All over the world, Frank Cottle is helping business owners provide office solutions for their staff, no matter where they work, with Alliance Virtual Offices.
After college, he became a professional racing yachtsman where he spent 10 years enjoying life on fancy boats and spending time with successful and influential people. Their business actions are what highly motivated to get into business himself.
Through many guises, and adapting as the industry changed, Frank has been a provider of commercial property since 1979.
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Where he was once the person building these spaces and then selling and leasing them on, he pivoted in the late 90s. He now provides office spaces as easily as Expedia provides hotel rooms, helping people find office solutions to suit the needs of their business.
And he shares with us his journey and how he has adjusted to the changing times, whilst helping us to realize that virtual offices can take our businesses to the next level. You can hire the best people regardless of where they live in the world, and become an international business with little upfront cost.
Commercial Property Experience
Frank first started off his commercial property company as one which built specialized buildings, often with executive suites. The purpose was to build the smallest buildings with the highest returns, using the least amount of bricks and mortar.
These properties appeared across the southwest of the USA in California, Arizona, and Texas. Blessed by a good market, the company later sold the portfolio 10 years later.
That is when he started to operate the classic business centers, and over the following 10 years built 195, which made them the largest company of its kind in the world at the time.
He liked the model, as he had a lot of users and continued to have room for potential growth. But he also didn’t like the model because of the leasehold structure. It affected how the balance book looked, and it suppressed the actual value of the company.
By the late 90s, they set about selling the company in order to start a new one. In Alliance Virtual Offices, it is a combination of a hospitality and technology company.
Across 52 countries, they now have over 700 facilities. But this time, rather than owning the facilities themselves, he owns the clients who use the services.
Just like Expedia don’t own the hotels, they instead own the transactional relationship between the two parties involved, and make sure both the client and customer are happy.
Frank thinks of his business as a software company, matching the right people to the right place for the right price.
Virtual officing is now the fastest growing sector in the commercial real estate industry, and that’s thanks to its convenience and expediency.
What Are Virtual Workspaces?
A serviced office gives you people, a place, and knowledge. But when you combine that the flexibility, a new structure is created called virtual officing.
The people which come with such places can include clerical, secretarial, administration, technical support, receptionists, and a great deal other staff.
They’re also provided with the technology you need, including the phones, Wi-Fi, bandwidth, computers, and network manager requirements.
But also you get a physical place which has been specifically designed to provide services in a highly flexible format to break them down to individual workspaces rather than entire offices.
This means you can lease as many workstations as you need and can shrink or expand the number as and when you need to with little hassle. And it requires you to not have to worry about fitting out the space, buying the furniture and equipment, or even organizing service providers.
People looking for such spaces can either sign a day, month or year-long agreement, depending on their needs. And this means the upfront costs and risks of starting out are reduced.
Changing Work Habits
The biggest category of user which use the Alliance Virtual Office services are financial institutions and venture capitalist companies. They use them to place start-up businesses in these spaces, which allows the initial capital investment to actually go further, rather than spending it buying or leasing premises.
It also means that these people don’t have to worry about running the office, of which they’ll likely have little experience of. It instead allows them to just focus on running the business.
In today’s economy, many businesses are also international, and hire the best people for the job no matter where they are in the world. So a business can now easily find a workspace to suit them, in a location near their new hire.
But also the businesses which are being built today don’t match the traditional models which we’re used to. Instead, they often just go from one gig to the next.
They are pure, 100% freelancers within their area of expertise. The digital world allows them to not be restricted by geographical location as to which jobs they can take on.
These digital nomads are often using co-working spaces in which they actually create their own communities and support systems. Office relationships are built across vast differences in industries.
Spreading the Message
When it comes to looking for a solution like theirs, most people find them through the internet. Within 10 minutes, you can have booked 10 different workspaces, easier than it is to book a hotel room for your weekend break away.
One of the current drivers for custom is by providing content, instead of simply just saying ‘Hey, I have a product’. People are more trusting of those who explain a product or industry, how things work and help them to take maximum advantage of those things.
So, at Alliance Virtual Offices, they have a team of dedicated, full-time writers who are industry experts, and they spend their days writing articles and carrying out studies. These help people to understand how to maximize their use of the virtual office, and not just where to buy one.
Not only is this because Google loves content, but more importantly, you are far more useful to people if you provide them with the information they need and help them out.
And Finally
If you’re interested in learning more about the industry of virtual offices and remote workers, then visit Allwork.Space which is a great source of useful information.
And don’t forget, to simply find your new office space, as well as booking meeting rooms across the world, then Alliance Virtual Offices is the place to go.