I got an email yesterday from a friend who moved to Michigan last year. His email asked about some website programming work we had been talking about. In his signature I noticed that he had a 416 area code phone number where he could be reached (416 is a Toronto area code). To me, this meant that his office space was in Toronto.

So instead of emailing him back, I decided to phone him at his Toronto office space and meet up for lunch. When I called the number on his email, I was standing at the elevators of my office space Toronto about to go out for lunch. The call was answered by a familiar voice and I also thought I heard that same voice answering the call not far from where I was standing… But I did not think about it.

As I was telling Rocco about the project I needed his help on, he told me that he had another call he had to take and that he would call me back at my Toronto office space in 15 minutes. So I went down to CafeOn4 to grab something for lunch and to see the smiley redheaded chef.

When I got back to my office, I had just sat down when Rocco called me back. He told me that he was still in Michigan and that his new employer had him servicing Canadian clients. They set up a Toronto Virtual office for him, with a local Toronto telephone number. His clients would call his Toronto phone number and the calls would be answered by a receptionist who would forward his calls to his Michigan cellphone.

So I asked him the name of the company and he told me the name of the company he was working for, but I wanted to know the name of the virtual office in Toronto. He told me that he did not deal with the virtual office company, but he knew that his office was on the 18th floor of 1 Yonge Street.  I started to laugh and he asked me what was so funny, I told him that was the same business centre where I had my Toronto office space.

Today while I was talking to Rocco again, he mentioned that he was talking with someone from his head office in New York and they told him they had found his Toronto virtual office because of the www.telsec.net website. In fact they also found about their other virtual office locations through the Telsec website.

Rocco told me that his company wanted him to come up to Toronto for a few days to meet with some of his clients who he would normally talk to over the phone or through a video conference. His company wanted to keep up the appearance that he had an actual Toronto office space, so they got him a Toronto daily office rental at Telsec. I told him that he would be better suited to rent one of the large Toronto boardrooms that had a 50-inch LCD screen for his presentations. The bonus part was that as a virtual office client at Telsec, he would get a better rate than a non-client would get.