How Home Businesses Take Advantage of Virtual Services
Compared to a decade ago there are an enormous number of virtual services available to home business owners nowadays that simply didn’t exist back then; services which can make the running of your business significantly easier while, at the same time, helping to prove to yourself and others that you do indeed run a home-based business, rather than working a home-based job.
Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/leeander/177067364
There are countless ways in which virtual services can work for you to help take your home business to the next level.
Some of the most popular (and potentially most important for your business going forward) are that they:
Serve as Your Registered Business Address
If you’re a home-based business there’s a good chance that you had trouble getting all your insurance documents and other information in order when setting out to name your home address as your new business’s address.
The difficultly of this issue varies by country (and often by provinces and states within each country), but if you’ve ever had to go through this process in a location in which many forms of identification and paperwork is needed for you to simply be able to work from your own home you’ll know how much time this takes up, time that’s much better off being spent actually working on your business.
In this regard, employing the ‘registered business address’ virtual service from a virtual business services provider is a no-brainer, as it allows you, for a small monthly fee, to use an address owned by the virtual company as your registered business address, meaning you no longer have to worry about the legal requirements surrounding working from your home.
Provide Telephone Answering and Mail Handling Services
These services can either be arranged for your home business as part of a package (such as alongside a registered business address) or individually.
If you receive numerous calls throughout the day, but are often unable to answer some due to being in a meeting or working alongside a client, taking advantage of a virtual telephone answering service is a great way of ensuring none of your calls go unanswered, with the contents of your call being delivered to you by email, in most cases, with the person answering your calls for you doing so in a manner that suggests they’re your company secretary or receptionist.
If you receive a fairly high volume of mail you can pay a virtual services company to have this mail delivered to one of their addresses, with their staff opening it and either scanning in the letters and emailing you a copy, or forwarding the letters directly to you.
Have Numerous Meeting, Training, and Videoconferencing Rooms
One of the main problems of home working is the need to find a suitable meeting, training, or videoconferencing room when you need to perform these necessary business tasks. Conducting an effective meeting is stressful enough without the need to find an actual room in which to conduct it from playing in the back of your mind. Virtual services offer these albeit not virtual necessities, meaning you can:
- Take meetings in rooms fit for purpose, often at the last minute.
- Find room(s) large enough for an entire training session, potentially spanning several days.
- Come across a private space to undertake an important videoconference from.
In conclusion, as a home business owner if you’re not currently taking advantage of the myriad of virtual services available to you you’re missing out. Popular services among home business owners include the ability for them to act as your registered business address, telephone answering and mail handling services, and the use of meeting rooms when they’re required.
Guest Author Bio:
Juliet Martin is writing in a freelance basis for Regus, a company that specialises in providing meeting rooms, work pods, and business lounges across the globe.