Switching to the Google ecosystem is relatively fast. It’s easy for your IT to implement and easy for your team to use. However, if it’s that easy, why should you work with a reseller? Find out more in this video.
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To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
Transcription:
If you’re a business owner with a Google Workspace account, the worst thing that you could do is keep your billing directly with Google. In this video, I’m going to cover why you should consider working with a Google partner or a reseller, and why it’s going to be better for you and your business to have your billing with a relationship with someone that’s not Google themselves.
My name is Pete Moriarty, if you don’t know us and our channel, we help small and medium sized business owners with everything in the tech and cloud space, but we specialize in Google Workspace. We’re one of Australia’s top partners for Google, in fact in the Asia Pacific region, one of their top partners. So we’ve helped literally thousands of small business owners with their tech, with helping them navigate how their business works, or if you’re a growing business and based on our growth roadmap, you’ll be at different stages of business and having different technology needs at those different stages of business. And we can help you no matter where you are.
So check out our other videos on the growth roadmap. This video is based for businesses who are either in the early stages, let’s say maybe launch mode or you’re in startup mode, or maybe even you’re in growth mode and you’ve set up G suite or what was G suite now Google Workspace yourself. And you’re considering working with a partner. Now if you’re wondering where I am, I’m doing a little bit of a van life traveling at the moment. You can see, I don’t know if you can see the beach there, definitely some grass and stuff, but I like to travel around and work and live the anywhere lifestyle. That’s what we love and that’s what we promote here. And so if you’ve got the right technology in your business and you’ve got a team that are performing well, then you’ll likely find that you’re able to have a flexible lifestyle. And that’s what I love and live.
So let’s talk about what the advantages are of actually working with a partner, rather than just dealing with Google directly. Now the fears that most people have when they consider working with a Google partner for their billing for their account, is that, “Will I lose access to things? Will I lose access to my administration panel? Will I lose access to support?” And the answer to both of those is no, you can still act as a full admin of your account even if you’re working with a partner for your Google Workspace account. And number two, you can still access Google’s free support, which is pretty cool. And so what that means is there aren’t really any downsides or negatives. Now one slight potential downside is depending on the billing system of the partner, when you go to issue new licenses, many partners will have to issue them to your account manually.
And that can be a little bit of a challenge because not all billing partners are actually efficient in how they have those things set up. But thankfully, our one, if you’re considering working with us at IT Genius, our billing system is automated. So the moment that you request a new user, it’s automatically going to add that new user in your account, but let’s talk about some of the other benefits. Why would you work with a partner rather than billing with Google direct? One of the biggest things that we see from time to time is business owners getting locked out of the Google Workspace accounts. And that may be through a phishing attack, it may be through an ex-business partner or ex romantic partner hacking into your domain name and changing the access details to your account. It may be one of your employees, something goes wrong inside the business and someone locks you out, or it may be that for whatever reason, I don’t know maybe your credit card changed numbers and you stopped billing and then your account gets shut down.
Now that happens pretty darn often, and we have lots of customers who come to us locked out of their accounts. But at that point, sometimes it’s too late to help and they’re trying to run a business without access to any of their business data that obviously can get pretty darn frustrating pretty quickly. Now when you’re working with a partner or a reseller, they actually have a backend access to your account. It doesn’t mean they’re going to be in there reading your emails or accessing your actual mailbox, because if you have two factor authentication enabled, then they don’t have access to that. However, they do have access to reset passwords if needed, including on the super administrator accounts. And number two, they also have access to reactivate the account if for whatever reason it’s hacked or there’s a billing issue, or even if the DNS has been changed and it’s been for some reason, transferred away and out of your control.
So that’s probably the number one reason. If anything goes wrong, you have someone to call and that person can always get into the back end of your account. And it sounds like one of those things that you don’t really need to worry about, it’s kind of like, “Will I get robbed, “or, “Will my house burn down?” But we’ve got enough customers and literally thousands and tens of thousands of employees across our customers that we’ve seen that these things do happen to at least one of our customers every couple of months. So if you don’t want to be that person, make sure that you’ve got things protected. Okay, so one of the things is going to be useful, working with a partner. Well obviously support, you get a better level of support. You have the free support option with Google all the time, but you also have the option of getting a premium level of support working with the partner.
Now if you’re a member of IT Genius Concierge, which is our support membership, not only do you get access to a professional support team who have been trained specifically at helping, not only with the G suite and Google Workspace product, but also with small business challenges around CRM systems and getting cloud systems talking to each other, and maybe you need a cloud based phone system. And we understand the ecosystem of apps and add-ons for Google Workspace so you can get more out of the platform. Now if you’re just working it out yourself, you’re kind of stuck Googling, or when you go to Google support, they’re not really going to be able to answer questions about what’s the best plugin to do X, or how do I do this formula in this spreadsheet? They’re all the things that we can do with Concierge. And if you’re billing your account through us, then that means that our team can jump straight into helping you really easily.
If you’re doing something like archiving a user in your account, usually when you go to delete a user inside Google Workspace and the admin panel, you’re going to lose all of that user’s email data. Well we have specialized tools and a specialized off-boarding method for when we off-board staff members and we actually bring all of that data into a central account so you can keep all of the historical data for your staff when they actually move out of the business. And best, you can actually save time by delegating that to our team. You don’t even have to do it yourself. Our concierge service is super useful because it means that rather than you doing the actual stuff yourself, you can just drop a message to our team on email, or you can drop them a message on Facebook Messenger, or you can even pick up the phone and call if you prefer that, and we will be able to get stuff done for you like a kind of virtual assistant service for your Google Workspace account.
Finally, one fear that people have is if they work with a Google reseller, then they’re going to have to pay more for their Google Workspace account. And I understand that fear because you start thinking to yourself, “Well how do the resellers make money? Surely they’re going to have to charge me more somewhere along the line.” Well I’ll let you in on a little secret. Because we are a partner, we actually buy Google Workspace at a cheaper price than it is sold to the public market. So what that means is we buy at wholesale and we can sell at retail. Now that’s up to the choice of the reseller. Some resellers will charge a premium, some resellers will charge the street price, which is exactly the same price as Google charged publicly.
Personally, I like to have no reason at all that a customer should choose to go with Google outside of working with us. And so we make it super simple by charging the exact market rate that Google actually charge, and what that means is that you will get the best price for your Google account. Now not only do we charge the market rate, but we can also get access to exclusive discounts that you can’t get directly billing with Google. So if you’re interested in potentially saving money on your Google Workspace account and paying even less than the market rate, then it wouldn’t hurt to have a chat to our team, check out our concierge service completely optional if you’re interested in that. You can transfer your account into us as a transfer in, and you get some of the benefits of our free courses.
We have one of our free courses that we give away for our members who are transferred in and billing through us. So if you want to get access to that, have a chat to our team, they’ll be able to have a consult, check out your account, see if there’s any way that we can provide value, but at an absolute minimum, if you’re looking to save a bit and have a backup backdoor, just in case anything goes wrong, it’d be a good idea to have your account billed through a partner. Thanks for catching this video. This is a part of our launch series for businesses that are just getting started and want to make sure they get their foundations right. We’ve got videos in each different stage of the growth journey for businesses at all different stages of business. We focus most of our energy on Google Workspace, because we want to make sure that you have the great foundation of good technology in your business as you grow and as you scale and as you build out your team so that you have the right things in place, so you can be successful in business.
If you need support for this video or any of our other videos that we’ve got around the Google ecosystem or anything in the small business tech space, then please get in touch with that team, jump on the links below. And if you haven’t already joined our free Facebook group for the Google Workspace community, that is a place where business owners using Google Workspace in their business can meet, collaborate, get access to exclusive videos when we record them live, and also get access to myself and my professional team in that group as well. There’s a link to that down below, and I’ll catch you in the next video. Cheers.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
