Back from a Small Business Summit, Virtual Office and Video were big winners
During my vacation last week I took time to speak at a Small Business Summit, my conversation to the audience was how to save money and trust your employees. With the price of travel going up, small businesses are going to suffer more than larger businesses. They need to think and act smarter than the other guy, one way to do this it to cut your travel cost. Cutting travel cost is not just business travel but it is also the travel time to the office. Small Business Owners are starting to get the message that they need to go virtual with if not some but all employees.
There is really nothing that you can do from office that you cannot do in a home office; this includes printing, video, chat and access to the company network. The problem that executives have is that they do not trust their employees enough to have them work virtual in a home office. This is not just small business but it is also larger companies, state, local and government agencies. I answered many questions on how my company has been virtual for close to a decade and is running great.
One president of a company asked me why he would ever think of this, he gave me the old school questions and the rebuttal of how it would never work. I then asked him what he was going to do as a small business when he starts losing employees due to travel cost just to come to work; he said find other workers. This is just what I was looking to hear, I started to talk about running a virtual office. A virtual office can be very easy to run; I gave the guests and example of a customer I helped.
We started off with a Cisco UC520 which gave the company IP Phones, voicemail, VPN access, wireless and soft clients. They have people who work from home using a soft client of their PC to answer any phone calls just like they were in the office. Then when they step away from the PC the calls are directed to a cellular phone. They are using Skype as an internet phone, video phone and IM to customer outside the company.
The question then came up from a few people, how acceptable is it to use Skype or other programs like AOL, Yahoo or MSN as a phone, video phone and instant messenger to talk to customers. I said I would ask our bloggers to respond to the question. So with the economy the way it is going do you see this as a problem for small companies to stay competitive and save money?
