Running a Virtual Business - One Year On

It's been a year since I co-founded Comrz, somewhat from the ashes of my previous venture Emojo. A lot has happened in that time, most of it great. The key decisions we made at the outset have all worked out well and we're looking to build on the new ways of working and not look back.

Below are some of the key Virtual Company premises we built the business on, and the pros and cons over the past year.

No Office / Location Independence

This was a key decision, and so far, so great. We still have no office, and have no intention of getting one. Not all the team is with us since some members felt they needed to work in an office environment, however most team members stuck with Comrz and have benefited greatly by having location independence.

One member of the team has moved back to India for a year, another has been working in Slovakia for the past few weeks, another is happily working from the Cote-d'Azure. Those left in the UK no longer have long commutes, they can work from home or from local venues, or great business clubs such as the Like Minds Club or One Alfred Place.

The down-side has yet to come, which will happen when we have to grow the team, I'm sure we'll need to develop some innovative teaching / learning tools to get people on board as effectively as possible. That said, we have outsourced very effectively (see below) with minimum effort for some pretty complex financial / payroll / HR stuff.

The best thing is that we now only meet up for fun, parties and entertainment. Every couple of weeks, those members of the team who are able to make it to London get together and go out. That's the only time we meet in person, but because we talk together so frequently each day it's worked out pretty well so far.

Outsourcing the Infrastructure

Right from the outset we decided to not run any of our own equipment and did a lot of research as to the best cloud providers. We chose Amazon and Yotta, and they've both been great. Neither has been without it's hiccoughs, and we had to do a lot of development to make our Affino platform work reliably on the cloud, but the benefits have been immense in terms of cost, reliability, reduced stress, reduced workload and cost compared to running our own infrastructure.

One of the best aspects of running off the cloud is that we can increase our capacity on-demand and provide massively scalable sites. It also means that peaking sites, e.g. event-based / news-based can have temporary increases in capacity without having to invest in year-round increases in server capacity.

Outsourcing

The first thing we did when starting Comrz was to outsource key book-keeping, payroll and financial related functions. We now also outsource elements such as design and in-effect a fair amount of development. This has gone extremely well.

Not only has the quality and value of the services been excellent, but in dealing with seasoned pros, we have benefited greatly from solid advice and efficient service. It means that outsourcing is now our Number One approach when it comes to increasing capacity or delivering new services.

Working and Communicating Online

Skype, Google Apps, Google Talk, Twitter, Tweet Deck, Google News Reader, DimDim and Affino have been the keys to great communication within the company. The latest generation of mobile tech including Apple's iPhones and various Google / HTC / Android devices have kept us in close contact whatever our location.

Great mobile services including the latest generation of 3G dongles, MiFi devices and now Android 2.2 have meant that we don't even need to have broadband to be working and communicating effectively online. Phenomenal when staying abroad or working in un-connected locations.

We've made a lot of improvements to our own Affino platform over the year with massively improved forums, which have driven over 30,000 conversations in the past year. Team Time our Team Time In/Out board with logs all the work-time and tasks has been key to managing both the full-time team members and external contractors. We're also rolled out great enhancements to our blogs, status updates and integration with Facebook and Twitter which really optimise our public comms.

The Downside (Not Much)

We've yet to experience these in any significant way. There's obviously disruption for team members when they work from home from their family and friends, but in terms of productivity it's fair to say that the team has been incredibly productive on the whole, with no loss of productivity at all when compared with the office environment.

We've also not suffered from being virtual in terms of our status. Our customers buy into what we're doing and our approach, and increasingly it is how they also operate and see Comrz as being leaders in the field.

Not having an office and all associated infrastructure, insurance, security / maintenance headaches, equipment et al has greatly freed up management time and allows us to stay focused on the things that matter like building a great product, supporting our customers to the max and growing the business.

The Future

The future for Comrz, and the world in general, will involve many more collaborations, working with partners and customers in innovative ways and always striving to be, and work with the best in the market.

We're liking the way the tech world is going with more integration, services being opened through APIs, everything migrating to the cloud and seamless global comms which makes working on different continents seem as close as working in the office next door.