Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
An average American spends 41 hours at work weekly. That’s an awful lot of time and much more than their European counterparts. So they do need a well planned offices to help them workl. Planning or no planning these two office designs caught my fancy over the net.
This picture is picked up from http://www.officedesigngallery.com/. Though it’s not my style or an idea of an office; creativity is the first thing that comes to mind when I see this office. You can almost visualize the art work gong on here.
This office design at http://mocoloco.com/ takes the prize as far as radical designs are concerned
Though these are pictures of very unconventional offices they do shake us out of our stupor of dreams of the steel and chrome offices.
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Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
In today’s blog post I’d like to cover a success story that an entrepreneur told me at a meet in Los Angeles. The names and places are changed to protect her privacy.
Carol is a successful entrepreneur selling niche jewelry designs, patterns and information over the internet. She is also a work from home mom. Her work is creative and does not require her to be at one city or office. Carol’s career allows her to remain with her spouse during his job changes and projects. In fact Carol says that frequent changes of places during the first few years of marriage made her more creative as she had to deal with a lot of new influences and handle them.
Jewelry design was a hobby which changed into a profession. But the road to success was a steep climb.
“The client’s said ‘we like your designs…they are good’ But they never came back. I knew my designs were good. It bugged me that the big companies did not deal with me. Small companies did not give me the price that I felt that I deserved.
It was then that I realized that importance of a professional look. I needed a flexible office. I hired a virtual office company to take my calls. I rented their upmarket Manhattan offices for my meetings with clients. I made my presentations at those offices. Within months my business changed. I started getting bulk design orders from large companies at very good rates.
I learnt it the hard way that professionalism matters and makes a huge difference. The virtual office made me look like a well established professional designer and inspired confidence in clients”.
It doesn’t stop at that. Recently, I was on the west coast for a holiday. All my calls were attended by the live virtual receptionist and forwarded to me later during the day. Suddenly, I needed to meet a client who was willing to travel. I rang up my virtual office services provider and they instantly set up an office for me. It was an Aha moment for me because I realized that unconsciously I had made a correct decision in hiring a company that operated nationally and was customer centric….”
Times have really changed and technology has truly revolutionized our lives.
And Carol changed my perspective of virtual offices. It was not about costs or convenience but about a professional business outlook that made success possible. Of course, Carol was good at her work but lots of us are; even then some of us fail to make a mark.
The simplicity of virtual offices and its operations have yet to make a very big impact, but some like Carol do dare to think differently. Carol’s flexible office solution is nothing but a virtual office.
- She got a cost effective office at the prime location.
- She made no large capital investment
- Her virtual office was practically a complete office with the facilities for all offices
- It was a national operator
- It was customer centric
Think about it.
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