Peter Moriarty: So if you're a business owner, and you struggle
with getting your tech, right, it's really important to get the
right tools for the job. And we use the Google ecosystem,
Google's tools, and the whole ecosystem outside of not only
Google workspace, but everything else that's included in it is a
great way to support the growth of your business. In this
section, I'm going to take you through some of my favorite
Google tools, and share with you why these reported, why we love
them, and how you can get the benefits of using these tools as
well. And let's jump straight into it. First of all I want to
cover off is Google Chat. And I absolutely love working with
Google Chat. It's got a bit of a bad rap, because in the old
days, it was Google Hangouts. And Google Hangouts was not
really developed very far. But over time, slack caught up and
Google have had to put a lot of energy into redeveloping their
chat app. And they've done a really excellent job. Now some
of the things that I love about Google is you can see here that
there's AI tools actually built straight into the chat. And
apart from that, there's also Google building in everything
into their Gmail, which means that right inside of your Gmail
mailbox, you can actually access the chat as well. You can see
here, this one is a demo of the meet bot, which connects to
people's calendars and can automatically schedule meetings.
And I absolutely love that. Now, we use chat for everything in
our business where we need to communicate with someone rapidly
and instant messaging has a downside. That downside is it's
a bit of an interruption station. And so you may choose
to use other software and other tools to connect with your team
when you've got non urgent communications. But I really
love using chat for the, you know, quick, rapid, like, you
know, what are we getting for lunch type chatter, either in
the office or with a distributed team. My next favorite tool is
Google Sites. And we haven't talked about this heaps on the
channel recently, we've had to go a little bit of the wayside.
But this is an absolutely central tool to the success of
our business. Now, we use Google sites for our team to store
documents, systems and processes on the way that we run the
business. And so these are the checklists in the how tos for
how we do things around here. And the point of putting all of
these in one place is that we have a digital Standard
Operating Procedures Manual for everything that goes on in the
business. Now, Google Sites is great for this because it
operates a little bit like a wiki in that anyone can edit it
that you give permission. And we encourage you if you're a small
business to actually let it be open to everyone to edit,
because that means that you've got the opportunity for everyone
to contribute to building out the systems and processes and
documentation of your business. Now, how does this differ to
something like Google Drive? Well, think of Google Drive as
like your filing cabinet, where you store all your project
plans, and your spreadsheets and your budgets and those kinds of
things. And maybe your proposals for your customers for as Google
Sites is the digital version of a standard operating procedures
manual. That's the How to and the information library of your
business. Now, that's an important asset, because when
you go to grow and scale, and potentially even sell the
business one day, you've got all of the intellectual property of
the business contained in one place. And of course, when
you're onboarding new team members, it's really simple
because you just get them hooked straight onto your Google site.
And they get the training that they need to get up to speed on
everything in their role in the business. We've got more videos
on Google Sites, if you search our YouTube channel, and plenty
of information on how you can build a business intranet, and
help support your team with working through better systems
and processes for your business. This is what I want looks like
we can see here we've got like a consultants guide. And that's
basically the the first week of what someone sees when they come
into our business, they're going to go right through the training
guide of all the first steps of what you need to learn who you
need to know is embedded documents as embedded videos.
And that gets them up to speed very, very quickly. Now, one of
my next favorites is Google Keep. And I use this every
single day of the week, I tend to find myself using this more
in my personal life, then in my business life. Because there's
not many kind of like sticky notes that I really need inside
the business. I more find myself in the business, you know,
building strategic plans. And they're the kind of things that
I would share in a task system like a sauna with my different
team members. But what Google Keep is really great for is your
virtual sticky notes. And in my personal life, I use it for
recipes. I use it for journals, I use it for saving pictures of
receipts or speeding fines, they all go into Google Keep. So I've
got a searchable place for all of my little bits and pieces of
notes and data that I need for my life. Now Google does optical
character recognition on anything that you snap into
here. And you can see it's got a nice colorful display, easy to
navigate, you can set up labels, and of course, being Google,
very prominent up the top they have a search bar to find the
information that you need. So what I love about Google Keep is
it's a safe and secure way to save sticky notes. Rather than
putting them on a note like just sitting on the desktop of your
computer which may not be synchronized. It may not be
encrypted. And it may be accessible by anyone else who
has access to your computer. Google Keep is connected to your
Google account. And so if you've got that locked down with a two
factor authentication, then no one else is able to access that
And we've got other videos on setting up two factor
authentication for your Google account. Of course, your
connection between your computer. And Google is also
encrypted, which gives you another layer of protection to
make sure that you are well looked after that. So that's one
of my favorites Google Keep. Next up, and don't shoot me for
this one, I'm going to go with Google Calendar. And this may
seem like a really, really basic one. But let me tell you, if
you're still someone who's using Apple calendar, and you're
wondering why you're getting synchronization not happening
properly, or you're unable to share your calendar with your
colleagues, or maybe you haven't yet harnessed the power of
Google calendar with group calendars, and automatic
declining have, you know, events when you're out of office, and
using the features like work hours to let others know when
you're available for meetings or not. All of these features
really make the calendar an amazingly powerful tool. We also
have other tools for actually planning out your year with a
yearly planner, using Google Calendar as your base for all of
your events. And if you're interested in that, we've got
more videos inside our library when you transfer your licensing
into it genius. Now, some of the things that you can do with
Google calendar is automatically schedule your Google meet
meetings for any meetings that you have with your team. And
basically, anytime that you schedule a meeting, it's
automatically going to create a video meeting link. And with
that with one button, you can actually click straight to the
meeting from your phone. And I literally use this all day long.
Now we've done plenty of videos on Google meet versus zoom and
why we recommend using Google meet if your workspace user,
check out our channel for some more of those videos. But I can
tell you that not having to like you know wait for zoom to
connect and dial in and just getting instant access to my
meeting with Google meet makes it an absolute cinch. And I
don't have anything like the limits of a 40 minute limit on
the free plan with zoom. With Google made it lets me record
meetings and put them straight into my Google Drive, which I
absolutely love. It's absolutely awesome. Now one of Google's
hidden secrets, best kept secrets, I would say, is Google
jam board. And this is an amazing app that lets you have a
digital whiteboard for brainstorming between you and
your team. Now you can actually buy a physical jam board there
are about 10,000 Australian dollars. And that is a big
physical whiteboard, which will actually like sit in your office
with you, you can put it on the wall, you can wheel it around.
But if you don't quite have the budget for that, then you can
just use Google jam board online. And it works in the
browser. It also works on your iPad. So if you've got an iPad,
or even a phone, you can start getting to work on building out
your jams. And we really love this for collaboration with our
team, particularly when we're doing collaborative team
activities with a remote team or working in individual different
locations. And you can see here, some of the things that our team
has set up. Here, they're brainstorming out something for
Google Data Studio telling a little bit of a story there. And
they're really going to town with the art there absolutely
love that. You can see here, this is one of our This is one
of our our culture sessions that we did. And so we use this a lot
for when we're bringing together our team and we want to bring
them together on our strategy. Now it should go without saying
that if you're a business owner, you should be using Google
workspace. This is Google suite of collaboration tools for
everything small business, file storage, communication,
collaboration, security, connection with your team
policies, and all in one place to be able to connect and
communicate, collaborate with your team effectively. Now we
are the number one partner for Australia and New Zealand for
Google workspace. And we've helped literally 1000s of
businesses get set up and get productive in the Google
workspace ecosystem. If you're already a customer of workspace,
I'm sure we can help you to get more out of your investment. And
if you're not yet a part of the Google ecosystem, well, then it
might be time to investigate that either way, make sure you
get in touch with our team. Now, Google workspace gives you the
ability to switch away from the consumer version of Google,
which is your email address@gmail.com and actually
use a professional business name in the Google ecosystem. What
that means is that you are able to use all of Google's tools in
a professional environment. And you've got an admin panel where
you can add and remove users and have full control of all the
data and all of the happenings inside your business domain. If
you're interested in that, then please be sure to reach out to
our team