Closer Apart - Running A Virtual Business

Operating remotely does not come easy for most of us. Fundamentally at its core, business is a social activity. We talk, we discuss, we negotiate – we interact with each other. Humans are social animals, and we don’t live in isolation.

- Ong Xiang Hong

Nevertheless, economic forces have made global, distributed business a modern phenomenon. For example, a company developing a new mobile application may have the project lead in New York, the programmers in Prague, the QA team in Hong Kong, and the end-user in Kuala Lumpur. Such cosmopolitan collaboration is the norm among multinational corporations.

Now, the shift towards virtual business is accelerating, thanks to COVID-19. The enforced lockdown in many jurisdictions has created a laboratory for remote working, affecting millions of employees. In addition, the restrictions on air travel mean that virtual crossborder meetings will be the norm for some time to come.

And there are clear attractions to running a completely remote, distributed business – as well as its drawbacks. What are they, and how can this help define the next generation of SMEs?

WHAT IS A VIRTUAL BUSINESS?

Simply put, a virtual business is any business that conducts all or most of its business via the Internet. It may or may not have some kind of physical presence – such as a warehouse or an office – but no physical location that customers can visit.

While virtual businesses are united in their efforts to move work online, they all retain different levels of physical operations. In the most extreme example, all employees work virtually, and the “headquarters” is wherever the CEO lives. In less extreme examples, virtual businesses may still have a headquarters where employees work, or they may have a warehouse where employees prepare packages to ship to customers.