Headhunter Shirley Lee's business card lists an office at Eton Tower in Causeway Bay, but anyone paying an unscheduled visit won't find her there. The MauI Business Centre, which occupies the premises, merely provides a 'virtual office' service for clients.
Lee works from home and the thousands of dollars she has saved each month on rent and secretarial support has helped keep her business afloat during the downturn. 'When the recession hit, we really needed to cut costs. So we stopped paying rent and switched to a virtual office,' she says.
For an HK$800 monthly fee, Lee gets the use of a downtown address instead of a cheap Kwai Fong space for her correspondence, a trilingual receptionist who fields calls and sorts mail, notifying her of bank statements and government letters which may require urgent responses. And when she needs to host a meeting, Lee can book a state-of-the-art meeting room for a few hundred dollars more.
'The service is about the same as a physical office, but I am saving thousands of dollars a month,' she says.
Managers seeking to avoid the hassle and costs of running full-facilities offices often take small spaces at business centres. Amid economic uncertainty, many find even this unnecessary and turn to virtual office providers such as MauI.
Uptake at smaller centres has grown by about 10 per cent, with established companies, particularly those with A or B-grade office addresses, recording bigger increases. At The Executive Centre, for example, virtual office business has grown 50 per cent this year, with 500 new accounts, bringing its total in Hong Kong to 1,500. MauI booked about 50 new clients this year, registering a 33 per cent rise.