- Hey guys, it's Pete here.
And I just reviewed the recording
and the backup recording for the following content.
Unfortunately, it is like completely junky in the video.
The audio is fine, but the video is not great at all.
The next few videos are not gonna be awesome
on the video side of things.
You'll definitely be able to see the slides,
but my video is a little bit jumpy.
The audio is obviously still good
and we're not gonna rerecord it.
But check these out for all of the latest
on getting your business and your team connected.
Hey what's up guys Pete Moriarty here.
Great to be here with you presenting location independent
working with Google Workspace.
So in this session,
we're gonna be talking about location independent working,
and what this is all about
is building more flexibility in your business
and more flexibility in your life.
Us as a business, itGenius,
we've been around for over 12 years now
and we are really all about helping
to liberate small business owners to be more successful,
to play a bigger game
and to help you succeed in your business.
Now, not only succeed in your business,
but hopefully succeed in your life as well.
Because I really believe
that once we have technology on our side,
then it can be used as a tool to enrich our life
rather than something
that we feel like we have to be a slave to.
We've seen all too many business owners
who outsource the responsibility
and abdicate the responsibility
of technology in their business to someone else.
And I get it. I understand,
if you're not someone who's grown up with technology,
you may just find it easier
to kind of like make it someone else's problem.
It's just like the finances in your business
or the legals in your business,
if you abdicate and leave that to someone else
without taking responsibility yourself,
sooner or later it's gonna bite you in the bum.
Now with technology that might mean
that you get attacked by CryptoLocker virus
and you experienced data loss in the business.
It may mean that you have someone hack into your accounts
and steal financial information.
It might mean that employee leaves the business
or a contractor leaves the business
and mistakenly deletes data on their way out.
And we see these things happen all the time, unfortunately.
And so what our business is all about
is about not only assisting businesses
as a consultant with their technology
but we also really believe
in educating our customers as well.
We primarily work with the Google Workspace ecosystem
and the collection of Google's tools
and ad-ons and partners for those Google tools as well.
But we also try
and consult just a little bit in the business realm as well,
but like we're technology consultants.
And if we can help you out with your business,
then that's ideal.
Now we grew and scaled our business.
We've now got over 42, 43 people in the business.
I think we've nearly doubled just in the last year
or we've been going through a tremendous amount of growth.
But as I said, we've been going for 12 years now.
So the business has been successful over time.
And we've been able to do that in part
because of good technology strategy
but with good technology fueling our business strategy.
And that's really where we believe
that the symbiosis
of business and technology come together
is when you have a solid business strategy
and you shape and use and make use of technology tools
around your business strategy.
That's what we believe help businesses to be successful.
And we see some pretty common journeys
as businesses grow and evolve
from a startup, literally like an idea
to a business that's starting to employ a couple of people
to something that's then in growth mode,
growth mode is where
you're kind of working out the business model
and things are growing and scaling as businesses growing up.
And then when you get to scale mode
or when you graduate to scale mode,
that's really when the business
has turned into a real business, we call it.
It's then a performance business
and the founder of the business
can then kind of like step back,
have some more time freedom for themselves.
And at that point then the business
will continue to grow
if it's managed and looked after well,
but really the hard yards are done
once you get to the scale stage of a business.
Now it's interesting that in Australia,
I think 97.5% or maybe even 98.5% of all businesses
actually never make it out of the growth stage.
And that's a really sad statistic
because most businesses in that stage
are still very resource heavy on the founder.
The owner of the business
is working in the business every day.
They're the ones dealing with all the problems
and they're the ones
that are basically the person to call on.
When when a customer is upset,
they're basically constantly going to the business owner.
And so we wanna try and help businesses graduate basically
out of that mode, out of that growth mode
and get them to scale mode.
And when we can get them to scale mode,
that means that they've got enough people in the business,
and it's literally about them amount of people.
They've got enough people in the business,
then they can have like a little bit of a management layer,
they can have some additional strategic execution
that's not all the business owner doing it all.
But effectively they get a lot more of the time freedom back
because the business owner is taking hats off
and giving those hats to the other team members.
Does that mean that you quit from the business?
No, not necessarily.
But what it does mean is that you get to do
what you probably got into business for,
which has have a bit more freedom.
And I'm very thankful myself,
thanks to the hard work of myself
and also the hard work of my team and our partners
and everyone who's been a part of the journey at itGenius,
I'm in that position now.
I'm able to travel when I like,
I can take time off when I like.
The emergencies that come up in the business
are mostly handled by our very competent management team.
And for me, it allows me to actually step back
and have more kind of peak time in my life
which is really awesome.
But also aside from that, I'm able to serve the business
and serve my team at a higher level
and in a more purposeful level
because I'm able to help
just with the strategy in the business,
and really bring the magic of my vision
as the founder of the business
to actually help out with that.
That's really what our aim is at itGenius.
Obviously we can't help you with your finances.
We can't help you with your marketing,
but what we can do
is we can help you with the technology strategy.
So whatever your business strategy is,
we wanna help you with the technology strategy,
and we want to help graduate you
from a launch to a startup or a startup to a growth
or wherever you are now into a scale company.
And so you the founder art
can have a much better relationship with your business
and hopefully with your life as well.
Now we are in a remote work reality.
COVID has hit and it is thrown everyone onto Zoom
and onto Google Meet
or whatever your preferred video meeting tool of choice is.
And I think by now everyone's pretty sick
of online meetings,
and the key problem with everyone switching to remote
or online work during COVID
is that most people just open up Zoom
and continue to work exactly the same way
that they were working.
No doubt that people are getting meeting fatigue,
people are having all kinds of productivity issues,
people are having all kinds of mental health issues as well,
all kinds of problems that are starting to pop up now
because in my opinion, people are not really using
the tools as they're designed to be used,
and maybe there's just a lack of competency
around how to actually run a business remotely.
Our business has been completely remote
for over six years now.
And so everyone works at home
or they can work from different locations.
I personally happen to travel a lot
and that gives us a lot of flexibility in how we work
and a lot of flexibility in how we deliver
to our customers as well.
Previously, when we grew and started the business,
we were based just in Sydney
and we could only really serve as customers in Sydney.
But as my vision kind of expanded, I thought, well,
what would we have to do to position ourselves
to service businesses right across Australia?
And we ended up setting a remote team
and we were able then
to re-engineer our products and services
so we can deliver remotely.
And not only do we deliver to customers in Australia
but now all around the world which is pretty darn exciting.
And so what I want to share with you,
and we go into depth in this inside Genius Academy,
and Genius Academy is accessible
just for our concierge subscribers.
And so if you're interested in
getting access to a deeper course on this work,
I think go and check out our concierge program
on our website itGenius.com.
But what I want to share a little bit with you guys
is how do you work remotely?
How do you actually get productive work done?
And I'm gonna share
a little bit about location independence,
because that's certainly a part of it.
But also I want to share a little bit about
what are the best practices
with teams working remotely
and what's been successful for us.
I haven't written the book on remote work
and to be honest,
it's pretty new for companies to be completely remote
and to not have an office.
But what I tend to do
is just share kind of what's working for us
over many years of trying to run
and grow a successful business with a remote team.
And hopefully those are useful for you.
So before I jump into those tips,
I want you to think and reflect for a second
and ask yourself a question.
If I could work from anywhere in the world,
where would I work from?
If I could make my office
anywhere on mother earth, the planet,
where would I make my office?
And if you're on the live stream,
drop that down in the comments now,
if you're watching this, I'd love to know in the comments
where you would like to work from,
if you could work from absolutely anywhere in the world.
Let me know.
Now, don't give me an excuses
about oh no, my business can't work remotely.
I hope that COVID
has finally like drilled into everyone's heads
that yes, you can actually get working remotely happening.
I used to run this slide on my presentations all the time
saying that the future of work was remote.
And we've been talking about this for about five years now,
and then COVID happened
and everyone has now literally forced to be remote
which has opened up not only in new business models
and new ways of working.,
but it has really shown people that reality
that businesses can actually work remotely.
And companies like itGenius and like Google
have been doing this for many years.
Not necessarily in the instance of Google
working a hundred percent remotely,
but at least providing flexible options
for your team to work.
And that's an important point is that for me,
we're a pretty radical business.
We try new things.
Most of our team are under 30 years old
or around about 30 years old.
And so we were kind of like a bit of a new age business,
very millennial in nature
in that we do things quite differently to the norm.
And we don't expect everyone's gonna follow us
and follow exactly what we do because that may not suit you
or what your goals are or what's important to you.
But what we do hope is that by being that radical
kind of like Vagabonding testers of new ways of working
that we can maybe inspire you
to shift the way that you're working by 10 or by 20%.
And if we've done that, then we've done a job.
And so that's what we try and do.
The reality of right now
is that everyone is working remotely.
However, no one's really been taught how to work remotely.
We've been kind of forced
to shift from working in an office.
For many people literally commuting to an office every day
to now working at home.
And there comes all of the challenges
of how to work at home productively.
I'm not gonna spend too much time on that,
I'm just gonna share a couple of my top tips.
But I wanna share more
about how you can lead your business to be a remote company
and how that can change your lifestyle as a business owner.
Because honestly there really aren't many resources
around how you should be working
or how you should be doing things.
And it's funny,
I think there's like probably a little bit of shame
around being a business owner
who's not there and in the business.
If you think about, well, if you have a customer
and that customer has the perception
that you're living in a caravan
and driving around the place whenever you feel like it
as I do from time to time
then a little bit of kind of stuff sometimes comes up for us
where that little voice in the back of their head says,
you should be working harder or that's not a real business.
And so I think the number one thing for you to do
before you embark on trying to actually practically change
how your business works, is first check in on your mindset.
Are you actually ready to work remotely?
Are you ready to give yourself permission
to work differently?
I know that at least in my business,
it required some really big shifts in the business
in terms of our business model
and how we were gonna actually change
what we were delivering to customers.
And it was only when I first got my mindset ready
that I give Peter permission to have this life,
and I give Peter permission to do things this way.
And I know that I won't get it perfect,
and I know that one customer
might hit me up on about something on Facebook
and I might be at the beach for the day
and have my phone switched off.
I gave myself permission to fail.
But first because I had my mindset in check,
then I was able to then make the changes
that I needed to make in the business.
(upbeat music)