You’re launching a startup on a bootstrap budget. You think you need office space for your team, but real estate costs would push your burn rate to new heights. Is an office really essential?
At first glance, setting up distributed teams would seem like the obvious way to save money on real estate costs. There are very few places in the world that don’t have reliable high-speed internet service. You can hire the best talent, regardless of where they live, and collaborate remotely. You don’t have to pay to relocate personnel, and you get the productivity gains of extremely short commutes – mere steps from the bedroom to the in-home office. Best of all, your real estate costs drop to zero.
However, a second look at managing a distributed or remote team may reveal some obstacles. You’ll lose the valuable “water cooler” effect, where serendipitous ideas can result in development breakthroughs. Without regularly scheduled face-to-face information sharing, you may struggle to build team cohesiveness. If a team member’s personality isn’t suited to distributed teamwork, you’ll have a hard time monitoring that person’s productivity if you’re many miles away.
Don’t discount the kind of psychological support that office space can give a new business. It’s a big part of your corporate culture, and corporate culture is what attracts and retains top talent. Renting office space shows your commitment to the business and to the team. In turn, your team feels pride in the new venture, and feels loyalty toward you.
From your investors’ standpoint, a lease says you’re planning for the long term. From your clients’ or end users’ point of view, a physical address says you’re a real business. Further, the type and style of office space, whether it’s unbearably hip or middle-aged mainstream, reinforces your startup’s brand.
There are good arguments for distributed teams, and there are equally compelling reasons for procuring office space for your startup. Many startups are doing a little of both, with good results. Flexible hours and telecommuting are valuable recruitment tools; when you don’t have to have every team member in the office all the time, you can reduce your spatial requirements to something more budget-friendly. Imaginative space utilization can reduce your needs even further – adaptive furnishings let you reconfigure your workspace on the fly, changing from individual workstations to collective conference room at a moment’s notice. High-density mobile shelving increases your storage capacity and decreases your storage footprint. Some startups even join forces with complementary businesses to share back-office operations and office space.
With some creative input from design and storage experts, and some outside-the-box thinking, a startup can have the best of both worlds – a distributed team that also works face-to-face from time to time, without breaking the bank. Office space defines your brand, your corporate culture, and your productive operation. When design efficiency makes office space affordable, can any startup afford to be without it?
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