A few weeks ago, we sent out an AppingoJim news story entitled Publisher Fires Landlord (and also wrote a blog post). It was a fun, tongue-in-cheek article that was based on an Appingo client that wanted to dump their expensive office space and bring the company fully virtual. They were excited that Appingo that was going to allow them to do that effectively. We thought it was a great idea and encouraged it.
Two weeks later, we were sitting around in our own office, after working virtually the day before, and one of us (can’t remember who) posed the question — Why are we here?
Huh?
“Why are we here? Why are we in this office?”
No one could come up with a better answer than — “Because this is the where the phones are.”
And that just wasn’t a good enough answer. We took a good hard look at the space we were in and realized that:
- We all work off laptops which we took home each night
- We can get internet access anywhere…from home, from Starbucks, from the library, etc
- We all have email
- We all have iPhones
- We run team projects through Appingo, which is web-based (more on this later)
- The Appingo software is securely hosted at a professional, virtual hosting center (Rackspace), so we don’t need to house our own servers
- We only really need to meet face-to-face as a team once, maybe twice, per week
- We commute a combined 30-35 hours a week and waste at least 70 gallons of gas in doing so (and most of us live real close tot he office!) (yes, Thomas Friedman’s HOT, FLAT AND CROWDED had an effect on this piece)
- We spend more than 10% of our sales on rent and utilities
After just a few minutes, we couldn’t really understand why we were hanging on to the idea that we had to have an office. No one had a good answer.
So we fired the landlord this week. We fired the phone company and the internet service provider. We fired the electric company and the cleaning service. And we went virtual. We held our first breakfast meeting with the team at Panera this past Monday and you know what…it was great. And productive. And the pastries were delicious.
So, we’re officially a virtual company. We’re part of a brand new world — one that web-based applications like Appingo are enabling. It’s completely liberating.
We excited for this next phase in Appingo’s life!
Derek
ps — Here is a look at a workflow we use for our corporate support team to manage all of our new client training. When a new customer signs up to use Appingo, we launch this schedule to help us manage their training and support effectively. It keeps us all together and I get to see, at any time, the status of all our active new customer launches.
