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Given the one- to three-person size of the large number of independent rep firms, many reps find themselves working out of a virtual office. More times than not, those virtual offices are at home.

Reps that have already made that move have faced and hopefully met logistical and personal challenges that accompany this virtual office trend.

RPMS, while not a rep firm but a company that many reps are familiar with, has successfully made the move, and the steps they took might serve as an example for reps anticipating a similar operating change. RPMS, Lenexa, Kansas, is a leading supplier of rep-specific software.

RPMS’ Jim Adam, director of research and development, looks back several years as he describes how his company made this gradual change. “One of our programmers has worked from home for 20 years. Back then, we mailed diskettes back and forth — nowadays of course, everything is communicated via e-mail. As a result, not much has changed for him.”

He continues, “At the beginning of 2011, I personally started working exclusively from home, using GoToMyPC and only made occasional forays into the office. During that first year our technicians also would work from home on either Mondays or Fridays. That obviously cut down substantially on their commuting. Since that practice seemed to be working pretty smoothly, we started looking seriously at what our office might be able to look like in 2012 after our lease expired.”

Phone and Internet

Adam emphasizes that since RPMS is a software company, “We are a very telephone- and Internet-intensive operation. As it happened, our phone and Internet service provider contracts were set to expire just a couple of weeks before the lease on our office. As a result, they were candidates for replacement anyway. When we made the move to a virtual office for the telephone technology we chose RingCentral Office (www.ringcentral.com) and it’s proven to be very effective. As a benefit, we’re saving quite a bit of money vs. what we were paying, and we gained more features.”

Once the telephone service was secured, “For Internet service we all had local Internet in our homes anyway. Since Internet accessibility would be a requirement in the new situation, I simply now reimburse our employees a nominal rent for their home offices, and allow them to select their own Internet service providers. (A nice side benefit of that is that instead of trying to claim a home office deduction, our employees receive rent from RPMS for their home offices.)”

With communications technology under their belt, the company then set up a post office box that is centrally located for the company’s bookkeeper. This move allows any employee to gather the mail. “A number of the regular bills had been moved to electronic checks from our bank anyway, so not much changed in that respect,” he adds.

When it came to locating the company’s hardware, Adam explains that “Initially I moved the key computers and server we used to my home, where I set up a local area network. Our people logged in to their own computers, just as they had been when the network was at our office. In March 2012 we came out with RPMSCloud, so our primary customer contact system was moved off our local area network and onto our hosted server provided by Earthlink in New York (www.earthlinkcloud.com).

“Once RPMSCloud was set we moved the individual workstation computers out to our employees’ homes and they began running pretty much the same as they had when they commuted to our office — while enjoying just a little more relaxed dress code.”

Counting the Benefits

There are more benefits to the company than just the more relaxed dress code, Adam continues. “The biggest benefit has been the flexibility that this has afforded our people. The son of one of our technicians has struggled during the last 15 months with an illness. He’s doing well now but working from home was a godsend for that tech.

“Another benefit has been the timely response rate of our knowledge workers. I responded to a customer at 6 p.m. on Sunday, and also at 7:15 a.m. Monday. That doesn’t happen all the time of course, but if it’s easy, then all of us are all glad to help whenever we can. When as an employee you save commute time, gasoline, wardrobe, personal time, etc., your dedication actually improves.”

While the benefits of the move have far outweighed the negatives, Adam admits there have been a couple of pitfalls. “The first was getting our former phone provider to believe that they’d truly been terminated. Though we followed their customer service instructions for non-renewal, getting them to stop billing was something of a chore. It took me until May to persuade them that we’d jumped through the hoops correctly, and to get them to collect their equipment back from us.

“Another negative, and one that continues, is that we continue to receive faxes. We have a dedicated fax number with RingCentral and the vast majority of those we receive come in just fine. But occasionally we will receive one, or a series of attempts of the same fax from the same customer, that are truncated or otherwise illegible. We believe that this is because those sending the faxes themselves are now working with VOIP lines, and that the baud rates on their fax machines are set too high.

“That used to happen now and then in 2011 and before, but the incidence is higher now than it was on our old fractional T1. We currently believe that being on RingCentral may make the problem more prevalent, but it may just be that more and more of our users are moving to VOIP faxing and that is the problem. We have no really good way to know, and that’s a little frustrating right now. Even so, I recommend RingCentral.”

Adam also took the time to comment on two subjects that reps often mention when they consider the move to a virtual office: time management and the desire to interact or network with co-workers.

Considering the former, he says “Any time management concerns are fairly immaterial. What we have at RPMS are knowledge workers. Our support technicians answer service calls when they arrive. Then they have tasks they must complete as they have time. Time management really isn’t something I focus on because our people are all doing what they are expected to do.”

On the subject of interacting with fellow workers, “Perhaps it’s something unique to our company, but that’s not a problem. Periodically we’ll meet as needed, but in general we simply don’t have the need to meet face-to-face. Phone and e-mail communication more than meet our needs.”

He adds, however, that “My recommendation for any independent rep considering the move from a traditional to a virtual office is to move ahead. But, they might be wise to provide monthly meetings for staff that can offer them the ‘meeting of the minds’ they might need.”

In summing up his and RPMS’ experiences in making the move from a traditional to a virtual office, Adam says, “The technology to accomplish a virtual office is absolutely there and the benefits are strong. We’ve realized substantial savings. In 2011 we were paying about $2,000 per month for phone, rent, Internet, etc. This year we are paying less than $1,200 per month, and even with that our employees are earning money each month as landlords of their own home offices.

“Our employee satisfaction is higher, and I think our customer service is as good as it has ever been, and may be better. I would recommend a virtual office to nearly any company that thinks it might work for their situation.”