In some respects having no fixed office is ideally suited to those who operate a small business. Working by yourself having everything that you need in the one place, makes it a lot easier. However there is the potential to expand your mobile office to include others working with or for you and still maintain no fixed office.
Of course there is more likely to be challenges in operating an office with no fixed location with multiple employee’s, however there are many things that can help to enable this. The key is combining communication, with accessibility for all employee’s in a simple way to maintain and measure the business in the same respect that you would if you were all working in the one office.
This can for the most part be achieved via the use of many different hosted applications either through paying a provider to access the application or via purchasing the application and hosting it yourself. It is possible to some extent, to have all the regular applications you expect available to use through an online interface, things like Shared Document’s, Accounting software, Groupware applications, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. While these are all available to varying degree’s of cost and features, the important part is that the ability is there.
There is also the additional potential to create custom applications, that are based online which allow for you to actually perform business sometimes even better then if you did have an office. Imagine the potential for a sales person to be able to log in to a web based application while with the client, and create on the spot a quote using your latest pricing data, and email it directly to the client before your meeting is even over, or with the right printer, print it on the spot.
Literally when you are working with no fixed office the actual potential is maybe even more then that if you are restricted by having a fixed office. I hope to explore some of the more specific aspects of the different software and application options available online int he coming months. So keep your eyes open or please feel free to contact me with any specific request for more information about applications.