Defined at last: Serviced, Virtual and Bedouin offices

The quality of comments to this blog continues to be much better than the posts! Thanks to MJ at Infurious for clearning up my serious confusion regarding the differences between Serviced Offices, Virtual Offices and Bedouin Workspaces. His full explanation deserves a bump up (below) and you can read the Infurious blog to learn more.

Serviced Office: it's an office. Many services provided. Relatively short term contracts but it's still a closed door office. Market leaders here would be Regus and the various enterprise parks in the North who cater for early-stage companies. With Mac-Sys we went from a 300 sq ft office to a 900 sq ft office within 4 months (and with a tripling of the costs) and finally settled on a 1500 sq ft office (for little more than we were paying for the 300...)

Virtual Office: no office, but you get a PA/telephone answering service, maildrop, office services, call forwarding and all for a small monthly fee. Many serviced offices offer this to their clients as well.

Bedouin Workspace: No office. Just a open plan workspace where the guy sitting next to you is not only not in your company, he's not even in your market. You have probably got all of the features of serviced and virtual offices but whereas the Serviced Office will generally give you workspace on a 3 month contract (wow, short!), the Bedouin office won't require a contract (it just may be cheaper to get one if you plan to use it a lot). Regus are responding to this need with some hot-desks in some of their centres but in Belfast it consists of a single sofa, beside a major thoroughfare, near the door (brrr!) in front of the tea, coffee and chocolate bar vending machines. Not the same thing at all!!!!

Our rationale for the Bedouin workspace is that you shouldn't need to pay for an office that you're not using 24x7 for papers and furniture storage."

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