Though I am still in Chapter three of the new book "Groundswell, winning  in a

world transformed by social technologies" published by Harvard Business Press and Authored by Chharlene Li and Josh Bernoff with Forester research, I had to say a few words about this great manuscript of insightful information.

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I often kid with my wife, friends and family about our/my business being like a second wife that is much needier than my “

;first” wife. Not that my wife is needy, she is actually very independent. However, the point I make is that owning and managing a small business can be very demanding on your time and mental bandwidth. One of the other challenging things with many small businesses is the required office space and software and hardware resources required typically to get everyone working to serve your customers in a common direction. So this is where the idea of a Virtual Office became so appealing to me. We started our business we spent a lot on building out office space and investing in assets that today actually collect dust since we have shifted everything to a virtual space. I once thought I would have a team of busy beavers working on our little office space and we would have long winded conversations around the water cooler as in most traditional offices. I was wrong though, since meetings on site became much less frequent and as our workforce grew with independent consultants located across the United States and abroad. So this has actually saved us a lot of money since we have lower facility maintenance costs and overhead. It also provided our workforce to have more freedom and independence, thus improving their productivity and increasing loyalty.

The other key component of a Virtual Office is that the tools typically have a variety of business automations that can, if you configure them correctly, actually let your business talk to you, your workforce and your customer in real-time. With event triggered workflows and collaboration tools you can interact and respond faster and much more efficient than ever before. I am a bit of a geek so I like web based tools and have spent the better part of the last 10 years researching and experimenting and even building from the ground up tools to fulfill this dream of a Virtual Office that could connect a geographically dispersed workforce and offer the real time collaboration that made doing business fun.

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