- What is a virtual office?
- Are free virtual offices real virtual offices?
- What is the best virtual office for you?
- Setting your business up for success with an Alliance Virtual Office
Q: Is there anything wrong with using a free virtual office? What kind of virtual office should I search for instead?
A: A free virtual office isn’t a real virtual office. Often, you can’t even register your business with a free virtual office. Instead of trying to save as much money in the short term as possible, you should focus on getting the best value for the money you’ve spent. An Alliance Virtual Office is the best choice for your money.
At the height of the pandemic, economists and labor market professionals realized that what was originally considered nothing more than an “experiment” was undoubtedly here to stay.
Before the pandemic, working remotely was fairly uncommon, but as shelter-in-place orders came down from the government and business closures ramped up, there was a period where almost 80% of all white-collar employees were working remotely.
This transition from something economists and other professionals assumed wouldn’t last long into something that’s changed and continues to change the entire labor market landscape has created ample opportunities for smaller business owners, entrepreneurs, and even established companies looking to expand.
Virtual offices allow businesses and individuals to secure a professional and prestigious business address that they can use to register an LLC. For established businesses only looking to expand, virtual offices can be used as excellent satellite offices that give you a sense of locality in a new market and help you better connect with consumers.
Unfortunately, not all virtual offices provide the same benefits or support as professional, high-quality providers.
These low-quality virtual offices might entice business owners with the promise of a cheap virtual office or, in some cases, a free virtual office.
Using a cheap or free virtual office address might sound like a good idea because you want to save money, but using a low-quality office like this will cost you far more time and money in the long run than simply using a high-quality office from the jump.
With fears of an economic recession looming, it can be easy to justify saving as much money as possible at the moment rather than planning for the future, but we’ll show you why this is a poor way to operate your business.
In this article, we’ll look specifically at the issues with procuring a free virtual office.
First, we’ll explore what a virtual office is and the amenities you should be looking for; then, we’ll look into whether or not a free virtual office is truly a virtual office. Next, we’ll determine the best virtual office for your business, and finally, we’ll cover how to set your Alliance Virtual Office up for success.
So, if you’ve ever spent a few frantic minutes before an online meeting searching for “free virtual office backgrounds for Zoom” – then you’re in the right place.
Keep reading, and don’t let the promise of a cheap virtual office prevent you from accessing the countless amenities and benefits of a real virtual office!
- What is a virtual office?
- Are free virtual offices real virtual offices?
- What is the best virtual office for you?
- Setting your business up for success with an Alliance Virtual Office
What is a Virtual Office?
Before we dive into all of the issues with using a free virtual office, let’s take a moment to explore what a virtual office is.
Read more: What is a Virtual Office and How Does it Work?
A virtual office is a modern solution for businesses and individuals that allows them to register and operate their businesses remotely without securing physical office space.
Essentially, a virtual office is a modern solution that allows businesses to operate remotely, flexibly, and efficiently.
Below, we’ve broken down the amenities and benefits business owners should seek when hunting for a virtual office.
- Well-known address
- Mail forwarding capabilities
- Customization
- Coworking and meeting rooms
- Cost-efficient
- Secure
Well-known address
When hunting for a virtual office, you want to ensure you use a provider that uses well-known addresses for business registration.
As a digital business, your competition is fierce. Using an unknown virtual office is a quick way to make potential customers wary, which may be enough to dissuade them from making a purchase.
That’s why you must search for professional virtual office providers that understand the importance of your business’s outward appearance.
The modern labor market often requires a good impression before consumers are willing to make their first purchase. With a solid, well-known address, your business can bolster its legitimacy as soon as you get started.
Mail forwarding
A virtual office should offer mail forwarding so that you can truly operate from anywhere you want.
Part of the appeal of using a virtual office is its unrivaled flexibility. Without mail forwarding, you can’t travel and work remotely as effectively.
That said, you shouldn’t deal with virtual offices that force you to pay for mail forwarding either. Some “free” virtual office address plans might appear like a cheap virtual office, only to force you to pay for an “included” mail forwarding plan that’s nearly unusable.
The best kind of virtual office is one that provides you with mail forwarding access but doesn’t force you to use it. Even better, some virtual office providers have multiple tiers of mail forwarding that your business can cycle through, depending on the volume of incoming business mail you’re receiving.
Customization
Just like you should be looking for a virtual office that allows you to customize your mail forwarding plan, you need to search for an office that gives you total customization control.
Some cheap and free virtual office providers will offer one package with a set amount of amenities and benefits for one steadfast price. It doesn’t matter if you won’t use the amenities or benefits they’ve provided, you’ll pay for them one way or another.
It’s necessary to seek out providers that allow total control over your virtual offices’ faculties so you can pay for the tools and services you need, as you need them.
In the past, business owners were responsible for paying set fees each month, regardless of how much they used the office.
If you’re renting commercial space but away from the office for the whole month, you’ll still be on the hook for that monthly fee.
With the right virtual office, this is no longer the case.
Coworking spaces and meeting room
A genuine virtual office provides access to on-demand work and meeting space, so you always have a place to work and meet when necessary.
If you’re using a free virtual office, there’s little to no chance you can access physical workspaces.
A free virtual office address in the US is usually nothing more than a glorified PO box.
Securing a virtual office with access to coworking spaces and meeting rooms means you can provide remote and hybrid work styles to your employees, bolstering retention and increasing productivity.
Cost-efficient
In the past, commercial leases were lengthy and expensive. Now, business owners have a cost-efficient method of securing a virtual office space with the same amenities and benefits as physical office space.
Historically, commercial leases lasted a long time and required a sizable deposit, monthly rent, monthly utilities, and general upkeep costs to stay open.
Now, business owners can get their operations off the ground for a fraction of the cost. Sure, you should avoid using a free virtual office, but even the more expensive virtual offices are exponentially cheaper than traditional office space.
Instead of trying to save as much money as you can while registering your business, take the time to secure a high-quality virtual office and use that space to find other innovative ways to save money moving forward.
Read more: Resources for Small Businesses: Top Free and Affordable Tools for Entrepreneurs to Grow a Business
Secure
You must find a virtual office provider that uses safe and secure virtual office centers in addition to the previously listed attributes.
With a free virtual office, you’re constantly at risk.
You want a virtual office that has onsite staff, on and off-site support, mail forwarding protection, and private and well-protected networks.
Now that you know what to look for in a virtual office, let’s look at the problems with using a free virtual office.
Are free virtual offices real virtual offices?
The transition to widespread remote and hybrid workstyles has brought along several misconceptions about the future of work.
Whether it’s misinformation about the number of businesses that fail, misleading information about the amount of money you need to save before starting a business, or rumors about lower productivity and unengaged remote workers, the myths surrounding modern business ownership are hard to sift through to determine the truth.
Read more: The Facts About Business: Busting Common Myths
One of these myths is that free is always better. Unsurprisingly, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
So, what is the problem with using a free virtual office? How about a free virtual office background?
Unfortunately, a free virtual office isn’t a real virtual office.
Below, we’ve taken a moment to explore issues you’ll find with a free virtual office. Keep reading to see why you should find a high-quality office and stop playing free virtual office games!
- Software-based
- No mail forwarding
- No workspaces or meeting rooms
- No actual benefits
Software-based
Free virtual offices are almost always software-based. This means they don’t offer you a business address for LLC registration.
If you can’t register your business with your virtual office, then what’s the point? What benefit are you getting from using it?
In addition to preventing you from registering your business, free virtual office software may lack essential security features, making them highly vulnerable to data breaches and black hat cyberattacks. Using a free virtual office can limit your control over your business’s data and operations, likely leading to long-term damage to your company.
No mail forwarding
With a free virtual office, you won’t have access to mail forwarding.
Your business mail is a crucial part of your company’s operations. Without mail forwarding, you may miss important mail, time-sensitive documents, and important government correspondences that you’d have no trouble responding to otherwise.
Without mail forwarding, you may struggle to keep track of business correspondences and other important communications with consumers, leading to delayed communication and the potential loss of sales and revenue.
No workspaces or meeting rooms
A free virtual office doesn’t give you access to workspaces or meeting rooms.
This lack of access to workspaces and meeting rooms can limit your ability to meet with clients or colleagues in a professional environment and will result in you spending money to ensure you have a private and legitimate location to host meetings.
Hosting meetings, virtual or otherwise, in a crowded coffee shop is a great way to destroy investor and client confidence. Without access to workspaces or meeting rooms, you’ll wind up spending an inordinate amount of time and money securing meeting spaces that could’ve been saved by just picking a high-quality virtual office from the beginning.
Your business may miss out on collaboration opportunities and continued networking due to an inability to use shared workspaces and meeting rooms, both of which would undoubtedly harm your business’s long-term goals.
No actual benefits
A free virtual office might sound like a good deal, but all it does is make working from home slightly, if at all, more convenient.
It provides no privacy, as your home address is still linked to your business and therefore a part of the public domain, the support for free virtual offices is nonexistent, and you’ll wind up spending more money long-term on meeting rooms and coworking spaces to meet with clients and staff and to keep up appearances.
Essentially, a free virtual office might offer some basic services, but these services are insufficient for the needs of your, or any, business.
Without the benefits like on and off-site support, full customization, coworking and meeting room access, additional amenities, and overall security, a free virtual office isn’t worth the time and effort required to set up the service.
Over time, investing in a high-quality virtual office will provide more benefits and better opportunities for growth and success than a free or cheap virtual office.
What is the best virtual office for you?
According to Gallup, remote work isn’t necessarily going anywhere, but it is being slowly overtaken by hybrid workers that typically work from home, but spend a few days here and there in the office or shared workspaces.
So, how can your business get ahead of this second transition? What can your business do to provide its employees access to coworking spaces, meeting rooms, and total flexibility via remote work?
As you might have guessed, the answer is a high-quality virtual office.
Alliance Virtual Offices is the ideal solution for modern businesses.
We offer locations throughout the United States so you can register your business in the ideal state, regardless of whether or not you live there or have visited.
Sure, it’s not a great idea to register a business in a state you’ve yet to visit, but the point remains: Alliance’s high-quality network of virtual office centers is so robust that you could start a business with a professional and well-known address in a state you’ve never entered.
All of our virtual office centers are located in prestigious business centers, lending your business the address it needs to solidify its reputation.
Not to mention, our security is unmatched.
Read more: Scammers Hate Us: Only Legitimate Businesses Use Our Virtual Offices
We employ a 2-step verification process that helps us ensure we’re never partnering with scammers or scam businesses.
First, we ask our potential partners to verify their addresses. This can be a home address or another business address, but it needs to match up with the other information provided.
Once they’ve verified the address, we then proceed to document verification. In this step, we send documents to the address provided and ask for a bit more personal information before we verify that the address is indeed used by the individual signing up for our service.
Thanks to the countless free virtual office providers, these scammers and bad actors can start businesses without providing any legitimate information. Free virtual office providers aren’t worried about catching bad actors; they want as many people as possible to use their service.
At Alliance, we’re aware of the potential fallout of a scam business using one of our virtual offices.
Thanks to all the scams that American consumers encounter in their day-to-day activities, consumers are constantly on high alert. If your company shares an address with a business that’s been outed as a scam, all of the other companies using that virtual address will suffer.
Typically, consumers won’t do the required research to understand that your business had nothing to do with the scams. They see that another business with the same address is in the news for stealing money or data, and they automatically label the other companies at that address as suspicious.
Through Alliance, we take steps to protect your business from this situation.
Additionally, we offer four separate tiers of mail forwarding to suit your needs.
- Monthly mail forwarding for $10.00/month
- Biweekly mail forwarding for $20.00/month
- Weekly mail forwarding for $30.00/month
- Daily mail forwarding for $70.00/month
Keep in mind, these prices might vary depending on where your virtual office is located.
The first two tiers are best reserved for newer businesses just getting their feet wet. They probably won’t keep you fully up to date on your business mail, but they’re a good way to get acquainted with the mail forwarding system.
The third tier, weekly mail forwarding, is for businesses receiving a higher volume of mail but are still unwilling to try the daily forwarding option. Weekly mail forwarding will keep you reasonably current on essential correspondences and time-sensitive documents. However, you still might have to compensate with trips to pick up mail at your virtual office center.
The final tier, daily forwarding, is for businesses that are seeing a substantial volume of incoming business mail and can’t afford to get behind on that mail, even for a day.
This last tier will keep you fully up to date on any time-sensitive documents, government correspondences, or legal requests. Not to mention, the daily mail forwarding tier is the best value for your money.
The first two tiers charge you approximately $10.00 per forward, and the third charges you about $7.50 per forward, but the daily tier comes out to only $3.11-3.69 per forward.
With Alliance’s mail forwarding, like all of our other handy services, you pay for exactly what your business needs and nothing more.
We also provide access to on-demand coworking and meeting spaces.
Don’t risk losing employees because they’re tired of always working from home. Instead, use one of Alliance’s Virtual Offices to provide your team with highly flexible, hybrid workstyles.
Setting your business up for success with an Alliance Virtual Office
Although a free virtual office might seem like a good deal, the truth is that a free virtual office is no virtual office at all.
Alliance Virtual Offices provides the best value for your dollar and offers countless features that support your growth and help your business thrive.
Don’t risk losing business or clients due to the poor image of a free virtual office, and don’t lose your mind trying to save as much money as possible as early as you can.
Instead, understand that you occasionally have to spend money to make money.
A high-quality virtual office is a long-term investment in your business.
Further reading
- What is a Virtual Office and How Does it Work?
- Resources for Small Businesses: Top Free and Affordable Tools for Entrepreneurs to Grow a Business
- Scammers Hate Us: Only Legitimate Businesses Use Our Virtual Offices
- The Facts About Business: Busting Common Myths
Alliance Virtual Offices provides virtual office services and several other digital tools to established entrepreneurs, new business owners, and anyone else looking to tackle the world of digital-first operations.
A free virtual office might seem appealing but will only serve to cause bigger problems the longer you use it. You wouldn’t rent the cheapest physical space in a terrible location, so why risk using a cheap virtual office?
Contact us today to see how Alliance Virtual Offices can help set your business up for continued success, and be sure to check out our Virtual Office Blog for more helpful tips and tricks!
