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A remote office, or virtual office as they are often called, provide a number of benefits including:
- selecting from a wider range of talent by choosing from employees who live far from your office location
- reducing overhead by employing staff with lower costs of living
- serving clients outside your main office location
You may be a CPA without an office, but work out of your home. Regardless of the size of your accounting firm, remote offices can provide an affordable, professional image for your firm either as a complementary facility to your main office, or as a location to meet clients or extended members of your team.
Here are four ways adding a remote office can benefit your firm:
1. Conference Room Facilities
Your principal office may not have a conference room large enough to comfortably fit all of your employees or the management team of a strategic client. You might regularly meet with a set of clients in Beverly Hills, but your offices are in Woodland Hills. Having a facility available to your firm on demand, without having to purchase an office and pay for the overhead of ownership is a great opportunity.
Virtual office centers often provide food and beverage services which can deliver the extra care your clients may appreciate. If you don’t use projectors or conference calling equipment often but could use them on occasion when you have client meetings, why own them?
2. Professional Reception and Call Handling Services
Depending on the level of service you contract for, you can access a professional receptionist to greet clients when they arrive at the remote office or answer and route your inbound calls. If you are out seeing clients frequently, or you want to have a part-time presence in the Los Angeles area where there potentially are future growth opportunities, a virtual office can give you an opportunity to see if there is enough business to merit a full time office and employees in that location.
3. Save on Commuting Time for Employees and Executives
Los Angeles is famous for its volume of traffic and long commutes. If you have employees who are spending a lot of time looking through their windshield and not at their computer screen or working with fellow employees, a remote office can make employees more productive and efficient. Should these staffers have relationships in the area near where they live, they can potentially act entrepreneurially and bring in client contracts you never expected possible by operating out of a single corporate office.
4. Expanding Your Business Network
Remote offices can evolve into tightly integrated communities of entrepreneurs and remote employees. Virtual office management often will work to have only a single provider of a type of service, such as a CPA or Management Consultant to nurture these relationships and foster referral opportunities.
Though having coffee with your colleagues and feeling connected to your internal team is of great value, if your remote employees can foster relationships with complementary businesses, the remote office can more than pay for itself.
You or your employees may have the benefit of telecommuting or “cloud working” now and again, however remote offices are a more professional, lucrative opportunity for accounting firms who are looking to expand into new areas without the capital costs of a dedicated office space.
Technology such as virtual meeting apps, collaborative document sharing, and Cloud based accounting systems are making it easier for CPAs to work securely in any location.
Is your Los Angeles CPA firm benefitting from remote offices? Please share your thoughts in the section for Comments below.
To follow-through on the tips introduced in this short article, be sure to download your free guide, 12 Ways for CPA Firms in LA to Utilize Technology More Efficiently.
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