One of the neat things about talking to microbusiness owners is the way you can sometimes see the future happening, right now, through their eyes — fairly often simply because of the ways in which they structure their businesses.

My conversation with Gayle Buske was a lot like that.

Gayle and her husband, Jim, are the co-founders and owners of Team Double-Click, Inc., a nonemployer virtual staffing agency headquartered in the tiny town of Ouray, Colorado.

In many ways, Team Double-Click might look suspiciously like a very large business instead of a nonemployer but, as they say, looks can be deceiving. Each of the company’s thirty core staff members are independent contractors, as a all of the virtual assistants the agency places with other companies.

In short, and without creating a single job as that terminology is bandied about in Washington, Team Double-Click single-handedly creates work for 180 independent contractors. And this particular nonemployer business is one of those that doesn’t show up in Census Bureau statistics, grossing just over $1.5 million a year.

All of which is, I think, endlessly cool; I’m sure by now you know how I feel about myth-busting.

The Buskes more or less fell into this extremely successful venture but a part of the secret of their success is almost certainly the fact that they were veteran small business owners when they did. In 2000, Gayle says, she had grown tired of the couple’s trucking business and launched into a bit of graphic and web design for a change of pace.

A couple of years later, in the process of working up a bid for a magazine production job, she put an ad online for subcontractors to help her meet the requirements of the project. “We got about 500 resumes back. It was just amazing, we had grocery bags just full of resumes sitting on our kitchen floor,” Gayle recalls.

From the response, she and her husband realized how many talented people there are out there who, for one reason and another, wanted to work from home. Recognizing an opportunity, they decided to close the trucking business and try to market those people’s skills.

Finding people with skills to market has never been a problem for Team Double-Click; in addition to the 150 independent contractors they currently have on tap, there are another 24,000 individuals who have not yet been interviewed and screened but who want to work from home badly enough to sign up.

Instead, one of the company’s primary challenges over the last four years has been educating businesses about the virtues of virtual assistants. Early on, sales meetings could last anywhere up to two hours as Gayle explained how it all worked and reassured skittish business owners who were unsure about the whole virtual office concept.

She says those sales calls have gotten a lot shorter more recently, as the virtual office has taken root in the marketplace. That is not to say that “everybody’s doing it these days, dearie,” but it does mean that the term doesn’t necessarily draw the sort of blank stare that it did even five years ago.

As one might expect from any kind of staffing agency, many of Gayle’s biggest business issues have to do with – well – personnel. She and her husband were very careful in setting up the agency in order to keep the ‘independent contractor versus employee’ bugaboo at bay and even now they have to be careful about keeping internal rulemaking to a minimum to avoid crossing that line.

At the same time, they also make a point of informing their independent contractors of their tax obligations even as they carefully avoid giving them enough information to be accused later of proffering tax advice without a license. Frankly, between that and the thought of all those 1099 forms they have to generate, my eyes cross just thinking about it.

But this company, being a prime example of the wave of the future, is by its very existence a good argument for the folks in Washington to get their collective act together on the independent contractor tax classification issue.

None of this trips off the lips of Gayle Buske if you ask her to name her biggest business headache, though. She and her husband have constructed systems to handle the tax-related paperwork and she says it all runs pretty smoothly at this point. Virtual assistant turnover is the biggest thorn on her rose bush right now.

Generally speaking, Gayle says, any member of her pool of virtual assistants can make a decent living through her placements. Some are not dependent on their earnings as their primary income and only want to work part time. Others willingly put in anywhere from forty to seventy hours per week. They earn between $10 and $40 per hour, depending on the skill set required for the job.

Some of them are older but most are young women with young families and the younger they are, the less likely they are to have a traditional view of employment. Gayle cites an article she read recently that noted that the average job tenure for a member of Generation Y is eighteen months.

“People just don’t stick anymore, so you’re going to have that turnover and people moving on anyway,” she told me. “It’s a huge challenge for us because our clients still have that nostalgia, they still have that expectation that someone’s going to stay there at least for five or ten years.”

The Buskes have devised a set of strategies to try to deal with that challenge. They are working to educate their clients not to expect such long term relationships from virtual assistants. And they have developed a rigorous screening process to weed out applicants who may not be able to function well in a less structured, unsupervised and isolated work environment.

In spite of the ever-present prospect of independent contractor turnover, the notion that her company’s growth may someday prompt Team Double-Click to hire full time employees makes Gayle laugh.

“We will never hire employees,” she says. “There’s just no reason to, with all the technologies around, and more and more coming on the market. There’s no reason why you have to be in the same office anymore. It’s just cool.”

It’s more that just cool. It’s tomorrow, unfolding before our very eyes — at least, for those of us who are paying attention.