Virtual office space. It starts with a mailbox. Then once a businesses’ address is established, maybe it will upgrade to a phone number. Then renting the conference room once in a while. And if the stars align, maybe, just maybe, the owner will decide to rent a permanent office and be a "dedicated space client" at New England’s first Intelligent Office franchise in Boston’s Financial District.
Wesley Walker, president of the Boston office a formerly in charge of operations and facilities management for Johnson & Johnson in the U.S. and Europe, recently opened the new shop. It offers business owners flexibility with short-term leases at a prime downtown address, 265 Franklin St.
Wesley Walker
Title: President, Intelligent Office; Boston
Age: 51
Experience: 14 years
A: I’m curious how you decide to go from facilities and operations management, overseeing construction projects, to opening a virtual office space company?
Q: [Laughs] It might not seem like a natural progression necessarily. My bachelor’s degree was in industrial engineering, and then later I picked up an MBA. I spent nearly my entire career in manufacturing operations management and in manufacturing facilities. By two or three years out of college, I was already in the medical device industry. I eventually accepted a position with Johnson & Johnson in Raynham in 1997. The last few years there I was getting really burned out on corporate life. I was on a heavy travel schedule because I was in charge of manufacturing and some operations in Europe, so I was in Europe for an enormous amount of time, almost a week a month for the last five years.
Q: And you left why?
A: [Laughs, again] Well, it’s not as glamorous as it might sound. I always tell my wife that the inside of a conference room looks the same no matter where you are. There’s really not a lot of glamour in that. So then Johnson & Johnson went through a big re-organization and the chance came for me to take a package and my exit. Starting my own business had been almost a lifelong dream of mine, but I never had the funds to do it. But over the years I saved some money, and that, combined with what I got when I left Johnson & Johnson, put me in a good position to start a business. I knew for a couple years that I would be leaving, so I spent a lot of time researching business models. The Intelligence Office franchise model really appealed to me. I’m not the creative type that would go out and invent my own software. But I can run a business model, I can follow a procedure. Being able to step into a proven business model had a lot of appeal to me. And it was a nice dovetail from my previous work, having a lot of facilities maintenance experience, construction management. So it was a simple progression, really.
Q: So what exactly is it that your new endeavor offers?
A: We have three main focus areas for services. First and foremost are communication services, mainly centered around telecommunications. We can provide an entire front-end for a small- or medium-sized business. We can take that $30,000 or $40,000 a year receptionist and turn it into just a few hundred dollars a month. And our people answering the phone cover a lot of different clients. They can do that because we have a computer-integrated phone system and customized software that operates on our own private cloud system. The software enables us to layout all the information about each one of our clients so when the phone rings for that client, a screen comes up and we can see everything we need to know about that client. If someone wants to know an email address, or who to speak with for a particular issue, anything a client wants to tell us we can store it in the computer and convey that to callers.
A client in another office, just as an example, is an attorney that specializes in DUIs. When his clients call in, they’re calling from jails or the side of the road or whatever predicament they’re in. And he only wants to do DUIs. He’s a high-volume guy focused on DUIs. Evidently it’s a big business. In the past when people called him, he and his paralegals would have to field those calls. And not all of them were really DUI cases, and he didn’t want those. It could take him 20 or 30 minutes sometimes to get to the real story from some of the people to find it wasn’t suitable for his practice, and that was billable time he was wasting.
So by using Intelligent Office, the ladies up front have a protocol form they take their callers through to determine if the callers are fit for this guy’s practice. And as a direct result of working with Intelligent Office, this guy says he has tripled his revenue just by freeing up all the time he used to spend with people that were not a fit for him. And so far, 50 percent of our business has been from the legal arena.
Five Outcomes Of A Recent Intelligent Office Work Survey:
- 61 percent of workers prefer more flexible work hours compared to the traditional 9-5.
- 45 percent believe technology remains an invaluable resource.
- 65 percent desire to work as an entrepreneur or independent executive.
- 66 percent desire a tablet/laptop computer for more mobility and freedom.
- 56 percent desire business/business casual dress codes, versus 22 percent who prefer casual dress.
