offer at Executive Suites/Virtual Office Services - Your Office USA . The location is absolutely perfect.'' Chaves said he wanted to avoid making the large investment required to set up a new office in Denver, at least for now. Instead, he rents the services Your Office provides from its 17th Street office. "It's cost-effective,'' he said.

Thanks to sophisticated technology and a growing cadre of companies like Your Office , physical presence is no longer required of foreign companies eying the U.S. market. With a monthly investment of less than $200, a startup company based just about anywhere can have the bare essentials of a branch office in Denver: a Mile High City mailing address and phone number, fax, voice mail, e-mail, even a Web site. "It provides the image of being a larger company because it gives the image of a staff of people working for you,'' said Gary Hahnenkamp, president of Executive Suites/Virtual Office Services - Your Office USA in Denver, which runs virtual branches for 36 companies. "These people are betting their business future on that image.'' Hahnenkamp also rents out real offices to small businesses, but he has room for only 34 offices. With his high-tech answering system, the capacity for virtual offices is practically unlimited. He's hoping to oversee at least 100 virtual office clients within a year. Virtual offices are typically used by home-based businesses that need a professional image, such as lawyers who run their own practices. The growth of Your Office is an example of the growing popularity of virtual offices. The company's franchiser, which started in Germany in 1989 and now has 120 locations worldwide, opened all of its 10 United States locations within the past year. Small business have looked to answering services and office space rental to fulfill their professional needs for years, but Hahnenkamp says his company's technological capabilities allow him to attract customers such as foreign companies hoping to establish a presence in the United States.

At Your Office, receptionists serve as virtual clerks. When the phone rings, a prompt pops up on a computer screen with the name of the company being called, the appropriate greeting for that company and contact information. A receptionist reads the greeting and then transfers the call to the phone number listed, which can be anywhere in the world. Your Office also will send e-mail messages with voice mails attached as audio files so its foreign clients can check their voice mail without paying hefty international calling fees. The company will even edit its clients' correspondence to make sure it's properly "Americanized." "It's really a different niche that we're chasing, and we're chasing it with technology," Hahnenkamp said. "These people are just starting business here; this makes it easier for them."

Though it may seem deceptive for a small company in another country to create the image of an established branch office in Denver, Hahnenkamp of Executive Suites/Virtual Office Services - our Office USA says they're simply using the resources that are available. "Technology is a big equalizer: It's not just that these companies can portray the image of a big company, but they can actually deliver the services," Hahnenkamp said. "With the Internet, e-mail and low-priced software with big capabilities, the small companies can now perform just like the big ones," he said. And according to Hahnenkamp, his international clients don't keep it a secret that they're overseas based businesses and may be calling from another country, a fact that is difficult to hide with time differences and the businessmen's foreign accents.

For Michael Fuerst, export manager for a German toy maker, Executive Suites/Virtual Office Services - Your Office USA sends out sales literature and toy samples to potential customers from its Denver address. Fuerst's company - Bartl GmbH in Germany, and Wooden Ideas here - hopes to eventually develop a larger presence here, but for now, a "virtual branch office" does the trick. "I rented this office because I needed something for a first beginning, so the American customers see that we are present in the United States," said Fuerst, who has never visited Colorado. "It's like me being in Denver."

For Zahid Imran, the virtual office concept adds legitimacy to his company, which breeds ostriches in Pakistan and exports the meat and by-products such as feathers and decorative egg shells. Imran says the ostrich market in the United States is good, and he's hoping to introduce his products in Denver. With a virtual office, he said, "even though we are a very small company, we can do very well with less expense."

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Offices by the Hour: Convenient and Affordable

Sat, 17 Sep 2005 13:23:18 -0800

Kinko's carved out a market selling services to folks working at home. Copycats are moving in.

By Daniel Eisenberg
Special thanks to our affiliate, YOUR OFFICE USA, for this article.

Missed package deliveries and phone calls. The occasional barking dog. This wasn't exactly what Tom Galloway had in mind when he launched a digital printing business from his home a few years ago. He was going to roll out of bed each morning, fire up the coffee and PC and make a fortune without ever getting out of his pajamas. Yeah, right. Within a few weeks, he was buried under paperwork and lonely. After six months, he hung up his bathrobe for good. "It was such a pain," Galloway recalls.

Even though he no longer works at home, Galloway still deals with that kind of frustration--every day if he's lucky. His new venture, a franchised chain of upscale, small business-service centers called Your Office USA, happens to target carbon copies of his former discombobulated self. Your Office is just the latest entry in the growing business of serving folks who work from home. That encompasses nearly 40 million people, from small-business owners to corporate telecommuters, according to International Data Corp., and many are searching for a home away from their chaotic and/or lonely home offices. Cut off from the professional services and social interaction that come with cubicle life, they're crying out for support, not to mention a little chitchat.

Along with executive-suite operators such as HQ and Regus, Your Office has a notion of being a more elegant version of Kinko's, the document dynamo that's gone from a haphazard copy shop to a retail multitask force. Even superstores like Office Depot and Staples are looking to duplicate Kinko's by adding more in-house, digital offerings. The industry's growth is such that Kinko's and Your Office both hope to go public in the next year or two.

A subsidiary of IB Your Office, a $50 million-a-year company with more than 100 franchises in Europe and Asia, Your Office, based in Charlotte, N.C., recently opened its first U.S. outposts in cities such as New York, Charlotte, San Diego and Denver. Founder Uwe Brettman, a former executive at The Body Shop, calls Your Office "a superstore for the home-based entrepreneur," and plans to open 25 more locations this year. Sure, the 6,000-sq.-ft. interiors have the familiar, drab trappings of officedom: a receptionist area, long hallways with mediocre art on the walls leading to individual offices. But few corporate sites house such varied activity. One customer trains security guards in a meeting room, for instance; nearby, a techie taps away.

Randolph Blatt, 41, of Raleigh, N.C., is one of those techies. After working from home for four years, Blatt, who recruits computer professionals, tired of the distractions. "I would get phone calls, and I had screaming babies in the background. I would duck into my laundry room to hide. It never worked," Blatt says. "[Here] I regularly run into people, and I feel like I'm part of the world." Your Office also hopes to serve the millions of sales reps who have lost their desks to downsizing and become corporate nomads, as well as on-the-go entrepreneurs who want satellite offices in several cities. By the hour, the day or the month they can rent office space, hire a secretary, check their mailboxes or e-mail, or conduct a videoconference. Whenever New York City bankruptcy attorney Garret Rubin has to meet clients near the Brooklyn courts, he uses a nearby Your Office. "I wish my office were this nice," he says.

The advent of new competitors has already sharpened the focus of Kinko's, which provides a widening array of services for its customers, who make 16 billion copies a year. Like the college kids it used to serve, this once ragtag collection of copy shops has graduated to more serious pursuits, its hit-or-miss menu of services now replaced by corporate conformity. In the past two years, Kinko's has been rolled up from a loose partnership into a $1 billion-a-year juggernaut led by a new CEO, Joseph Hardin Jr., a former high-ranking Wal-Mart executive who doesn't think small. He just launched a $40 million ad campaign with the slogan "Express Yourself," and plans to add 100 branches to the more than 900 Kinko's has worldwide.

In any of these outlets, day or night, graphic artists and bank presidents alike can access a uniform set of PCs, fax machines, color copiers and printers to update resumes, create flyers, trade ideas and confer with clients. "We're the intellectual meeting place in any community," claims Paul Orfalea, who started Kinko's in an old Santa Barbara, Calif., hamburger stand in 1970 (the name came from his kinky red hair). That may be a stretch. But there's no denying that Orfalea, who owns a third of the company (probably worth a few hundred million) and wanders the world as a Kinko's goodwill ambassador, has created his own brand of low-end consulting.

A key part of that success, it turns out, is replicating the sense of community that employees used to find hanging around the water cooler and the cafeteria. "It's a social, professional network," argues Franklin Becker, director of Cornell University's International Workplace Studies Program. "The real value at Kinko's is sharing ideas and leads with a broad range of people." Says Terri Biloff, a Milwaukee, Wis., Web consultant who often chats with the Kinko's "co-workers," as the staff is known: "I've really kind of built up a rapport with them and received referrals from them." And Susan Cumins, a Miami p.r. agent, calls Kinko's "the only office social experience I connect with. It's like the office, but without the politics." To make things cozier, Kinko's has opened up a few FedEx and Citibank minibranches in its stores, and it's talking with Starbucks about adjoining coffee bars. At Your Office, franchisees hold pizza parties and holiday bashes to bring their disparate customers together.

It doesn't take much. As long as the dogs keep barking, the babies keep crying, and the computers keep crashing, there should be no shortage of weary home workers desperate for a change of scenery--and, if new companies like Your Office are any indication, no shortage of places for them to go.

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