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The People Gardener Podcast with Rhonda Delaney
The People Gardener Podcast with Rhonda Delaney
Google Workspace Strategies for Entrepreneurs with Adrienne Farrow
This episode dives into the essentials of Google Workspace, highlighting the value it offers to small business owners. We explore the differences between free and paid plans, essential tools for productivity, and how Google's AI features can enhance workflows.
• Discusses the benefits of Google Workspace for small business owners
• Compares free and paid options within Google tools
• Highlights Google Drive’s storage capabilities and collaboration features
• Explains functionalities of Google Calendar for scheduling
• Introduces Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides as productivity tools
• Explains the impact of Google's AI advancements on productivity
• Clarifies the limitations of Google tools and integration with third-party applications
• Offers insights into best practices for leveraging Google Workspace for business
Go to my website, rhondadelaney.com, and subscribe to stay updated on all things people, gardening and leadership.
Adrienne Farrow - www.adriennefarrow.com
Well, hey there. Welcome to the People Gardener podcast. I'm Rhonda Delaney, your host, also known as the People Gardener, thrilled to put this podcast together to help small business owners, new business owners, frustrated business owners and aspiring leaders, whether they're inside business or outside. Each week, we bring you some actionable steps so that you can actually improve your skill as a leader. That's what we're about. We're here to help you become a better leader by giving you access to lots of different perspectives. By giving you access to lots of different perspectives. The guests are varied. We're thrilled to have them. Get out your pen, get out your paper and be ready to learn Every single episode. You're going to be able to take something away that you can implement. Are you ready? Let's get to work. Well, hey there. Welcome to the People Gardener podcast. I'm Ronna Delaney, your host, also known as the People Gardener, excited because I actually have two episodes planned. My guest today Adrienne Farrow. Welcome, thank you.
Speaker 1:She is a Google expert, and so when we were doing our pre podcast interview, we decided that you know what this needs to be a two episode. We're going to do an overview Google for this first one, but then the following episode is going to be more specifically Make sure I have this right on the like the Google workspace of all of the different tools that Google has to make your life easier and more streamlined as a small business owner. Yes, no, Definitely. Yes, yes, exactly. That's all we're gonna do, Okay, well, we're gonna get right into it, Adrienne. Start us off and educate us about Google itself.
Speaker 2:Sounds good. Well, first of all, my name is Adrienne Farrow and I'm a Google tool specialist and technology coach, and I am a Google certified trainer. So I spent most of my time in education, first being in the classroom with students helping to pioneer Google tools, and then made a transition online to working primarily with online entrepreneurs and adults on how to be productive with Google tools. So looking at not only how to like set up Google but like create systems in Google so that you can save time, and also some of the cool things that Google can do that you may or may not know about. So I'm really passionate about Google for a couple reasons.
Speaker 2:One, it is by far the most popular platform for people to be on in general, but in businesses as well. Way about 10 times more people use Google than Microsoft in regards to their like business emails and things like that. So I think that a lot of times, we sign up for Google not quite knowing what exactly it entails, what you can do with it, how you might want to like features you might want to look at and set up, and things like that. So, ronnie, you use Google right? Yep, I love my Google Drive. Yay, good, good. And when you set it up and stuff, it was pretty easy right?
Speaker 2:To get it going, yep.
Speaker 1:Yep Do you use it. What's shocked me? I'm still on the freebie, like I'm not paying for any of it, and I think is it 15, 15 gigabytes? Yeah, gigabytes that you get? I hardly touch that. Yeah, I it's.
Speaker 2:It's amazing how much, how much it holds yes, definitely, and I think that's a good segue into like. The first part I was going to talk about was like free versus paid, yeah, like what is the difference? Like why consider a paid plan started with a free plan, et cetera. So you can go and go to Google and sign up for a free Google account. It costs nothing. You get an at gmailcom email address. With that you get all of the same Google tools. You know. You get your drive, your Gmail, your calendar. You get, like you said, 15 terabyte or, excuse me, not terabytes, that would be a lot 15 gigabytes of storage space, which, when you get started, is plenty to get you going.
Speaker 2:But if you wanted to go on the paid route, there is what's called Google Workspace, which is used to be called G Suite or that might ring a bell for some people, but they changed it to Google Workspace and that is Google's business plan. So that is where any size organization or company can sign up for it. You can be a solopreneur or you can have a company of hundreds of people, and it starts as little as $7 a month, so pretty inexpensive. And some of the perks of that is that you can get a custom email address so you can get a. It connects to your domain for your website and you can get like for me.
Speaker 2:I have adrian at adrianferrocom and so that is, you know, very professional, having that attached to your domain. I like to call it a calling card, because whenever you're giving out your email address, you're also giving out how to get a hold of you to find your website. You get 30 gigabytes of storage, so it doubles the storage size. But then you also get some cool features, like there's shared drives, which if you work with a virtual assistant or other people, you can share ownership over files. And shared drives you can get an appointment scheduler. Now, if you go up to one of the higher tiers of the Google plan you can get you can actually sign contracts on google docs now, which is really cool, okay hold on.
Speaker 1:Let's back up and go to the the calendar thing. That tweet, because currently I have calendly, yes. However, people pronounce yes, right, calendar, yep, and you pay. I think it's 150 bucks a year or something, something like that. You know, and it's just the calendar, yeah, and so what? You're saying the $7 a month to move even to the basic? I would have a calendar included, right, have a calendar included, right, yep, $84, is it a month or a year? Instead of the $152. So you know, that's like not Not quite half 50% saving, plus I get 15 more gigs.
Speaker 2:And a custom email address too, and so with the paid plan and you actually do have an appointment scheduler they just added it to the free plan. So if you go into your free Gmail you can find it, but you get one, and that one is you cannot attach payment to it at all. So if you ever have people book calls with you where you want them to pay for that call, you can go up to the $14 a month plan for Google. You get multiple schedulers so you could have five, 10 different ways for people to book and you have a booking page and then you can actually connect that to stripe and get paid for your google calls too. So you plus you would get on that plan. You get two terabytes of storage, so you go from 15 to 30 to two terabytes of storage and then plus you get the additional features on the appointment scheduling the appointment scheduler.
Speaker 1:Do the? How many did you say you could have on on the?
Speaker 2:second tier, on the second. There, as far as I know, there's no limit.
Speaker 1:You can have multiple okay, there's yeah, do they? Let's say, you've got three, because right now I've got three. They all talk to each other. So if somebody books on one, it books off the space on the other. The Google Calendar works the same way.
Speaker 2:Yep, so it'll read your Google Calendar. It'll read to see wherever you have the holes of availability. When you set up your Google Calendar, the appointment scheduler you tell it what calendars to look at, so what calendars you want it to read. And then, once someone books it, it takes it off the off the schedule and or not doesn't allow it to be booked there, and and you and you move on.
Speaker 1:The way I have it set up is the three different ones is a 15 minute, a 30 minute and a 45 minutes, and there's a default of having to have 10 minutes between call. You know any call that gets booked.
Speaker 2:So you're saying this operates similar, yep, very similar, very similar. So there's some small little differences. Like Calendly gives you some more customization over your emails when you send it. Google will still send you, send a confirmation email and a reminder email and things like that. But you can connect it to Zoom. You can connect it to Google Meet. You can connect it to like have a phone call. In there you can collect information. Like you know, add extra text boxes to collect additional information.
Speaker 2:So there's a lot of functionality in it, cool. So that's one thing to think about kind of at the beginning stages of business is like you can get started totally with a Gmail free Gmail account. But if you're brand brand new, it might be worth looking into the Google workspace, because one of the things that I often run into with people is, once they pay for the Google Workspace, then they have to migrate everything over from their free account to their paid account, because you can't just upgrade your free Gmail. They're two separate kind of entities. There are ways to move things and whatnot, but I'm an advocate for the paid plan just because you do get quite a bit of additional functionality on it, right? So, huh, your brain's going.
Speaker 1:You know, just trying to figure out what makes sense. Were you going to talk about Google Drive in the next?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm going to dive deep into there, but I was going to go into, like the different what's in the components of Google, like what you get.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay so carry on.
Speaker 2:Okay. So in when you sign up for a Google account, you get a ton of different Google tools and most of the tools are the same across the free and the paid. It's just that the paid might give you some extra functionality and such. So the three that are the foundational tools that I call them. I call it the Google trifecta, but it's Google Drive, calendar and Gmail. So Google Drive is how you store files, so it's a cloud-based storage service. It will store not only your documents, like Google Docs or other things, but it'll store PDFs, it'll store Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, it'll do PDFs, audio files, video files. It pretty much does all the different file formats in Google Drive. So that's one component. And then you have Gmail, which is your email service, which a lot of people are familiar with from maybe having a personal Gmail, operates very much the same. And then Google Calendar is your schedule, your calendar tool, so you can create events on there and have keep track of your of your day and what's going on and things like that.
Speaker 2:And then we get into more of the like the word processing, creation kind of tools, and that's Google Docs, google Slides, google Sheets and Google Forms. So Google Docs is like Microsoft Word it's a word processing service, all cloud-based, so it's still all within, you know, just on the internet. It's not taking up storage on your computer itself. Sheets is like Excel it's your spreadsheet. Forms is a survey tool or a way of doing forms and collecting information in some kind of way. There's a variety of different ways to use forms. And then slides is like PowerPoint it's you know you're creating a presentation kind of tool, and then on top of that there's a couple more productivity tools and a couple extra things. So there's Google Sites, that you can actually create a basic website using Google, which is very cool. There's Tasks, which is a to-do list within Google. It's actually attached to your calendar.
Speaker 2:And then Google Keep is like a note-taking app. I like to talk about it as virtual Post-it notes. They look like little squares. They put them on a board and then you can pin certain ones to the top and you can color code them, but it's a way of taking quick notes.
Speaker 2:And most all of these actually all of the ones I've talked about sync with either your mobile phone or your iPad, so they have a app associated with it to make it really easy to use on the go Sites would not be one that has a mobile app, but the other ones that I talked about all do have a specific mobile app that has a mobile app, but the other ones that I talked about all do have a specific mobile app. So that's really helpful for keeping track of things. And then Google likes to throw in some other things, especially now with AI, and Google has its own AI system called Gemini, which is available on the free plan too. And then there's upgrades. There's a really cool new tool called Notebook LM, which is a note-taking AI system, and then they just came out one Is that like the Otter.
Speaker 2:No, not for transcription.
Speaker 1:No, it's the AI bot that is often on calls that I'm on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's completely different. So Notebook LM you's it's no, it's completely different. So you notebook LM, you upload only your sources to it, so it could be transcripts of calls, it could be writings of some kind of PDF, whatnot, and then it will help you synthesize that information, come up with some frequently asked questions, some frequent topics, so. But the cool thing about it is it just works with whatever information you have. It doesn't go search the internet to get additional resources. So that's really cool. And then they just came out with one called Google Vids, I believe I haven't had a chance to play around with it, but it's a new AI video making service which is kind of cool.
Speaker 2:So they're always innovating and adding things, but really the core of Google is those three that I talked about first Drive, gmail and Calendar, and then the other top four, which would be Docs, sheets, slides and Forms. Those are the ones that most people use and are the most familiar with.
Speaker 1:OK, I have a couple of questions here. The first one is the email address. So on the free plan you get one. On the paid plans, do you get more than one email address? Yes, the reason I ask is because we've all received these, you know, hello at RhondaDelaneycom or info at blah blah blah, and it's a great way for companies to actually separate out emails per department for a different person, that kind of thing. So how does it break out on the paid plans?
Speaker 2:Yes. So it's a yes and no answer to that. So, yes, so if I, if you have one user on the paid plan, so you pay per user, so you can have multiple accounts if you'd wish. So, for example, for my account I have three users. I have myself, I have a training account which is training at adrianferrocom, and then I also have one for my virtual assistant, which is va at adrianferrocom.
Speaker 2:So I paid $14 a month per each of those users and each of those users get their own Google Drive, their own email box, their own calendar and their own storage. So it's two terabytes times three. So my whole organization shares actually six terabytes of storage way more than I ever need. But within that, each user can create email aliases and that's what a lot of people end up doing with the hello and the info app and what that means is like for mine Adrian at AdrianFerrocom, that's my primary email, but I have at least two, if not more, aliases. So hello at and support at, and those go anytime anyone emails either ones of those, it goes to my Gmail inbox, it goes to my Adrian farrowcom, so it doesn't go to a separate one. It's not a separate user. It doesn't have its own drive. I don't have to pay anything extra for those. It's just taking my primary one and making an alias of it, and you get up to 30 of those per user.
Speaker 1:You can go in and set rules, that it actually you can set up folders and rules and if it says hello it goes into this.
Speaker 2:So you have this one massive box filling yes yes, you can get really granular in gmail and set up labels and filters, and then you can also, in some of the settings, you can set it so that you can send mail as those email addresses too, because by default you'll just receive them, but you can go in there and set it so then you can. You can send mail as those email addresses too, so that if someone emails me at support at AdrienneFerrocom, I then respond back as support, so you're able to do that with up to 30 of them, which is great. And I often also use those for testing too. So like if I'm testing like digital products just to make sure that every all the automations are working and whatnot. I have created like test at adrienneferrocom and I'll use that. I don't even receive any email to it, or I don't you know. If you send me email there, I'll get it, but I just I use the email aliases to give me additional emails to test things with it, to make sure that it works.
Speaker 1:So interesting. I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to really think about this a little bit further in the year. Hubby he is, he's going to be retiring in December and so not going to need his business website or his email, all of that that kind of kind of thing, which right now it's office 365, right, Mine is the same, but what you're saying is, I think that I could just move everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's one of the ways that I specialize. So I am a Google referral partner so I can help set up those workspaces and I also have a discount codes to save 10% off your first year. And then, yeah, that's one of my specialties is helping to migrate, so getting all of those things that might be in your free Gmail over to a paid space and making sure everything's talking to each other and things like that. So definitely something I help a lot of people with.
Speaker 1:Right, very, very cool.
Speaker 2:Okay, so you said you had a couple other questions come up.
Speaker 1:The other one was on sites. Yes, okay, so you and I are in the online space. She's in the same group coaching program that I'm in. I'm assuming that this is a page. It's a single page.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:Site or it's a multiple page site.
Speaker 2:You can do multiple page sites. Yes, you can do multiple page sites.
Speaker 1:In our world, let's say, and even in those small business owners where you have something it might be your newsletter that you want people to subscribe to, or it might be a little something that you actually sell online they could create a site, one of these Google sites.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so again, my, my, my answer is going to be a yes and no situation. So it's a very light version of a website creator no-transcript your to your website. It's fantastic at integrating with Google, meaning like you can actually embed really super easily like a Google doc or your Google calendar there, but it's very blocked. It's one of those things that I recommend like you can get started with or you can even create. Like you could create a little site for a client, like as a client portal, or you can create a, you know, a demo site of you want to give your, you know, students all access to certain things. It's not quite like a course portal, but you could use it in a way to give information, but there's no like you can embed.
Speaker 2:So you could take from your email marketing provider a code to embed like a way of collecting emails, but there's not going to be like a native way within it that it's going to give you, give you that to collect. But you can do multiple pages, you can do sub pages, you can do menus, so you'll have a menu bar and beneath a page you can have it. You know, have multiple there so you connect a domain If it's not your domain, like not the one that you are using as your email address. You can connect several different domains to your Google workspace and then connect that to a Google site, if you wanted to, to have that be an option.
Speaker 1:Cool, okay, so you got anything else you want to get in there.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to think of some of the other basics things before we go into the next episode where we're going to dive more deep and I'll go a little bit more granular. Some of the other things that you can that are really cool within Google that you can do on a business plan. Like I said before, you can have contracts created in Google Docs and actually include signatures places and send them as a PDF to collect signatures. So you could ditch something like DocuSign if that's something there is oh, I didn't mention this. There is Google Meet, which is like Zoom, but for Google, and that is getting more robust and more used. I would say A lot of people are so used to Zoom after COVID that people aren't as used to Google Meet. I've started to use Google Meet with my students because the AI features that they're putting into there are pretty cool and I can get a transcript and a recording sent directly to my Google Drive, so I don't have to go in and download it and then transcribe it and things like that. So that's a paid AI feature, but they're coming out with some pretty cool things. And there's also, if you do anything internal with other Google users, there's a chat feature so you can use Google chat. So they have I mean, I like to say Google uses their own tools within their own company to run Google, so like, if you think about it that way, they're running a multi billion dollar company using just their own tools and products. Anytime we do anything in the trainer community, it's with something that Google has created. They're not going to an outside source to make something. And then I guess the last thing I'd say is I estimate you can use Google for about 80% of your tasks that you need to do for your business.
Speaker 2:The only things that I think Google is lacking, that you might want to look for an outside source, is that you can't do email marketing within Google. You can send emails, but you can't legally do like big email blasts. It's not an email marketing system. You can't collect payments outside of that Stripe integration with appointments, so you wouldn't be able to do any checkout pages or anything like that, like memberships and courses and things like that. You could do like a light version, but if you want something more robust, you'd have to go to some outside tools. And then you can do project management within Google Sheets, like you can create stuff to help you go, keep going on your project management, but really even Google tells you because they tried to do a project management system and it was in beta and then it didn't make it out of beta. And they will even say, hey, that's not our forte, like, go, try something like Asana, trello, clickup, we'll integrate with them, rather than we will have it for you, we will integrate with them, and so, oh, I actually just realized I forgot one other tool.
Speaker 2:I should mention Chrome. Go for it, google Chrome, chrome. I never think of it as a tool, but it really is a tool and I mean I do teach about it too. That is, the internet browser for Google is Chrome, and I know a lot of people use Chrome and a lot of other people are like no, I'm a hardcore Safari user, I really like Edge. The only thing I like to say about that is that Google works best with Google, and some of the times I have helped to troubleshoot things because they're in a different browser other than Chrome, and so sometimes when you use Google tools in another browser, then it'll still have some functionality, but it's not. You might have some technical issues.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I use.
Speaker 2:Chrome.
Speaker 1:I like the extensions Me too.
Speaker 2:Chrome extensions are great, they're great so yeah that's Google in a nutshell. That's kind of what to expect with Google, why it's great for business owners free versus paid so I hope that's really helpful to everyone to hear that overview.
Speaker 1:Yeah, perfect, it is Absolutely so. I mentioned to get into the next episode so that we can dig into a few of these things. So that's it for this week, folks. We'll talk to you again next week. Well, thanks for joining me today. Just a quick reminder if you were not on my email list, go to my website, rhondadelaneycom, and there's a place there that you can subscribe. Keep you up to date on all things people, gardening and leadership. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you again next week.