Have you ever walked into a mall, perhaps looking for something specific or maybe even browsing around before you make your way to the food court to get your fill and then you walk past a shop that seems like it doesn’t get much action in terms of buying-customers? Yes, I’m talking about those shops, some of which are really tiny, exclusively selling items such as socks and the likes and it’s always more of the same really when you visit the mall every other time — there’s no action and the shopkeeper seems to be bored with the credit card reader looking like it’s still brand new straight out the box.
Well, the fact that this type of store survives having to pay the expensive rent that comes with its location in a high-end mall shouldn’t be raising suspicions that they might be pushing some illegal dealings under the table. No, there is rather quite a valuable lesson in modern day business to be learned here.
The same applies to expensive offices which are registered to a company in a high-end business district — perhaps they could be involved in illegal dealings, but there is indeed a less cynical explanation for that.
In the case of a company being registered to a prestigious high-end business address such as the likes of Paul Street in London, that is likely to be a virtual office wherein you probably wouldn’t find the usual business tools like merchant services credit card machines and the likes. What you would probably rather find are a bunch of post boxes, a front-office admin worker and office equipment such as photocopiers, fax machines, computers, telephones, scanners and office stationery.
The admin worker pretty much fronts as the personal assistant for a number of companies who are registered to that office on the basis of it serving as a virtual office, so the admin worker handles tasks such as receiving business documents, scanning them and then sending them off to the various business operators who otherwise could never afford to rent physical office space at such a high-end location.
Going back to the mall example, although the shopkeepers make use of some point of sales solutions from the likes of MerchantAccountSolutions.com to process the occasional physical sale that does take place, the real business with these kinds of outlets resides online in that they likely operate e-commerce stores to shadow the physical business.
So operating a shadow e-commerce store along with perhaps renting virtual office space and its associated services is how you can afford expensive rent in a high-end business district. Perception is indeed what counts in business.
