- Popular books are that business owners tend to pick up.
One is "The E Myth" around building systems
in your business.
So you can extricate yourself from the business.
Another one is "The 4-Hour Work Week" by Tim Ferriss
which is another really popular book
about creating a lifestyle that you desire.
And I guess the most important thing for me to share
with you right now is for you to check
in with why did you actually get into business?
You know, why did you choose to be a business owner?
Why did you choose to, you know manage
and run things yourself?
You know, for some people that have a chip
on their shoulder about their parents or the system
or the bully at school or whatever it is.
For others it's just a natural progression
in your chosen profession to start as a sole operator.
And then some people have the ambition
to grow something into a business.
So it's not them exchanging their time
for money all the time.
But everything starts with you.
And so I would say, if you were to dream, you know
what is the dream life for yourself?
What is the dream life for you?
And really give yourself permission
to actually have that life.
Because you need to first do that
before we can actually go into the practicals
of then moving your business to a remote work business.
The reality now is that we have very powerful tools
to be able to work anywhere from any device.
And if you're a member of our group
the Google Workspace Community,
where this video is live
you would know all about Google Workspace and its benefits.
And so I don't need to pitch or sell you on that.
What I will say though, is most businesses
or many businesses that we work with
who are already utilizing Google workspace
formerly G suite, are not quite using it
to the best of their ability.
And what I mean by that is there are a lot
of tools and features and options inside
of Google workspace, which are very powerful
but not everyone kind of knows that they exist.
And so our business's whole aim
is to not only help businesses discover Google Workspace
but once someone's actually had Google Workspace implemented
in their business, we wanna help you get the most
out of your investment so that you're actually using all
of the tools to the best of their ability.
And they are supporting your business strategy.
Now, not only that, but we wanna help you
with remote work tools that are plugging
into your Google Workspace account.
So then, and I'm gonna talk a little bit about those.
So I won't spoil that one just yet.
So we have these amazing tools in front of us right now.
It's time that we actually started using them.
And businesses, when they go
from being a non remote business
to an actual remote business,
it goes through a number of different stages.
And so these tools are gonna enable us
to move along the journey of a remote business.
So this is a scale put together
by a company called Buffer,
which is a social media company.
But you know, very public about their remoteness business.
They blog about how they all work remotely
from different locations.
And you'll see here
from one end of the spectrum being completely office-based
everyone works in one place.
I don't think they kind of exist right now after COVID.
And number five, being completely distributed
with people, you know basically no mattering
at all around the world.
And as I said I don't want you guys to try
and get to like level five.
That's not the goal here.
The goal here is hopefully we can inspire
and support you to move at least one step to the right.
To get a little bit more remote
and a little bit more flexible.
But not only is this about your team being flexible.
This is about you being flexible as the business owner.
Now interestingly, a couple
of you know really quite large businesses
that have gone not quite completely remote
but at least remote in a pretty substantial way.
One is it Atlassian.
They've got thousands of employees all over the world.
Their largest office out of,
I think they've got eight offices worldwide.
Their largest office is Sydney.
Second largest office is San Francisco.
Third largest office by number of people
is their remote workforce.
And so a multi multi-billion dollar company,
a huge huge Australian success story in the tech space.
Don't worry if you don't know about them
because they're, they create tools for developers
and tools for IT businesses.
And so, you know, less relevant
to most of the general public.
But another pretty cool example here is Github.
This one is over a hundred staff.
Primarily working remotely and Microsoft bought them
for I don't know, how many tens of billions
of dollars it was.
It was ridiculous amounts of money.
And so there's also during COVID been a list compiled
of all of the businesses who have created a permanent work
from home option for their staff after COVID.
And I believe Google has also just been added
to this list as well, if they weren't already.
But yeah, you can see
that large corporates
are now actually taking advantage of this.
And are interestingly if you're based in Australia
I know for a fact that ANZ bank actually have most
of their call center employees are working from home.
So they are primarily in the Melbourne region.
I don't know why, but all of their employees who are
in the call center actually work from home.
So they have a VoIP phone sitting on their desk
or it may also be on their computer.
And then they have a quiet space and they work from home,
which is pretty damn groovy.
So I'm interested to know if you knew about any of those
or if there any other companies that you know
that are working remotely.
You might be interested to pop those up,
to pop those down in the comments.
Tools that you'll need to work in the cloud
and tools for you to work location independently.
So these are really gonna be the tricks
of the trade for you to make sure
that you can work from wherever you are.
Number one is obviously Google Workspace.
This is the foundational tool that allows us
to do everything that we need to do.
If you're inside our group,
if you're watching the live stream, you know all about this.
And if you're on our YouTube channel,
then you know possibly a little bit about Google Workspace.
But this is a collection of business tools
that allow you to get everything done.
Now, one of the things that we find is many businesses
as they're going through their growth scale
and they're going through the different stages
of business growth,
they start to run into subscription fatigue.
And that particularly happens around businesses
that are in growth stage.
When you're a startup, business owners
very often have bright, shiny object syndrome.
And they're signing up for different million,
a million different apps.
They've got Zoom over here, they've got Skype over there.
They've got Slack for their instant messaging.
They've got all these different tools
from different vendors and that kinda works
when you're, you know, solopreneur
and you're just excited and kinda getting started.
But once you hit growth mode, you start to run into problems
in that you need to have a consistent technology set
up across all of your team.
So that when you're onboarding staff
it's nice and easy and efficient.
But secondly, you don't wanna like break the bank
with a million different 10 or 20
or $30 month subscriptions for each one
of your staff members, as you start to grow the team.
Because that can get very darn expensive.
And so what we really love about Google Workspace
is as Google says, "It's all your tools
and all your work in one place."
Amazing mail, calendar, meetings, file storage, documents,
and yes while they don't have every single bell and whistle
and button that Microsoft have in their documents.
Well, Google get you 90% of the way there.
Yes, Google Chat doesn't have every single feature
that Slack has, but it'll get you 90% of the way there.
Google Meet does not have every single feature that Zoom has
but it will get you now 95% of the way there
because boy have Google put some updates
into Google Meet this year.
And it feels like every single week
there's more updates coming out.
Some of which I will talk about in just a second.
And so one of the things that I really love about
what Google has been putting their effort into
is this concept of everything in one place.
And the new Google layout inside of Gmail allows you
to access your calendar, allows you to access your chat.
You can access Google Voice if you're outside Australia
and have access to that.
And you can see here on the right-hand column
we've got all the different areas
of the business that we need to get access to.
Even things like Google Keep, you know.
Like I see business owners trying to be productive
but they're still using Evernote.
And, you know Google Keep will do 95%
of what Evernote will do.
You know, why would you use the non Google tools
when I not only do you have all the Google tools
for free as part of your subscription to workspace?
You know, it's also just less mental bandwidth
when you have less things to think about.
And you know, I personally, I'm a minimalist at heart
and that doesn't mean that I, you know sit
in a empty room by myself and meditate
or twiddle my thumbs all day.
What it actually means
is I do less of the complicated things
so I have more time for the things that I love.
And I've, you know over an extreme period of time
and much, you know coaching and training
and personal intention.
I've got my workday down to three days a week.
You know, and it's pretty chill.
Now, of course I had to build a business
that was able to impart work without me for that.
But having four day weekends is a result
of a continued effort in lifestyle design
and building good systems and practices inside the business
which is what we aim to teach you guys.
So if you're not yet a member of Genius Academy
we've got amazing, amazing content in there
and how we run our remote teams, how we hire staff
in the Philippines, how we grow and, you know build
a remote company completely, you know
without an office and completely remotely
and everyone working from home.
And of course we have other videos on our channel.
If you're interested in checking those out.
There's another feature here that it's coming very soon.
If it's not yet dropped in for you.
And that is when you're working on a presentation.
Being able to have a Google Meet running concurrently there
in the side panel.
And we often find that this is the case inside IT juniors.
So all of our meetings run internally
with Google Meet because, you know
it's just the easiest thing for us.
When we create a calendar event automatically
it's gonna drop in a Google Meet.
And when we're collaborating on a document
like for example, half an hour before this live.
We're putting the final touches on our slides
myself and my marketing manager,
what we will do is we'll actually be innovating.
And then inside that meeting, we will be working
on a document together and collaborating on that document.
And, you know, for anyone who's still using Microsoft Word
for that proposal document, just because I like the way
that the background images can use a gradient
and you can't do that inside of Google
or, you know whatever your excuse is,
I would implore you to consider how much more work
could you get done if you were delegating the task
of putting the proposal together
to somebody else that wasn't you
and then you were just reviewing it on a video call.
It's the difference between doing something yourself
for half an hour, or reviewing someone else's work
for five or 10 minutes.
And if you can get three X on your time just
from changing a document format
and, you know learning a slightly different way of working
then I'd strongly recommend you consider that,
because that's a pretty good return on your investment.
Another great thing that Google is really good
at is obviously search.
And so this is a little stat here.
That 75% of workers believe they miss out
on important information.
And that's, I think that's a little bit obtruse,
maybe a little bit vague
about what they're actually talking about here.
But what that kinda makes me think about
is two great tools inside of Google Workspace.
One, Google Cloud Search.
And so if you've not used that before
it's at https://www.cloudsearch.google.com.
And cloud search will let you actually see all the documents
and basically everything in your business
from one search panel.
So you can search across your email, documents,
Google Keep notes, Google sites, basically everything
within your Google Workspace account
is searchable from right within here inside of cloud search.
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