Serviced Offices have become a big part of the global movement towards agile and flexible work. They provide furnished and fully-equipped office space that can be rented on a pay-as-you-go basis, enabling businesses to run a workforce quickly and cost-effectively in any city they desire a presence in giving them the needed flexibility in today’s business space.

Serviced offices provide the office space you need, but without the troubles of having to set it up and equip it with utilities, as these offices are already furnished and fully-equipped. There is also no need to sign a long-term lease as you would for a traditional office, because serviced offices are rented on a pay-as-you-go basis; and furthermore, they are able to service your business with the essential amenities it needs, which you would have otherwise had to arrange for yourself.

A serviced office will thus save you the costs of maintenance, facilities, furnishings, and the installation of equipment requisite for a conventional office. Not only are serviced offices fully set up from the start but they also offer monthly fees that are transparent, which makes it easy for you to scale your business up or down whenever you may need to.

In being designed to serve the increasing need for flexibility in today’s business world, serviced offices provide several advantages over conventional ones—of which the main ones are:

Flexible Leases

A major and obvious benefit of a serviced office is that it bypasses the conventional office arrangement of a long-term lease—which could be anything from a minimum of one year to ten years.

The significance of evading this long-term commitment is that it affords your business room to grow or shrink if and when it needs to—which of course would be difficult if not impossible to do whilst on a long-term lease. By contrast, the monthly agreements typically offered by serviced offices gives your business the flexibility needed to adapt quickly to changes in economical or logistical circumstance.

Freedom of Movement

An added benefit of the flexible leases offered by serviced offices is the ability to promptly discontinue your presence at one office and immediately move to a different one. This flexibility thus makes it possible for you to try out a variety of offices at different locations, which can be especially advantageous for a business based on frequent interaction with its clients, i.e. in that such a business will be able to test-out a few different office locations in order to find the most convenient one for client interaction.

In other words, you can stay at one location for a while; then spend a while at a different location in order to compare the two experiences—from which the best location for your business will have made itself evident.

Space and Amenities to Measure

In most cases, a company will need to use amenities such as conference rooms; but only every so often. Traditionally, a business would have to acquire and maintain that space regardless of how often it’s used. However with a serviced office, a variety of spaces can be booked to use for a small fee (usually by an hourly rate), anytime they’re needed.

This benefit also applies to the saving of time and investment traditionally needed to buy all the office furniture, equipment, supplies, amenities and utilities: with a serviced office, the office space and amenities your business needs is already fully supplied, allowing you and your workforce to simply move in and focus on your work immediately.

Also, a serviced office will generally offer your business the most modern resources – such as the equipment needed to teleconference; and printers of high quality – which serve to enhance the productivity of your workforce, including the minimization of downtime caused by technical problems.

Overheads Kept to a Minimum

In addition to the suitability and convenience of having just the space and amenities your business needs, a major benefit of this arrangement is that your overheads will be far lower than if you acquired your own office on a long-term lease. Thus regardless of the financial position your business happens to be in during one time or another, you will comfortably be able to maintain a professional and productive workspace that’s accessible to both your employees and clients.

Maintenance is No Longer a Concern

Ordinarily being a considerable responsibility and expense of any business, the necessary time and money involved in the ongoing maintenance of your office – be it by hiring a professional or allocating the task to your own staff – is entirely saved by a serviced office: as maintenance is included in your monthly agreement, you are totally free from any time or worry concerning it.

Everything a Business Needs

All in all, a serviced office is a flexible business model that allows businesses to provide their employees and clients with the space and amenities they require, whilst offering all the facilities they might need for the continuously smooth running of their business.

Furthermore, the flexibility of serviced offices is able to cater for a variety of businesses, such as start-ups and entrepreneurs; growing small businesses; and project-based teams requiring fully-equipped offices at particular locations on short-term basis (i.e. while fulfilling contracts).

Having established itself in the 1980s and continuing to grow in presence since then, the Serviced Office is now conquering the landscape of the office space industry by adapting swiftly to the needs of modern businesses: indeed, the numerous and immense advantages of serviced offices have created a trend towards an eventual superseding of the traditional office lease.

For more information on serviced offices, visit our best Serviced Office shopping guide.

Photo: Austin Distel