By Samuel Fromartz

Thomas J. Leonard is the ultimate virtual person. He does not live in a house or an apartment. He does not work in an office building. Instead, this 45-year-old semi-retired trainer of personal coaches lives and works in a 37-foot mobile home. He's been driving for the past six years. Last year alone, he visited 50 American cities.
Leonard can be reached by cell phone and e-mail, and also via his Website. His mail is delivered to a Mail Boxes Etc. in Florida and forwarded to wherever he finds himself. He pays all his bills online and has a full-time assistant whom he has met only three times. He still teaches coaching, holding forth in weekly conference calls on a mobile phone.

Last year, when Leonard needed to transcribe those telephone sessions and deliver them to his students, he turned to My Virtual Corp., a startup he had come across at a conference. Each week one of the company's "associates," a screened independent contractor, dials into Leonard's call, transcribes the session, and then e-mails him a transcript. He then forwards it to participants the next morning. Leonard says he hired My Virtual Corp. because he wanted a company sensitive to his style of operating. "I've never met them," says Leonard from his latest pit stop in Phoenix. "It's all managed by e-mail."

My Virtual Corp. is not based in an Airstream motor home cruising on the open road, but it could be. In fact, founder Merrily Orsini has set up a corporate structure that mirrors Leonard's life. She runs My Virtual Corp. from the basement of her suburban home outside Louisville, Ky., with a view of a wooded ravine out her window. Although the company has 135 active associates working on dozens of projects at any one time, Orsini has just one full-time employee, who also works at home. This employee oversees all the projects, which range from marketing studies to direct-mail copywriting, and from logo designing to creating employee-benefits packages for small companies--all produced by independent contractors. She also directs "team leaders," who in turn manage associates on a project deadline.

Until recently, Orsini had a second employee who headed up sales and marketing and set up plans for an outsourced sales team. Although Orsini does plan to fill her spot, she would prefer to keep her employee count as close to zero as she can.

After all, the 54-year-old Orsini's idea for this company, her second entrepreneurial endeavor, grew from a conclusion she had reached already about employees--namely, she wanted to avoid having any. She had more than 250 employees in her previous venture, an elder-care company that she started and sold after 15 years. "I felt like their mother," she complains. "I didn't want to feel like that anymore." Luckily for her, Orsini's non-maternal instincts happened to coincide with two distinct trends under way in the workplace--which, as her company demonstrates, is not an actual "place" anymore.

First, Orsini's two-year-old startup is capitalizing on outsourcing--that is, the trend among companies to farm out work that isn't at the core of their business. American companies spent an estimated $340 billion on outsourcing last year, up 15% from 1999, according to a survey by Dun & Bradstreet Corp., a provider of business information. The growth of outsourcing among small companies was even higher, at 25%.

Orsini has taken this model a step further by outsourcing all the work that has been outsourced to her. The core of her business isn't the work she provides--the copy-editing, word processing, graphic design, transcription services, and so on. Rather, it's the process by which the work gets done. Her specialty is finding the best candidates for a job, organizing them into virtual teams, and making sure they meet the deadlines and understand the scope of each project. She accomplishes this in part through a rigorous application and interview process with any prospective associate who applies via My Virtual Corp.'s Website. An initial series of questions on the Website is designed to find skilled people with a minimum of five years of work experience who have worked in niche markets.

"We don't look for people good at everything, because usually they're not good at anything," Orsini explains. If they pass that stage, she hires them to work on an internal project for My Virtual Corp. She wants to make sure they provide high-quality work, can do well in a virtual environment, and will meet deadlines. If they pass that hurdle, she will assign them to a client project. Orsini likes to think that she's hiring the top 5% of America's work force.

She can aspire to such lofty heights because she's hit the mother lode of the second big workplace trend--a professional's desire to work at home on his or her schedule. "I'm amazed at the quality of people we get who want to work this way--it's like a gold mine," Orsini says. Some are attracted to My Virtual Corp. because it allows them to focus on what they do best. Jen Cosgrove, a freelance advertising copywriter in Denver, confesses that she doesn't much like hustling for work or negotiating with clients she doesn't know. My Virtual Corp. acts as her go-between, allowing her to focus on writing ad copy.

While telecommuting might sound old hat, it's very much still growing. Cahners In-Stat Group, a high-tech research firm, estimates 24% of the U.S. work force, or 30 million workers, will do some telecommuting this year. It expects to see 40 million by 2004. Researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey and at the University of Connecticut also found 59% of all employees would work from home part of the week if they could. Telecommuters tend to be more highly educated and earn more money than the general population. While most work for companies, 19% are self-employed and 37% are professionals.

They are the people beating a path to Orsini's virtual door. As for the business model, remember that Orsini has to pay workers only once she has lined up a job. Although her Website has sucked up a few hundred thousand dollars in development costs, her overhead is relatively low. That isn't lost on Bill Lomicka, a Tucson, Ariz.-based angel investor and chairman of Coulter Ridge Capital, who has pumped $50,000 to $500,000 into 15 startups--My Virtual Corp. among them. "She has to crack a very-low-overhead nut," he says of Orsini. "It's not as if she has employees sitting around waiting for work."

Maximizing profits--or even making money--hasn't always been among Orsini's top concerns. For years, she says, she didn't take money out of her previous company because her inner social worker prevented her from doing so. "The business made money; I just gave it all back to the employees," she says.

Like the folks she now hires, Orsini's work life and personal life were deeply intertwined. She actually lived in an apartment above her company, and moved next door when the business expanded into her apartment. But in 1990, after attending a course on strategic planning, she decided she eventually wanted to sell her company, Elder Care Solutions. Her partner in the course, she recalls, would make her repeat over and over, "It's okay to make money. It's okay to make money." The upshot: She raised prices, didn't lose a customer, and unloaded the $3 million company six years later.

She stumbled onto her next venture when she hired a former Elder Care employee who lived in North Carolina to be her administrative assistant. The assistant provided mostly secretarial services, and they exchanged work by e-mail and talked on the phone. Almost immediately Orsini realized that others could use a virtual assistant for secretarial services. She formed My Virtual Corp. in 1998, hired a Website designer, and began offering the service on the Internet. By 1999 she had about 25 clients paying $25 an hour for services that included bookkeeping and word processing. Orsini, in turn, would pay the associates about $15 an hour for their work. The problem, though, was that it was a labor-intensive, low-margin business. "It was so quick and efficient, an associate would finish a project in 15 minutes," she said, billing $6.25 for the work. "I would get mad just looking at the billings."

By June 2000, she realized she was making some costly mistakes. She had retained human-resource managers who were screening out professionals in favor of people suited to become virtual personal assistants--since that was the early goal of the business. But Orsini feared the personal assistant service was becoming a commodity. "I started looking through these applications, and I couldn't believe the kind of people we were getting at the Website--and passing on," she says. She soon decided to target a higher-margin clientele in need of specialized business-support services.

She took on people like Janine R. Mura, who had worked as a product specialist in the medical business group at W.L. Gore & Associates, makers of Gore-Tex. Mura signed on with My Virtual Corp. to smooth out the fluctuations in her Louisville, Ky.-based consulting business. She liked the flexibility of the schedule, since she could spend time with her 3-year-old daughter. "I've been approached with full-time work but turned it down because I'm happy with this arrangement," says Mura, who has worked on marketing plans for My Virtual Corp. clients. "This keeps me in the game."

For My Virtual Corp. to do a good job, it needs not only to choose the right people, but also to coordinate all the various elements of the job and make sure everyone is meeting his or her benchmarks of success. Much of this management falls to Tammy Brown, the employee who oversees the company's teams of associates. The freelancers have specific duties and deadlines and report to a team leader, who in turn keeps Brown updated. Brown gets as many as 200 e-mails a day and relies on a project-management software program to keep everything flowing smoothly.

To find appropriate associates for a job, she searches through a centralized company database according to criteria she sets up--say, for a graphic designer skilled in PowerPoint presentations. But there is clearly a learning curve for this way of working. Anita Sirianni, a professional-sales coach based in Albuquerque, N.M., retained My Virtual Corp. for a number of projects, including sales-course presentations, marketing brochures, PowerPoint slides, graphic design and word processing. "In the beginning there were a lot of hiccups, work that was off-base and unusable, and that caused a lot of tension between me and MVC," she says.

Sirianni, originally referred to the company by a colleague, went through about 20 associates to get the current five-member team that produces the work she wants. Brown admits there were problems, but says they originated on both sides. The associates, for example, had a hard time writing speeches for Sirianni--a task that they eventually scrapped. Sirianni also complained about a marketing associate who wasn't up to her standards. Brown responded by getting her someone else. Now My Virtual Corp. has created a template that Sirianni can adapt to her various presentations.

But other complex projects have gone smoothly. Wellspring Personal Care, a home health-care business in Chicago, had to write a procedures manual to conform to state and federal law--a daunting prospect that could have taken a lot of time for an administrative staff of seven employees. "I looked at it and just said, "Ah man, I just don't need to deal with this,'" says owner Sheila McMackin, who knew Orsini from her previous elder-care company. She contracted My Virtual Corp. to put a team of human-resource specialists on the job. They served up drafts and revisions and vetted the results with a lawyer. "It was labor-intensive, but it was smooth," McMackin says. "I could barely keep ahead of them." Before they were through, My Virtual Corp. had also redesigned Wellspring's marketing brochure and logo.

Orsini has spent about $500,000 on the startup and reckons it will take perhaps another $100,000 before the company's Website and Intranet are really in shape. With a new-business focus that was only six months old in 2000, revenues should top $600,000 this year. "What they should be doing is providing these services to big companies on special projects," says Jean Cecil, a financial consultant at Salomon Smith Barney, who hired My Virtual Corp. for a marketing plan. "Merrily finds people who can really think and get a project done." (In fac

t, Orsini recently became a "preferred vendor" for a technology-services giant.)
Orsini's latest challenge is figuring out how to sell the company's services without narrowing the focus too much or confusing customers. Even Kelly Kitchen, who recently left as My Virtual Corp.'s vice president of sales and marketing, says some companies are wary about outsourcing. Others can't quite grasp the virtual aspect of My Virtual Corp. Why work with a company whose employees have never even met one another? In short, Orsini's biggest ongoing risk is that her stealth work force is simply far more extreme and progressive than the clients who will pay for their services--unlike the personal coach roaming the highways in his Airstream motor home. And despite the trends working in her favor, it still might take time for others to catch up with her employee-averse approach.

"I was 20 years before my time in elderly home care," Orsini admits. "I hope I'm not that far ahead of the curve on this one."