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.