Lesson Learned #1 - Business Address and Phone

I've recently finished reading a quality book on setting off on your own, entitled The 4 Hour Work Week, which is based on an interesting angle looking at entrepreneurship - creating enough "automatic" income so that one does not have to work much more than a few hours per week. The author, Tim Ferriss, has apparently lived an interesting (and short - young guy) life and has some good basic ideas on how to achieve more by being more focused and cutting out "the fat" in your worklife. I'm quite skeptical of some of his basic ideas as his own "4 hour work-week" sounds more like the result of good fortune, but he does offer some practical tips on how to sell your boss on working remotely, setting up automatic income tools and time saving tips for mundane tasks (via batching). Well worth a read. But for this post, let me focus on the topic of business contact addresses for startups and home based businesses which The 4 Hour Work Week touches on.

A lot of people will immediately think of just using their existing home address as well as personal cell phone number as the mail contact addresses for their new business. However, this may not be optimal if you foresee the possibility of receiving frequent calls about:

a) your new product
b) your customer service
c) calls from other businesses looking to sell your services.

This is the same for using your home address plus the fact that you may receive unwanted/unexpected visitors who are looking to visit the "store front." (The latter is a point that Tim Ferris points out rightly) Therefore, sometimes it makes sense to obtain a separate mailing address and business phone number.

On separate phone numbers I believe the best way to go is either to obtain a VOIP service like Vonage, or hire the services of a company that specializes in providing business phone receptionist services.

Vonage: is a good service if you plan on making outgoing calls and you have broadband internet service at home. Call forwarding and access to your messages online is very helpful but if you start a very small business, the services may be more than you need - particularly if you don't make a lot of outgoing calls. The monthly service cost may be high relative to your usage.
Evoicereceptionist: is also a good service and provides custom greetings as well as connections to custom extensions - pricing here is about $30 per month
Angel: is a more robust service and is one that is used by many medium to large sized companies. There services tend to cater to larger enterprises and may not be the most cost effective.
Onebox: Very simple to use, and low cost ($13 per month) with custom greeting, fax option and emailed messages.

From these choices and from the research I put in to look around, I felt that Onebox was the service that best fit my operations as it had what I wanted (custom greeting, autoforwarding to email, fax) and for a great price ($12.95 per month - includes Toll Free number).

As for a business mailing address, the options are to go with a USPS post office box, or use the services of an independent company. For my purposes, the fastest option was to set up a USPS box and alter the address in business correspondence to customers so that instead of the address appearing as "PO Box 212, Chicago, IL 44411", the address would incorporate the Post Office's address (say for example it as 12 Main St): "12 Main St., Unit #212, Chicago, IL 44411". This has worked great for us. Just note to obtain a business post office address, you need to identification proving you own or are authorized by the business.