- Why the cheapest Virtual Office seems appealing
- Is the cheapest Virtual Office the best deal?
- Which Virtual Office provides the best value?
- Alternatives to the cheapest Virtual Office
Q: What should I be looking for in a virtual office? Is the cheapest virtual office the best choice?
A: When searching for a virtual office, you should find a provider that can cater to your business’s specific needs, that allows you to customize your office, and that is legitimate and well-respected. Using the cheapest virtual office available is seldom the right decision.
Since the pandemic, the job market has made the switch from in-person, authoritarian styles of work to remote or hybrid, collaborative work styles.
This change has brought a slew of technological advancements to the forefront of public thought and shown entrepreneurs everywhere that starting a business isn’t anywhere near as difficult as it used to be.
A few decades ago, starting a business had an almost insurmountable barrier to entry. You had to secure office space, find several solid staff members, and have enough capital to keep up with these recurring costs before getting your business off the ground.
Now, as countless Americans continue to work from home, hopeful entrepreneurs and established business owners are in a position to create robust digital-first operations without having to risk excessive capital.
This is largely due to the Virtual Office, which gives would-be business owners a cost-efficient chance to secure a professional business address, register for an LLC with that address, and start operating their company from anywhere in the world.
Naturally, as this service grows in popularity, several entrepreneurs are curious about the cheapest virtual office and how effective that office would be.
In this article, we’ll cover why the cheapest virtual office might seem appealing, whether or not the cheapest virtual office is the best deal, and more importantly, which Virtual Office provides the best value. Finally, we’ll close with some key ways to scale the Virtual Office with the highest value.
Don’t waste time searching for “cheapest virtual office in New York” or “cheapest virtual office in Dallas” – find out which Virtual Office gives you the best value for your hard-earned money.
- Why the cheapest Virtual Office seems appealing
- Is the cheapest Virtual Office the best deal?
- Which Virtual Office provides the best value?
- Scaling your Virtual Office
Why the cheapest Virtual Office is appealing
Before we dive into the appeal of a cheap virtual office, let’s take a moment to explain what a virtual office is.
A virtual office is a service that provides businesses with a professional mailing address and access to amenities like conference rooms, receptionists, and coworking spaces, without the need for a physical office space.
Read more: What is a Virtual Office and How Does it Work?
While many new entrepreneurs that don’t need a full-time physical office use virtual offices to do their work remotely, established business owners can use virtual offices to recalibrate their online operations, enter new markets, and effectively scale their companies.
Think of your Virtual Office as a suite of tools rather than an office that exists virtually. With the right Virtual Office, you can do business anywhere in the world, register your business anywhere you want, and customize your plan to cater to your business’s specific needs.
Now that you know what a virtual office is, let’s explore some virtual office costs and determine why a cheap virtual office might look attractive from the outside.
Many business owners think in absolute terms.
They want to make the most of their money and think the best way to do that is simply to spend less.
While the idea isn’t inherently incorrect, that is unfortunately not how business ownership works. The phrase “you have to spend money to make money” isn’t an age-old aphorism for nothing.
Nevertheless, these business owners apply this logic to their virtual office costs. They shoot for the cheapest option because they imagine that the less they spend, the more money they’ll have in the long run.
Again, this idea isn’t inherently incorrect, just misguided and lacking nuance.
Think about it this way: not just in America, but all over the world, 62% of employees between the ages of 22-65 are currently working remotely occasionally, which is a hybrid work style.
Simply put, remote work isn’t going anywhere. If the entire world was transitioning to physical office space – you wouldn’t just find the cheapest lease possible and call it quits, would you?
No, you’d do research, compare amenities, and find the best value possible so that your employees have everything they need, your business can operate smoothly, and you’re positioned for long-term success.
Unfortunately, many business owners don’t think this way. They’re under the impression that all virtual offices are the same.
This isn’t the case. Many virtual offices are little more than glorified PO boxes.
This is why searching for things like “cheapest virtual office in USA” isn’t going to get you very far. After all, if you can’t register your business with your virtual office, was it even worth it?
Is the cheapest Virtual Office the best deal?
Cheap virtual offices might seem like a better deal, but they simply aren’t.
Below, we’ve put together a small list of the issues associated with searching for the cheapest virtual office.
- Poor locations, illegitimate addresses
- Limited services
- Unprofessional
Poor locations, illegitimate addresses
First of all, the cheapest virtual office isn’t going to provide your business with a prestigious address.
With the influx of scammers and spam businesses, you can’t afford poor optics.
Anyone who searches for your business address will instantly see it’s located in a retail store or post office.
Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t inspire confidence and may make some consumers hesitant to purchase from your company, ultimately skewing your net profits and overall profitability.
Not to mention, using the cheapest virtual office address might put you in a situation where you’re unable to register your business because the address doesn’t even exist.
Some states might allow you to register a business with a PO box, but some will not. Vying for the cheapest virtual office could very easily leave you in a position where you’ve spent money for an office but are unable to register your business.
If this is the case, the cheapest virtual office has only wound up costing you more money than if you’d simply found a high-quality provider in the first place.
Read more: Get a Virtual Address for LLC Registration
Limited services
Outside of the poor optics associated with a cheap virtual office and the issues of LLC registration, many of these cheaper options don’t provide any space to work and meet.
Without amenities like these, your virtual office is only serving to make your life more difficult in the long run.
First, you will end up having to pay high prices for rentals down the road. Finding a professional, quiet, and cost-efficient meeting room is typically a fool’s errand, so securing easily reservable space should be high on your list of priorities.
Second, if you’ve ever worked remotely for any extended period, you understand the pitfalls and chances of burnout from working from the same place you eat, sleep, and relax. Sure, if you have a designated home office you can negate some of these feelings, but even that will get a bit monotonous after a long enough period.
When you can access a coworking space that’s professional, quiet, and filled with like-minded entrepreneurs, you can break the routine you’ve been enduring and give yourself a fresh approach to your work and your personal life.
At the end of the day, the cheapest virtual office isn’t going to be the best deal because you get what you pay for.
Read more: What Are Digital Products? Your Guide to Creating and Selling
Unprofessional
A cheap virtual office provider may not give your business the same professionalism and customer service as a slightly more expensive provider.
Remember, your Virtual Office should act as the centralized hub for your business. Do you want to risk leaving your business’s fate in the hands of an unprofessional provider?
Think about it this way; your business mail will include sensitive documents, time-sensitive documents, government correspondence, and several other kinds of private mail. If you’re using an unprofessional provider, who will guarantee your mail’s safe and responsible handling?
In addition, the cheapest virtual office providers aren’t going to have helpful and friendly onsite staff to assist you with any of your business’s needs.
If your cheap virtual office doesn’t come with onsite staff, access to meeting rooms or coworking spaces, provides poor customer service, and might not allow you to register your LLC, what is the point of paying for that service?
The differences between a high-quality Virtual Office and the cheapest virtual office are extensive.
While a noble idea, focusing on saving money upfront isn’t the correct way to set yourself up for long-term success. Rather than trying to save as much money as possible upfront, you should be building out a robust business infrastructure that allows you to save money that compounds the longer your business exists.
Instead of searching for the cheapest virtual office, you should look for the one that provides the most value.
It’s better to make a slightly larger initial investment if that initial investment gives you a better-quality Virtual Office that helps your business grow.
How Alliance Virtual Offices offers the best value
Alliance Virtual Offices provides the best value for a Virtual Office, and with the economy on shakey ground, you need to search for the highest value investments possible.
Read more: Inflation vs Recession: What’s the Difference?
We may not be the cheapest, but with every single dollar you spend, you get more than you would with our competitors.
Just take a look at our TrustPilot profile– over 90% positive reviews and counting. For good reason, our clients have come to expect a certain high quality from our services, and we continue to deliver.
Alliance Virtual Offices provides nothing but the best, most prestigious business addresses, helping you establish your business as reputable and trustworthy.
Before we move on, let’s take a quick look at how Alliance Virtual Offices provides exponentially greater value than any of the cheapest virtual office options.
- Prestigious addresses with locations in every state
- Endless customization
- Integrates with other digital tools
- Access to meeting rooms and workspaces
- Friendly onsite staff
Prestigious addresses
Alliance Virtual Offices has offices in every state and just about every central business district. This means that entrepreneurs can go through Alliance to register their LLCs anywhere they want.
In addition to having offices everywhere, Alliance makes a point to use prestigious business addresses that are professional, well-known, and, when seen by consumers, clients, or potential investors, inspire nothing but confidence.
Rent in the larger cities doesn’t seem to be declining anytime soon. Naturally, securing a Virtual Office now is an excellent way to take advantage of this continued influx of individuals.
You don’t need to hunt for things like the “cheapest virtual office in New York” because, through Alliance, you can start a financial services business in the heart of upper Manhattan for a fraction of the cost of a physical building.
Similarly, you can start a technology business in Silicon Valley with ease. You could even start a private LLC in Delaware through Alliance – the possibilities are endless!
Endless customization
Commercial leases were prohibitively expensive in the past, requiring the first and last month’s rent, a security deposit, monthly upkeep, utilities, and rent itself. Typically, these leases would last between three and five years.
This barrier to entry prevented countless entrepreneurs from following their dreams and starting a business. But with the introduction of the Virtual Office, entrepreneurs can pay for what they want, when they want it.
In a traditional office space, you pay monthly rent, regardless of how much time you’ve spent in the office.
With your Virtual Office, you have access to meeting rooms, coworking spaces, mail forwarding, and other Alliance services that you can pay for and use only as needed.
If you don’t need to spend any time in a physical workspace, you don’t have to pay extra money for the right to use that space. Alternatively, if you do need to spend time in a physical workspace, Alliance allows you to pay for the space as you need it.
Customization is everything.
At Alliance Virtual Offices, we understand that no two businesses are alike and that flexibility is the most important aspect of any successful business. We’re flexible by helping you build a Virtual Office that caters specifically to your business’s needs, wants, and goals.
When you’re searching for the cheapest virtual office, customization isn’t even an option. Several cheaper providers offer one service, one fee, and virtually no amenities.
Integrates with other tools
Customization without integration is meaningless. When using the cheapest virtual office, you have no guarantees that your office will integrate with the other tools you’re using to help your business grow.
At Alliance, this isn’t the case.
Alliance’s Virtual Offices are built to integrate with any digital tools your business can imagine. Alliance itself provides several tools that you can easily set up to function through your Virtual Office.
Remember, when you search for the cheapest virtual office, you aren’t just affecting your business’s performance in the short term, you’re creating barriers that you’ll have to hurdle as your business continues to grow.
Access to meeting rooms and coworking spaces
Alliance’s Virtual Offices all come with access to easily reservable meeting rooms and coworking spaces.
Most cheap virtual offices won’t offer any kind of physical space, so this is a huge benefit.
Having this access allows you to break the monotony of working from home, gives you a place to host client or investor meetings, and even allows you to provide the same amenities for your employees.
Outside of the meeting rooms and coworking spaces, Alliance’s Virtual Offices also come with mail forwarding add-ons that you can use to help organize your business mail.
Depending on the volume of mail you’re receiving, you can pick between once-monthly, bi-weekly, weekly, and daily mail forwarding options.
Each of these options ensures that your mail is being handled safely and securely, so there’s no need to worry about prying eyes or bad actors getting their hands on your confidential documents.
Friendly onsite staff
Another benefit that cannot be overstated is the friendly and professional onsite staff that Alliance Virtual Offices employs.
There’s nothing worse than trying to host a meeting but being stopped in your tracks by a technological issue. Similarly, there’s nothing more frustrating than reaching out to your Virtual Office support staff and waiting days before getting a response.
With Alliance, neither of these are issues you’ll have to experience again.
The onsite staff is ready and available to help you troubleshoot technological issues while staying available and ensuring you’re never without support for your Virtual Office.
As you can see, Alliance Virtual Offices provides the best value for entrepreneurs and business owners everywhere.
Don’t risk your business by using the cheapest virtual office or other low-quality digital tools. Instead, use Alliance Virtual Offices to ensure your company is positioned for continued, long-term success.
Alternatives to the cheapest Virtual Office
While it may be tempting to go with the cheapest virtual office, doing so gets you considerably less per-dollar.
Alliance Virtual Offices might be slightly more expensive, but we provide the best value for your money.
Think about it this way: in the past, a traditional office was prohibitively expensive and required an inordinate amount of upkeep.
Now, regardless of the virtual office you choose, you can save an absurd percentage of that capital and use it to reinvest in your business.
Searching for the cheapest virtual office after saving so much money on the switch to digital-first operations is nothing more than being greedy.
Instead of trying to save money with a cheap virtual office, use a high-quality Virtual Office to cut operational costs while strengthening your business infrastructure.
You can use a Live Receptionist that integrates perfectly with your Virtual Office to reduce the positions you need to hire for.
Not only that, but your Live Receptionist personally screens and answers every phone call, allowing you to focus on the more nuanced aspects of your business.
By using a Live Receptionist, you’re improving customer relations, reducing the risk of frustrating a caller by being inattentive, and most importantly, saving capital that can be reinvested into your business.
With the mail forwarding add-on, you can reduce travel time, eliminate unneeded drives to the post office, and even save money on labor costs.
The point is that there are several alternatives to finding the cheapest virtual office that will save you considerably more capital in the long run. Skimping on your Virtual Office is like skimping on the boat you expect to help you cross an ocean.
Further reading
- What is a Virtual Office and How Does it Work?
- Get a Virtual Address for LLC Registration
- What Are Digital Products? Your Guide to Creating and Selling
- Inflation vs Recession: What’s the Difference?
Alliance Virtual Offices blows the cheapest virtual offices out of the water for countless reasons.
First, the prestigious addresses that Alliance uses are unrivaled. Second, Alliance provides several different tools that integrate perfectly with their Virtual Offices and are built to help business owners scale.
Third, Alliance has onsite staff who are ready and willing to help any business owner with any of the issues they might come up against. And finally, Alliance is a tried-and-true brand that has been serving customers for years.
Our overwhelmingly positive TrustPilot reviews makes it very clear: our customers expect a lot from us, and we continue to deliver.
For more information about why the cheapest virtual office isn’t the safest bet and additional business ownership tips, check out the Virtual Office Blog and contact us today for any other questions about Virtual Offices, entrepreneurship, and anything else related to the future of work!