FedEx and GotVMail.com have entered into a partnership designed to serve the “go anywhere entrepreneur.”
So what exactly is the “go anywhere entrepreneur”?
The “go anywhere entrepreneur” describes a business owner who conducts business from anyplace he or she happens to be. Whether out and about visiting customers, on a sales call, buying supplies, evaluating outsourcing partners, or trying to carve out some thinking time in a coffeehouse — business doesn’t stop. Just because we are out of the office, doesn’t mean we can shut off from our business.
We need to be able to go anywhere and know that we can be productive. And we need to know that back at the office, wherever that happens to be, calls are being handled in our absence.
I love this phrase the “go anywhere entrepreneur” because it describes the trend of how so many of us work today.
As a trend spotter what I find so interesting are the new products and services some vendors are coming out with, designed specifically to address the new conditions under which we work.
GotVMail.com by its very nature is a product designed to let you work and function anywhere, independent of having to be at a specific place. It gives your phone an automated voice greeting to answer calls and forward them to appropriate voice mailboxes, dial-by-name directory, “follow me” call forwarding so that calls can be forwarded to your mobile phone , and the ability to get faxes and voicemails in your email box (so you have only one inbox to check). You can even set up separate voice mail boxes containing sales information about a particular product, with the ability to automatically send out a fax if the caller requests additional information — without a staff member needing to do a thing.
FedEx, with its acquisition a few years ago of Kinko’s copying centers, has created products and services which allow you to keep copies of your printed brochures and other documents online, to be accessed by employees anywhere. They offer other products designed to be accessible, no matter where you are.
What the partnership means is that these two companies are working together to come up with a pre-vetted selection of services that help make it easier for us to “go anywhere.” John Joyce, the Vice President of Business Development for GotVMail.com, told me that they screen potential partners very carefully, and choose only those that understand the needs of this “go anywhere entrepreneur”:
“We could partner with any number of different firms. But we look for the best of breed. Who is the best at serving the highly mobile entrepreneur of today? Who understands intuitively the “go anywhere entrepreneur”? Those are the kinds of companies we feel will best serve the needs of our customers and today’s entrepreneurs.”
I happen to use the GotVMail service myself to field inquiries for the Small Business Trends Radio show, and find it indispensable. And I also have done some other work with the folks at GotVMail, and find them to be very savvy about trends in how entrepreneurs and business owners operate today. So it is nice to see their partnership strategy come together.
