Young Entrepreneurs and Office Space

Students and young entrepreneurs count office as foremost hurdle for a startup. The office space has created a wide gap between their ambition and activity; this gap can be bridged by some of the innovative ideas being used by tech entrepreneurs like. These may be:

1. Virtual Office Space: VOS is one of the fastest emerging concepts for web based businesses being not only used by entrepreneurs but industry’s leaders also. Budding entrepreneurs may use it in their bootstrap period by internet based businesses. You need to have your website, email, phone number, and an address for mail receiving purpose (may be your home address). The address may be used of receiving letters, pay checks and other communication. If you have a payment gateway with your website it will be proven as an add-on.
2. Shared Business Office: Consider two entrepreneurial businesses viz. event management and PR management may share the resources including office and operate as a venture. In this case if one business has been in operation for a long time, other may add some good advantages and in return may use their office space. Limitation of this approach is your dependency on the parent business i.e. your target customer will reduce to the actual customer of the parent business. However you get an ample time and opportunity to prove your idea and ability before investors or venture capitalists.
3. Use Garage: You may use garage, spare guest room, any old office infrastructure of your own or of your friend. It will come for extremely low cost but you will have to invest a little over interior.
4. Off Town Office: If you are not in a position to pay for an office in main market area one good option may be to have an office space in those area where rent is comparatively lower.
5. Office Sharing: To reduce the office expanses the office sharing concept has emerged as en effective tool for entrepreneurs. There are some of issues must be discussed before getting inside shared office space infrastructure, viz. nature of businesses participating in such model must have different market and far different product/ services, allocation of space must be done in an intelligent way so no one have any issue, branding and advertisement must not be done at office space by any party or may be with mutual agreement only.

Before thinking about any of the above option you will have to make sure that you will reach your customers and find them at their place, and don't bother them to find you.

The original blog published on www.EntrepreneurIndia.biz on 12-Nov-2011