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Any advice on going virtual?

by Brad Gosse
2 replies
I currently own a 2000 sqft office condo. We like working here every day but I also have a nice home office.

When I bought office space years ago it was for 2 reasons.

1. I needed a place to get high speed internet (not available at my house)
2. I needed access to more space power and cooling for my wifes video encoding cluster.

Neither of these reasons exits today.

I am considering the following.

1. Selling my office space (I will pocket a few hundred grand + save $100k in annual expenses).
2. Taking my small staff virtual to work from home.
3. Getting high speed at my house and working there.
4. Setting up an auto attendant phone system to route calls to people on skype.

Has anyone here gone from physical to virtual? Any pitfalls or advice I should take?

Thanks.
#advice #virtual
  • Profile picture of the author Sean Donahoe
    Hi Brad,

    I actually recently did this myself. I have about 10 members of staff that all now work virtually and sold our office space. Thankfully now I have a nice 20mb cable connection and turned part of my garage into a data center.

    The pitfalls we hit in this transition were mostly communications based. For example, I am very much a hands on manager and like to oversee projects and get constant updates to keep my staff on track. To address this we had morning coffee conferences as I called them.

    These started at 9AM to go over the plans for the day and we did this via Skype. This made it easy for everyone to touch base and while informal, it made sure everyone was ready for work at 9AM to put in a full days work.

    We also did a quick wrap up at 5PM to go over any last minute things before we all quit work for the day, again, also to make sure everyone was on track while trying to keep it informal.

    I also installed 2 lines, one for public and also a "Batline" just for staff to call.

    Other considerations were a bit of training for the staff who worked at home to make sure they had dedicated space for working virtually and that they did actually "Switch Off" after hours. Creating a seperation between work and home life is essential to make it work.

    Other factors are the tax write-offs. Working from home allows you to deduct a portion of your home, electricity bills and other utilities as business write-offs.

    Now, that being said and in relation to taxes I don't know how you pay your staff and how they are actually part of your business. I have all my staff as Freelancers and 1099 them. If you do this then you need to let them know that they can also take the same home-based write-offs you do and that will save them some money come tax time.

    One other aspect that we added was the GotoMeeting and GotoAssist which allows me to work with my staff as if I was also at their computers so I can literally work with them when they are needing my input or I need their input on a project. This has made life very much easier and a lot less stressful for going virtual.

    Hope this helps and good luck with the transition. If you have any questions just PM me and you are more than welcome to pick my brain.

    All the best

    Sean
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    • Profile picture of the author Brad Gosse
      Originally Posted by Sean Donahoe View Post

      Hi Brad,

      I actually recently did this myself. I have about 10 members of staff that all now work virtually and sold our office space. Thankfully now I have a nice 20mb cable connection and turned part of my garage into a data center.

      The pitfalls we hit in this transition were mostly communications based. For example, I am very much a hands on manager and like to oversee projects and get constant updates to keep my staff on track. To address this we had morning coffee conferences as I called them.

      These started at 9AM to go over the plans for the day and we did this via Skype. This made it easy for everyone to touch base and while informal, it made sure everyone was ready for work at 9AM to put in a full days work.

      We also did a quick wrap up at 5PM to go over any last minute things before we all quit work for the day, again, also to make sure everyone was on track while trying to keep it informal.

      I also installed 2 lines, one for public and also a "Batline" just for staff to call.

      Other considerations were a bit of training for the staff who worked at home to make sure they had dedicated space for working virtually and that they did actually "Switch Off" after hours. Creating a seperation between work and home life is essential to make it work.

      Other factors are the tax write-offs. Working from home allows you to deduct a portion of your home, electricity bills and other utilities as business write-offs.

      Now, that being said and in relation to taxes I don't know how you pay your staff and how they are actually part of your business. I have all my staff as Freelancers and 1099 them. If you do this then you need to let them know that they can also take the same home-based write-offs you do and that will save them some money come tax time.

      One other aspect that we added was the GotoMeeting and GotoAssist which allows me to work with my staff as if I was also at their computers so I can literally work with them when they are needing my input or I need their input on a project. This has made life very much easier and a lot less stressful for going virtual.

      Hope this helps and good luck with the transition. If you have any questions just PM me and you are more than welcome to pick my brain.

      All the best

      Sean
      Thanks for the feedback I will try to implement some of these into my plan. I like the idea of an internal employee line especially.
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