Q: What is an Anytime Mailbox? Is there a better choice?
A: Anytime Mailbox is a service that provides mailboxes for business owners nationwide. One of Alliance’s Virtual Offices is a better choice because of the sheer number of amenities and the prestige associated with the space.
Remote work has existed for almost three decades, but before the pandemic, it wasn’t a very popular choice for workers or businesses alike.
Although the influx of remote workers had started before the pandemic picked up steam, Covid-19 was the match that lit the fire. It’s estimated that 17.9% of Americans adopted remote and flexible working arrangements between 2019 and 2021.
At the start of the pandemic, many experts and economists thought the focus on working from home was nothing more than a fad that would fade into obscurity as soon as the market allowed.
Years later, this isn’t the case.
Sure, remote work has slowed, but it’s still more popular than wholly in-office work, and hybrid workstyles have quickly become the preferred method of work for the 56% of American employees who can do their jobs from home.
Considering that more than half of all full-time employees in the United States can work from home, this presents an opportunity for new entrepreneurs and established business owners alike to take advantage of offering hybrid workstyles for their employees.
Not to mention, with tools like Virtual Offices and other services, starting a business is easier than ever. Unfortunately, some tools marketed to new business owners aren’t as helpful.
Faced with unending options, some business owners may see an Anytime Mailbox as the perfect response to their business mail dilemmas.
In this article, we’ll explore what an Anytime Mailbox is and look at Anytime Mailbox reviews. We’ll look at Virtual Offices and determine which suits your business. Finally, we’ll discuss why you should skip an Anytime Mailbox for a prestigious business address procured through Alliance.
So, if you’ve been on the hunt for an Anytime Mailbox for business, take a second to explore your other options first!
Get Your FREE Guide Today!
How to Start a Business in a Recession
What is an Anytime Mailbox?
Flexibility is key for modern business owners. As wholly remote work loses steam to hybrid workstyles, the need to provide workers with workspaces outside their homes becomes more apparent.
Fears of a commercial real estate crash have convinced some executives to switch to utilizing coworking spaces and hybrid workstyles, but many business owners are holding out.
Making these transitions isn’t easy, but with the right tools, it’s not as scary as you may think.
Read more: Transitioning your Business to a Modern Workspace? Here’s What Business Owners Need to Know
Successful modern business owners understand that change is guaranteed. The better prepared you and your business are to react to shifts in the market, the easier it will be to scale your company.
An Anytime Mailbox doesn’t solve the problem of not having separate workspaces, but it does provide some level of convenience.
Below, we’ve put together a detailed guide to how an Anytime Mailbox business address works.
- 1900+ locations
- Mail forwarding
- Business address
- Low rates
- No workspaces
- No meeting rooms
- No prestigious addresses
1900 locations
According to their website, Anytime Mailbox boasts 1933 locations.
Unfortunately, they don’t have options in every state.
Mail forwarding
Anytime Mailbox offers mail forwarding as one of its primary services. The company launched in 2013 because the founders wanted a better way to view their mail from their phones and have since built a large network of locations.
Business address
Using the same 1933 mailbox locations, Anytime Mailbox offers virtual office services for individuals willing to use the mailbox locations as their business address.
Low rates
Anytime Mailbox boasts a low starting price, as low as $5.99 per month for mailbox services.
Considering the lack of amenities, this low starting price makes sense.
Read more: Is a Cheap Virtual Office Costing You?
No workspaces
Through the virtual offices that Anytime Mailbox provides, there are no coworking spaces you’re given access to through their services.
The virtual offices they offer may give you an occasionally workable business address. Still, the lack of workspaces means your employees and you alike will have to find tertiary locations for hybrid work.
No meeting rooms
Similar to the issue with coworking spaces, Anytime Mailbox doesn’t offer any shared meeting rooms.
This means you’ll have to find a new location for any situation where you’d like to host a meeting, virtual or in-person. As you may know, crowded coffee shops are horrible for meetings, hosting meetings from your home gives a poor impression to attendees, and securing conference rooms is often pricey and unpredictable.
No prestigious addresses
One of the largest issues with Anytime Mailbox’s services is the lack of prestigious addresses they offer.
The cheap rates and nearly 2000 locations come at a cost. Instead of getting a prestigious and well-known business address, you’re stuck with easy-to-miss PO boxes.
As you can see, there are several issues that you’ll run into as a business owner hoping to utilize one of Anytime Mailbox’s business addresses.
The modern market relies on image very heavily. If you’re using a glorified PO box as your business address, it’ll be difficult for potential investors, clients, and even customers to take you seriously.
Thankfully, there are more options.
What is an Alliance Virtual Office?
Before we dive in, it’s worth differentiating between high-quality Virtual Offices and their lower-quality counterparts.
Read more: What is a Virtual Office and How Does it Work?
A higher-quality Virtual Office will provide access to easily reservable meeting rooms and coworking spaces, offer prestigious addresses you can use for your business address, and is easy to integrate with other tools and services.
Lower-quality virtual offices, however, don’t offer as much. Rather than offering prestigious addresses, these lower-quality providers may use PO boxes or other illegitimate addresses that may prevent you from forming an LLC, they don’t offer access to physical workspaces, and they’re difficult to integrate with other virtual tools.
Today, we’ll be looking at high-quality Virtual Offices. Particularly, Alliance’s Virtual Offices.
- Prestigious addresses
- Mail forwarding add-ons
- Secure and safe
- On-demand workspace and meeting rooms at every location
- Over 1000 locations
- Cost-efficient plans
Prestigious addresses
Alliance’s Virtual Offices are legitimate Virtual Offices that provide your business with a prestigious address you can use for registration.
This is incredibly important as you start scaling your business.
Think about it this way: would you prefer to use the tech business based in Silicon Valley and surrounded by other successful tech companies, or would you rather use the tech business based in Oklahoma and surrounded by retailers?
With a prestigious business address, you present a professional image to clients, investors, and customers. Many states and localities don’t allow business owners to form LLCs with PO boxes, so the cheap virtual office you’ve found may not even allow you to register your business.
Mail forwarding add-ons
Alliance Virtual Offices offers mail forwarding to your home address, allowing you to keep your residential address private while operating remotely.
Read more: Unlock Full Flexibility with Business Mail Forwarding
Some providers insist on including mail forwarding in their packages, forcing entrepreneurs to pay for it regardless of whether it’s needed.
At Alliance, we do it differently. We don’t force our partners to pay for anything they don’t need, and we’ve created four separate tiers of mail forwarding that business owners can cycle through depending on how much incoming mail they’re receiving.
The first tier, monthly mail forwarding for $10 per month , is the most infrequent mail forwarding tier. Once monthly isn’t often enough to keep you up to date with your incoming mail, but it is a great way to familiarize yourself with the process.
The second tier, biweekly, or twice-monthly, mail forwarding for $20 per month , isn’t as infrequent as the first tier but still isn’t a great option if you want to stay fully up to date. That said, new businesses and businesses taking time out of the office benefit greatly from this tier because it’s often enough to stay informed without feeling like your incoming mail is taking up all of your time.
The third tier, weekly mail forwarding for $30 per month , is for when your business is picking up steam. Weekly forwarding keeps you in the loop and prevents you from going more than a few business days without receiving your mail.
The fourth and final tier, daily mail forwarding for $70 per month , is for businesses that see a considerable amount of incoming mail each month. Daily forwarding will keep you fully up to date with any important correspondences or government documents and will prevent you from missing your mail for any period.
Additionally, daily mail forwarding is the best value available.
The first two tiers will cost your business $10 each time your mail is forwarded, while the third tier will cost about $7.50 for each forward. Alternatively, the fourth tier only costs your business between $3.10 – $3.70 for each forward.
Secure and safe
Also, Alliance Virtual Offices provides you with a secure, safe business address that solidifies your business’s reputation.
Part of the trouble with using lower-quality virtual offices is that you don’t know who else is using the service, and bad press can send your business to zero surprisingly quickly in the age of easily-accessible information.
If you’re sharing an address for a company that’s outed as a scam business, anything associated with that company will suffer, including your business. The best way to avoid this is by using a provider that has measures in place to protect its partners.
Alliance Virtual Offices has a 2-step identification plan to keep bad actors and scammers out while protecting you and your business.
On-demand workspaces and meeting rooms at every location
Alliance offers on-demand coworking spaces and meeting rooms at every location. Regardless of where you’re Virtual Office is, you’ll have access to two of the most important amenities imaginable for modern business owners.
With coworking spaces, you have a perfect spot to break the monotony of your daily routine while allowing you to network with other like-minded professionals.
Similarly, our meeting rooms provide an area to host in-person and virtual meetings. This allows you to show professionality and prestige to any of your meeting’s attendees and helps you present yourself as a legitimate business owner.
Over 1000 locations
Your Anytime Mailbox login may give you access to 1933 locations, but there are states without mailboxes, and none of their offerings provide access to physical space.
On the other hand, Alliance has more than 1000 locations in the US alone, with offices in every state and almost every city. Additionally, every one of Alliance’s offices comes with access to physical space.
Cost-efficient plans
Alliance’s plans start as low as $49 per month, making Alliance far more affordable than a traditional rental while also giving you the freedom to work from anywhere.
Compared to the providers who have low-priced plans but offer zero amenities, this is a welcome change.
Now that you’ve seen the difference between an Anytime Mailbox and Alliance’s Virtual Offices, let’s determine which is right for your business.
Which is right for your business?
Unsurprisingly, Alliance Virtual Offices is the clear choice.
We offer real physical addresses that help you build and solidify your business’s reputation.
At the pandemic’s peak, approximately 60% of workdays occurred from home. This number isn’t as extreme as it once was, but regardless, flexible workstyles aren’t going anywhere.
With a physical address, you’re providing your remote business with prestige and professionality that will help you make positive first impressions and show legitimacy. Your business’s image is vastly important, and using an Anytime Mailbox address that’s nothing more than a glorified PO box isn’t going to do you any favors.
Our mail forwarding tiers allow our partners to work from anywhere in the world without worrying about what’s happening to their incoming business mail.
We offer mail pick up so you can make a trip to the Virtual Office center rather than having your mail forwarded while simultaneously offering several different tiers of mail forwarding. With these various tiers, you can get important documents anywhere in the world without worrying about the security of your incoming mail.
With PO boxes, your mailbox is left unguarded for long periods. Sure, it’s not super likely that anyone will break into your mailbox, but you don’t have anyone watching over you to help ensure that this is the case.
At Alliance, our mail forwarding center deals exclusively with you and individuals you’ve given express permission to access your mail. This means that your important documents, government correspondences, or other incoming mail is safe from would-be bad actors.
Not to mention, our coworking rooms are the perfect answer to job burnout.
Burnout can happen to anyone, but some research suggests that working exclusively from home causes burnout quicker than other workstyles.
This is largely due to the isolation an individual feels when spending all their time working from the same place they spend their downtime.
Thankfully, coworking spaces provide workers an excellent way to break the monotony of their daily routines. If you’ve been spending weeks upon weeks in total isolation, working with your peers gives you time to be social, recharge, and refocus.
Doing so will help stave off the feelings of burnout and will also provide new networking opportunities that you may not have considered. After all, there’s no better place to find like-minded business people than in a coworking space for other entrepreneurs.
Our meeting rooms serve a similar, yet different purpose.
Hosting meetings is an important aspect of any entrepreneur’s life.
The frequency of these meetings may vary, but if you’re running a business, it’s fair to assume that you will occasionally host meetings.
For digital meetings, you may think you can get away with hosting from home, but this isn’t a good idea.
First, you’re in an environment where distractions are almost guaranteed. Whether it’s barking dogs, noisy neighbors, or an unexpected vacuum cleaner sound, you’re setting yourself up for negative impressions from attendees who will think poorly of your company based on what’s happening on your screen.
Not to mention, using a virtual office background looks distracting and isn’t as professional as a single-colored wall in a quiet location.
For in-person meetings, your options are even more limited. You may consider using a coffee shop or a hotel conference room, but both options also come with countless potential problems.
A coffee shop just isn’t safe. Public wifi is dangerous, and speaking about your business within earshot of total strangers is terrible operational security.
Hotel conference rooms are safer, but far more expensive. In addition, you must plan for your meetings very far in advance to effectively use hotel conference rooms.
Thankfully, Alliance’s meeting rooms come in a variety of sizes and can host several different numbers of attendees.
We also have additional services you can use to scale your business as you grow.
Sure, you might spend slightly more for an Alliance Virtual Office, but each dollar spent provides exponentially more value.
The shortsighted business owner seeks the highest savings in every business interaction. The smarter business owner understands the importance of getting the most out of their money.
A high-quality Virtual Office that costs an extra $50 now and continues to save you money over time is infinitely better than the cheap virtual office that saves you $50 today but costs you several thousand a year from now.
Skipping an Anytime Mailbox for a prestigious business address
Anytime Mailbox is essentially just a PO box.
An Alliance Virtual Office is the clear choice for any serious business owner looking to effectively scale their business.
Alliance Virtual Offices offers access to easily-reservable physical spaces, different tiers of mail forwarding, straightforward integration for other tools and services, and possibly most importantly, a prestigious and well-known business address.
Compare Anytime Mailbox customer service to Alliance’s customer service for further evidence.
Anytime offers phone support and a window of live customer service, but Alliance offers phone and email support for our partners that aren’t in the Virtual Office Center. For those that run into issues in their respective centers, we have friendly and helpful onsite staff prepared to help with any problems a person may encounter.
Other virtual office providers use intentionally misleading information or neglect discussing price because they’re more concerned with where their next dollar comes from than the outcome of their partners’ business ventures.
At Alliance, this isn’t the case.
Alliance’s Virtual Offices are built to help our partners grow successful, long-term businesses that can scale with ease.
Further reading
- What is a Virtual Office and How Does it Work?
- Is a Cheap Virtual Office Costing You?
- Unlock Full Flexibility with Business Mail Forwarding
- Transitioning your Business to a Modern Workspace? Here’s What Business Owners Need to Know
Alliance provides Virtual Office services and a whole slew of additional services and tools that you can use to effectively scale your business.
While an Anytime Mailbox may be a cheap option, the lack of physical space and amenities will create more issues in the long run than it’s worth.
Contact us to see how Alliance Virtual Offices stands out from its competition, and check out our Virtual Office Blog for more useful information!
