Has Mobility Become a Must?

You know you need a mobile work force when . . .

• You arrive at the office every day to a full voice mail box and 200 new e-mails.
• Your sales team's idea of regional turf is the 10 square miles around your office.
• Your employees start asking to take their desktops, keyboards, mice and monitors home with them over the weekends.
• The last trade show your company attended was back in 1998 at the Holiday Inn downtown.
• You pass up potential employees with killer resumes and experience because they live out of state.
• A freak snowstorm brings your company to a complete standstill until the roads thaw. It's the business equivalent of freezing your tongue to a light post.
• Your ideal clients live across the country--and you don't even know they exist.
• You return from a two-week vacation to discover that your three best employees left, your five biggest clients switched to the competition and your office was painted mauve.

This article was originally published in the April 2009 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: When Mobility Becomes a Must.