Dear Clients and Friends,
We have had a lot of inquiries regarding how we set up a remote office. Rather than just respond to a couple of people, we thought this would be appropriate to discuss and give to our clients. Four years ago, Geraci set out to really adopt technology and infrastructure to allow our people to work wherever they were in the world. We rapidly grasped that the world was moving from PCs and desktops to cell phones and mobility.
After hours of research and adjustments, we came down to use the following:
Technology
We adopted the following technology that forms the basis of our firm:
Ringcentral
We use RingCentral as the backbone of our communications hub. Wherever we were, we have access to our office phones as a result. As long as we have cell phone or Wi-Fi coverage, the RingCentral app will ring as if we were in the office. As a business that relies on on our phone system, this is absolutely mission critical for us.
Zoom.us
We have over 50 people that work at Geraci. in order for us to meet and move our priorities forward instead of being able to meet physically like we used to, we have adopted and harnessed Zoom.US as our virtual meeting room as well as our team meetings. The connectivity and interaction it is almost as good as being physically present with each other. Each month we have our own hands comma and yesterday was the first time we did it completely virtually. It went very well.
File Server
Our files are all on a remote server That can be accessed from anywhere by anyone. For those of you who have not already invested that infrastructure, you could use Dropbox or box.com as a great alternative to be instantly remote.
Slack
We message each other through an app called slack. It is free and accessible for desktop or on cell phones.
Putting it all together
Our meetings are calendered and put together just as they would in real life. The only difference is we get together over zoom. For any interaction between people, we could either directly call them, video chat or send instant messages via slack. Our banking, transactions, closings etc are all completed via the internet.
If you have any questions on how we did it, or any other needs at all feel free to reach out to us and we will help you any way we can. Stay healthy, stay safe, but most of all stay sane. This too shall pass and new opportunities will be created as a result. How you respond to them will pave the way for your future.
All the best,
Anthony Geraci
