When you are starting out in business, you may not have the resources to warrant renting an office at all, let alone the funds to use an office in a prestigious address in a city like London. However, the address you use for your business has a significant impact on your customers’ impression of how successful and credible you are.
If you operate a business where people need to send things to you regularly, or you simply want an impressive address to use as the mailing address on your website, you can actually achieve this without spending big money on office space by using a mail forwarding service.
What is a mail forwarding service?
Much like the ‘PO Boxes’ of old, a mail forwarding service allows you to use a different address to your true one, and still receive your mail. This can be a very good idea if you run your start up business from home but do not want to publicise your home address (and nobody really wants to advertise where they and their family live on the internet!).
Mail that is sent to that address is forwarded on to you so that you can receive it with only the company who operate your mail forwarding actually needing to know your home address. Of course, mail forwarding is not only useful when you want to keep your living address a secret – it can also be used to help your business look more credible and successful.
Using a London address
If you do have an office and are happy to advertise where it is, there still may be a good reason to use a mail forwarding service – it can position you in a more prestigious or well known location. If you deal with clients all over the world, an address in a small town in the UK that they may never have heard of has way less impact on how they see you as a brand than an address in London.
Using a mail forwarding London company can therefore make you appear to be based at the heart of UK business in a city known the world over, rather than say, Worksop or Bracknell. This can work as a device for making your company seem bigger too – even clients who have visited your site and live locally will see your address and assume you have a London HQ.
Prestige
Even within London, different post codes give a different impression. If you are actually based in Croydon, it can be worth using a mail forwarding service that lets you use a more prestigious address in business terms with an EC1 post code. Everybody is aware of how expensive office space is in the centre of London, so this gives a sense of success to your business that your real address may not.
If you want the benefits of a swanky address without having to actually shell out for one, mail forwarding can be a great way to achieve it. It can also help you keep your address secure when you run a business from home.