The era of business without office is gradually ending. Meaning businesses existing on social media alone will soon disappear. It is a pity that lots of entrepreneurs will go bankrupt and close their businesses very soon. This is inevitable because we are entering a new era, the era of borderless business, which is the aftermath of Corona virus (COVID19) and the introduction of 5G technology. It is the doomsday for small scale entrepreneurs. However, you can restructure your business into a borderless business.
Published May 16th. 2020
Long before the era of
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snap Chat, when internet service was not a
common place and my website programmer was in Lebanon, website designer was in
India and cartoonist was a sixteen years old girl in Australia, I predicted
business without an office. My prediction highlighted that series of businesses
would spring up in different industries without offices.
Then, the future I saw
was beyond running a business from a basement, garage or trunk of a car; it was
business without a physical, but a virtual office—the web. Fast forward many
years after, these days, there are thousands of entrepreneurs who are running
their businesses from a single or multiple social media. Thanks to Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, Snap Chat, and of course, Google.
However, we are entering
a new era, an era the coronavirus is introducing us to. It is the borderless
business era. And businesses without offices may not survive the new era. They
may disappear like the dinosaurs. Better still, they may vanish like some
internet-based companies did during the dot-com bubble in the late nineties.
Why you may ask? Because borderless businesses will take over businesses
without offices.
Most businesses without
offices are managed by half-baked entrepreneurs with no business ethics and
formidable organizational structure to stand the test of time. They are only
conscious of making peanuts without thought-out plans of how to build
formidable businesses like what Mark Zuckerberg is doing with Facebook or what
Jeff Bezos is doing with Amazon. Businesses like these ones are the future of
businesses in the new era of COVID-19.
What is a borderless
business? A borderless business is a business situated in a country but
operates across the globe without any restriction. It is a business that
captures its potential customers from across the globe. It is a business with a
business model that stretches its tentacles into every country. They are the
businesses that will swallow the businesses without offices through acquisition
or merger.
What should you do?
Simply turn your business without an office into a borderless business. How
then do you build a borderless business? Quite a task if you must know.
Those days, it is easy to build a small business with an excellent “Speedee
Service System” like Maurice and Richard did with McDonald’s in the fifties. In
the past era, it is also easy to build a business by setting up an Instagram
account or Facebook page. These days, you need more than a breeze through
system if you are going to be serving customers scattered across the globe. You
need a formidable system with a physical operational office in your home
country and eventually annexes in other countries. It will be an era when you
will leverage on a formidable team in your operational office in your home land
to capture customers from other countries through social platforms and then
create annexes in different countries to register your presence. Businesses
like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft are almost a decade ahead of
others. They are already creating their presence in different countries. Take a
cue from them. Start small and grow big, and then become very big.
So, what I am saying is
this: We have moved past the era of businesses without offices when large
corporations are forced to pitch their virtual offices on social platforms
because they don’t want to be swallowed by dot-com businesses managed by some
weird drop-outs teenagers in jeans and sneakers. We are in the era when borderless
businesses owned by Millennials (and few Gen X) need operational offices
(anywhere in the world), proper organizational structure and business ethics
with the intention to capture customers across the globe and eventually set up
offices in different countries.
The new era is like
doomsday for businesses without offices. It is the end of an era that will
introduce us to a new era. So here is what you have to do if you are presently
running a business without an office. First, build a formidable team around
your business. You may not need a large team, but you need to hire or put
together a team that will take care of the 4 important areas of your business. These team, 70% of them, must be located
together in a physical office. Then create an online presence that is second to
none. Invest heavily on creating a gateway that allows customers from across
the globe to patronize you. Keep the data of your customers from different
countries. Once you notice that you have a large customer-base from a
particular country, it is time to jump on the plane to set up a team and a home
office in that country. You have to keep repeating the same process in different
country until you are as big as multinational organizations. They are the
future of borderless businesses. You can be part of the future too.
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