Today, more and more people have mobile phones, laptops and Internet access. As a result, the prevalence of work-from-home and flextime is flourishing. This harks back to the end of the 19th century – at the height of the Industrial Revolution – when more than half the population still worked from home. Farmers, medical doctors, blacksmiths and small time retailers lived and struggled in combined business and domestic units.
The idea of the virtual office stems from a combination of technological innovation and the Information Age, the period in human history defined by the shift from traditional industry brought by the Industrial Revolution to an economy based on information computerization.
The virtual office was derived from the executive suite industry, which originally referred to the suite of offices on or near the top of a skyscraper where the top executives of a company worked. Later, the term was also applied to the people who occupy the space and their assistants – not just the physical space itself. For instance, the White House has over time come to embody the Executive Office of the President of the United States.
An executive suite can also refer to a group of individual offices sublet from a larger suite of offices, where the owner of the executive suite rents entire floors or even buildings and leases the spaces to businesses who don’t need, or can’t afford, large space. This was a useful solution for small, start-up companies who had not achieved the stability for a long-term commitment.
For many business models, however, the inflexibility of the executive suite lease turned out to be problematic, which promoted the emergence of the virtual office concept.
Ralph Gregory evolved the executive suite into the virtual office when he became a father and wanted to stay at home with his daughter while keeping his business professionalism high. He devised a way for his secretary to transfer his phone calls to him seamlessly, wherever he was, and thought that many professionals would benefit from a similar arrangement. The first commercial application occurred in 1994 when Gregory founded “The Virtual Office, Inc” and later “Intelligent Office”.
Primarily, a virtual office provides communication and professional business address services, with optional access to work or business meeting spaces. These spaces also often include a range of professional live communications and other services.
Being a virtual office client means that your office expenses are low while your professionalism retains the image of a traditional, high-cost office. It can enable you to expand your firm’s reach into an area with many more potential clients, without the burden of setting up a (second) office.
In South Africa, you can go virtual with Cube Workspace, and gain access to sleek, fully furnished, fully serviced office buildings in Cape Town CBD, Rondebosch, Kyalami and Bryanston. Being a client at one of these branches gives you access to each of the other branch facilities in the country – convenient for always having an office solution at hand while travelling within the country.
Cube Workspace offers a comprehensive range of virtual packages as to suit the needs of any business. Considering their flexibility, Cube can assist clients in need of short, medium or long-term serviced office solutions.
In creating Cube Workspace, the deciding factor for founder Anthony Manas was to offer the serviced office space client a customised solution, as if being in a five-star hotel.
Work has become ubiquitous.
