Innovations International, a 25-year-old consulting firm, traded its physical offices for doing business entirely on the Internet. Is it the right move for your business?
Daniel Guillory, CEO of Innovations International, was looking for a change. For a quarter of a century, his small business had been providing consulting services, seminars and surveys in areas like leadership, diversity, empowerment, creativity and work-life balance. Life was good, and so was business.
But early last year, for what he calls "no particular reason," Guillory decided to shake up his organization and close the company's physical offices in Utah in favor of a fully virtual distributed workforce. With five full-time employees and a team of some 30 contractors, the goal was to improve workers' lifestyles and reduce commute times.
Guillory had been working remotely out of San Francisco, but the other four employees had worked in a conventional office in Salt Lake City, with contractors located all over the country. Now the company does not maintain any office space at all, everyone works out of home offices. The move immediately shaved 20% off the company's operating expenses, Guillory says.
Technological Choices
Obviously, advances in broadband and remote communications were critical to making the move possible. But so was simplicity and ease of use. With everyone distributed, there was little chance for IT support. Each worker was pretty much on their own, but there haven't been major issues after the first three to four weeks.
For communications, both internal and with clients, the company relies on Ring Central. Guillory especially likes the service's ability to present voicemail messages as attachments to e-mails. It's much easier to read a list of who called, Guilory says, than to listen to all your messages in order. And while he notes that forwarding voice mails is so difficult that few people actually do it -- and even fewer are confident that the messages go through -- "everybody forwards e-mails." Innovations International also uses Ring Central to route faxes, without having to have a separate fax number.
For additional internal communications and coordination, the company uses Gmail and Google Calendar. Skype is the vendor of choice for chat and simple video conferencing. It also saves money on international calls, Guillory notes.
But Innovations International doesn't use Google Apps to share files and documents, Guillory says, because it doesn't support a wide enough range of file types, including PageMaker and InDesign files. Instead, Guillory asked his Linked In network for suggestions on how to share multiple file types, and "someone suggested Egnyte." What sealed the deal, he says, is that you can set Egnyte to look like a regular folder on your desktop. Despite the large files his company creates, "Speed is not a problem." It takes only a couple seconds to open even the biggest files, he says.
For CRM and project management, Innovations International uses 37 Signals'Highrise, and Basecamp.
Innovations International's Virtual Company Toolkit:
Ring Central
Gmail
Google Calendar
PageMaker
InDesign
Egnyte
Skype
Highrise
Basecamp
Elance
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