What probably got me seriously thinking about moving to a virtual office was when I wrote about Best Buy's "results-oriented work environment" or ROWE. In a nutshell, Best Buy took their 4,000 corporate office employees and said "We don't care when you work or how you do your work, as long as you get your work done."

I realized this is exactly what our clients do with us because it's natural and makes sense, and so why not treat my employees the same way? If MWI doesn't do a good job, the client never uses us again. Why not let my employees share in the successes and failures of the business just as I do? Sure, there's more risk, but there's more opportunity for reward as well.

Ultimately this has to be the way the world will trend because the companies that successfully implement ROWE will have a competitive advantage over companies that don't, and so they will survive while the others don't. It might take decades, even centuries, but that's the way economies naturally trend and so I'm sure we'll see more and more situations where not only companies but employees themselves are judged by the direct impact of their results, rather than an inaccurate and rather arbitrary measure of results such as hours worked.

Think about it, what is more ridiculous than a time clock? Ok, it makes sense in some situations where the results an employee produces have to do directly with being physically present for a certain time. If Best Buy told their retail employees they could show up whenever they wanted to then they'd have serious problems in their stores. But many employees don't need to show up at an office to get their work done.

When it came to MWI, our office was almost useless. Clients rarely came to visit, many of my employees preferred working from home and seemed to get more work done when they stayed at home anyway (probably because they didn't spend two hours every day chatting about The Office or Simpsons reruns). So the move only made sense, although it was by no means an easy decision.

I agonized over the decision to go virtual for at least a year. I did research, I surveyed current clients, past clients, potential clients, and even past potential clients who never became real clients. I talked to my employees, I talked to other people, and even then it wasn't an easy decision. But finally everything clicked and it became obvious that the time had come, and so we made the switch.

So far it's been great. We've had one potential client express concerns about us not having an office, but that deal might have represented a positive impact of $1K per month to our bottom line, which hardly justifies a negative impact of $5K per month.

Going virtual might not be right for your business, but if you'd care to know more about my experience or if you have any specific questions please feel free to ask.