Virtual office provider eyes doubling clients by 2016
Pacific Stronghold, which operates a virtual office business it calls OfficeFirst, has set aside an investment budget of Bt20 million to develop its information-technology system so it can double the number of clients to 4,000 by next year.
This will boost its revenue from the Bt24 million it posted last year to Bt400 million in 2016, chief executive officer Chatchawan Pisitpaisankun, 48, said in an interview with The Nation.
Chatchawan established Pacific Stronghold in 2006 as a rental-office business. In 2013, he set up OfficeFirst, a virtual office system.
He started his business after resigning from Citibank.
"We decided to develop a virtual office three years ago when seeing strong demand from small and medium-sized enterprises that needed offices in the central business districts but could not afford the rent. This inspired us to set up a 900-square-metre virtual office at the Empire Tower," he said.
He said the virtual office provides services including call centres, meeting room, videoconferencing, teleconferencing and a postal service. SMEs can use the address of the Empire Tower office as their own when contacting their customers, and also use the telephone number for their customers to contact them.
"We developed our teleconferencing system to transfer the calls from SMEs’ customers to the SMEs directly even though they are not physically in the office. This is how the virtual office can serve their customers while also cutting their operating costs," he said.
Pacific Stronghold now has 2,000 OfficeFirst clients that generate annual revenue of about Bt7.2 million, or 30 per cent of its total revenue of Bt24 million, with the remaining Bt16.8 million coming the rental of its 30 physical office units.
The company aims to have 4,000 OfficeFirst clients by next year, and it is investing Bt20 million to expand its virtual office space from 900sqm to 1,500sqm this year. This should boost its total revenue to Bt400 million next year, up to 70 per cent of which will come from the virtual office, and the rest from physical office rental fees.
"We are confident that the demand for virtual offices will grow strongly as the number of young entrepreneurs rises. Some of these new businesses are run by only one or two persons, so they need a virtual office. A virtual office can also reduce their operating costs, as we charge only Bt2,400 per month," he said.
