Yes, you've built an awesome business, that's significant. But have you ever felt overwhelmed by the IT subscriptions you have in your business? Do you think it's about time to run an audit on them and see which are the useful ones from those which are not?
Today, let me share with you how to consolidate your IT subscriptions as an entrepreneur.
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To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
Let's talk about how to consolidate your it subscriptions. For many business owners, they live in a state of absolute overwhelm. And they're stuck with subscriptions going completely out of control. And what we've noticed in the business owners that we've worked with over the years and years and years and 10s, of 1000s of employees across our customers, is that it's really easy to sign up for a cloud service, punch in a credit card, start a trial, and then completely forget about it. And we end up in this place of being completely overwhelmed with how many different apps that we're using, and that is an inhibitor to scaling your business. Because technology complexity means more time spent doing support, more time managing IT, more time implementing, more time configuring, and things just start to get a little bit out of whack. What we like to think about for businesses to aim for is to aim for driving a Tesla, you want things to be simple, think about the difference between a Tesla and a normal gasoline car, a normal cars is going to have a heating system, it's going to have a cooling system, it's going to have oil, it's going to have water, it's going to have electronics that go all through the car, it's going to have a transmission, it's going to have a drive train. And all of those are 1000s upon 1000s of moving parts. Whereas a Tesla has about five or 10 different moving parts, where it's only needing a battery, an electronic management system. And that's about it four wheels and some brakes, it just doesn't have the complexity of regular vehicle. And if you take the same approach to your team, and you take the same approach to your technology, you can get into a place where you can really, really simplify things and allow them to be simple and much more cost effective. So how does this actually start? How do business owners start going down the road of getting things out of control? Well, the free trials are somewhere where we start and for business owners, we have bright shiny object syndrome. And you know, that means that we're excited to try new things. And that's a great thing when harnessed in the right way, when someone shares a new tool or piece of software with us that we can potentially leverage to build a more successful business, that's a great thing for us to investigate whether or not we think it's going to work. But it becomes a little dysfunctional when we end up in that place of complete overwhelm with all of our subscriptions. Now, it's also important to note that at different stages of business, you're going to need different tools that are important to you, right, when you're in the growth stage, you need a great CRM, when you're in the startup stage, you need to manage your tasks and make sure they're taken care of. If you're in the launch stage, you should be taking care of your basics, like your backup, and you're saving your passwords and making sure all of those things are done correctly. And yet, we have business owners that grow and their subscriptions and everything else in the business gets completely out of control. So how do we fix it, I've got a couple of steps here, having done this many times myself in the growth of our business over the years. And I'm going to take you through some of my little magic steps to help you get back control of your it subscriptions. Number one is to do a bit of a taking stock, what are all the different systems and tools that we have access to right now. And some of them you may be using some of them you may not be using. And the simplest way to take stock of these is to actually start switching them off. And I don't mean trying to find them and log into all of them, I mean actually switching them off by stopping their ability to work. And how we do that is with a credit card refresh. And so the credit card refresh is basically calling up your credit card provider recording your card as lost and asking for a new card to be issued. And that card will actually immediately stopped working. And so what happens then is there's no more ability for those software providers to build onto that card. And after 30 days, all of them all basically stopped working. And this is the easiest way to do an audit for your subscriptions. Because basically at that point, what we're going to do is we're going to say okay, for every subscription that we enter the new credit card into, we're going to stop and make a decision about whether or not I really need this piece of technology. And so at that point, we get to make the choice, is this something that still needs to stay in the business or not. And for that, we're going to use another test that one's called the Horta test. And then the Horta test, we're going to take a real good look at just how many pieces of software we may be holding inside the business. Now I'm a bit of a hoarder of technology myself, it's more on the hardware side of things, I've got a million HDMI cables and USB charging cables. And that just kind of seems to be my kryptonite. And my partner said to me once that alright, Pete, it's time to do a big cleanup of some of this tech stuff. And I had boxes and boxes, and it was sitting in racks. And it was the kind of things that I just didn't use anymore. And we devised a pretty cool method for dealing with my hoarding tendencies. And I'm going to apply the same method to choosing your software that stays and choosing the software that goes. So first up, you're going to say, or you're going to ask yourself, have I used this piece of software in the last six months? If it hasn't been used in the last six months, then it's failed the first test? And the second test is, am I going to need this in the next 30 days? Am I actually going to make use of this in the next 30 days? And if you answer no to both of those, well, then it's time to go and we're basically no longer going to make use of that piece of software. anymore, we'll just let it build itself out, or we'll cancel the account. And that's the simplest way to get it done. Now, importantly, when we're choosing new software in our business, in order to avoid getting to a place of complete subscription overwhelm, we're going to use a little tool that we like to call the decision matrix. And the decision matrix is a way of choosing great software and making sure that you make great decisions so that you can have that correctly as a part of your technology strategy. And you don't end up in a place where you've got a million different apps that you're not actually using. Now, we've just recently recorded a special video on how to make great choices with technology software, and that's on our YouTube channel, go ahead and check that out. And we'll drop a link below so you can get access to that video as well. If you're interested in billing through us and moving your billing into a relationship with itGenius, we've got some amazing offers for you. And that is a transfer in offer, which doesn't cost you anything extra, we give you a bunch of awesome perks from the team here at itGenius. Now we have a dedicated google classroom for small business owners, which teaches you how to get the most out of your investment in the Google workspace account. Now, not only do we cover Google workspace, but we cover everything in the realm of growing and scaling a small business, what we've learned about running a remote company for over six years, and even a video series on how to get your inbox down to zero every day, using all of the best features of Gmail that we haven't shared publicly, but is now available for customers that have transferred in all of this is available with quizzes and certifications for your team. So when they complete their training, they'll actually get a certificate to save that they've completed and are competent with using Google workspace. Now that is available on the link below. If you click on to right below this video that Transfer In offer, you'll get access to in a couple of minutes, fill out a simple form and move your billing into us. It doesn't cost you any extra on your Google workspace account. Because we provide it at the same price that Google does that you get access to a bunch of benefits, including access to our professional support team. Thanks so much for joining this video. I look forward to catch you in the next one. If you're not already subscribed to our channel, please do that. Drop a like below this video, share it with someone who you think it may benefit and I look forward to catching the next one. I'll see you in the comments down below for any questions that you have. And we'll see you next time.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
