Unlock the hidden gems within Google's suite of free tools as technology coach Adrienne Farrow joins us to reveal the secrets to optimizing your Teachers Pay Teachers business. If you've ever found yourself overwhelmed by subscriptions or wrestling with organization, this episode is a goldmine of strategies to save both time and money. Adrienne sheds light on the most underappreciated features of Google Drive and shares invaluable insights on the shift towards digital products in education. Plus, we tackle the importance of diversifying product formats to captivate a wider audience and underscore the crucial role of efficiency for the savvy teacher entrepreneur.
Wade into the waters of productivity with our deep-dive into Google Calendar's task integration and the organizational marvels of Google Sheets. Imagine managing your to-do list in harmony with your schedule, all within Google Calendar, and streamlining your workflow with Google Sheets' straightforward features like 'chips,' dropdowns, and color coding—no complex formulas necessary. I'll share how these tools revolutionized my business, from monitoring performance metrics to orchestrating events like the teacher seller summit. This episode is your invitation to embrace the simplicity and power of Google's tools, stripping away any hesitation tied to their sophistication and arming you with the prowess to elevate your business backend systems.
Unlock the hidden gems within Google's suite of free tools as technology coach Adrienne Farrow joins us to reveal the secrets to optimizing your Teachers Pay Teachers business. If you've ever found yourself overwhelmed by subscriptions or wrestling with organization, this episode is a goldmine of strategies to save both time and money. Adrienne sheds light on the most underappreciated features of Google Drive and shares invaluable insights on the shift towards digital products in education. Plus, we tackle the importance of diversifying product formats to captivate a wider audience and underscore the crucial role of efficiency for the savvy teacher entrepreneur.
Wade into the waters of productivity with our deep-dive into Google Calendar's task integration and the organizational marvels of Google Sheets. Imagine managing your to-do list in harmony with your schedule, all within Google Calendar, and streamlining your workflow with Google Sheets' straightforward features like 'chips,' dropdowns, and color coding—no complex formulas necessary. I'll share how these tools revolutionized my business, from monitoring performance metrics to orchestrating events like the teacher seller summit. This episode is your invitation to embrace the simplicity and power of Google's tools, stripping away any hesitation tied to their sophistication and arming you with the prowess to elevate your business backend systems.
Welcome to the Rebranded Teacher Podcast. My name is Lauren Fulton. I'm a full-time teacher, author and seller on Teachers, pay Teachers and I help other teacher entrepreneurs grow their TPT businesses in a way that's purposeful and sustainable. So if you're looking for actionable, step-by-step ways to grow your business, you're in the right place. Let's get started it. If you are type A or a type A wannabe, then you are going to really enjoy this episode with Adrienne Farrow, because Adrienne is talking about how to use Google, a free tool, to help you organize your business.
Speaker 1:
Now, I don't know about you. I tend to accumulate a lot of subscriptions and sometimes I don't realize it until the end of the year when I'm looking over all of my accounting and I'm like holy cow, how do I have that many subscriptions inside of my business? We won't even talk about my personal life and how many I've just had to call from my personal life, but even within my business, there are so many different subscriptions. This subscription helps me do this. This subscription helps me do that. This membership helps me accomplish this task a little bit faster and over time, you start to realize just how much money you're spending on things and things that you don't necessarily need to spend money on when there are free substitutes that are available to you, like Google, and Adrienne is sharing some of those ways that you can use Google to help you organize your business work more efficiently and to help you save time. You don't want to miss this.
Speaker 1:
Let's go ahead. Let's meet Adrienne. Hey, Adrienne, how are you Not too bad? How are you doing? Lauren, I'm great. I'm so excited to chat with you again. We've had you on the podcast before, but I'm really excited to have you back because you're full of so much good information. But could you start by just telling everyone a little bit about you, who you are and what you do?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, definitely. Well, my name is Adrienne and my business is Adrienne Farrow, and I am a Google tool specialist and a technology coach and I work with teacher entrepreneurs any entrepreneur on how to best utilize Google tools for your business, along the lines of using those Google tools, finding out what they actually can do for you and your business, some of those underutilized, underrepresented things. I make digital products for a lot of teacher authors that they go ahead and sell in their stores, and I'm just passionate about Google because I really believe it's like the most awesome tool out there, so can't wait to share some more googly knowledge.
Speaker 1:
I love that. I'm so excited to have you here. So we're going to be talking about like three of the most underutilized Google tools that are on the market today. But first can you speak to like when we're talking about digital things? I mean, obviously there was a huge surge in digital sales back in 2020, 2021. Have you seen any of that? I know it's kind of hard because you're you may not see the data on the other side of creating that product, but have you seen the demand for that lesson? Or are teachers looking for something in particular now when it comes to the digital products?
Speaker 2:
I've seen the demand change. It's not as in demand as in 2020, 2021. I call that the great digitization, Like that was when we just had to put everything online. But I think that teachers are more intentional now about how they're using technology in the classroom and a lot of schools have put a lot of money into technology in 20 and 21. So it's still being used. It just might be used in a little bit of a different way. So I am still seeing a demand for teacher authors to have a digital component to their product or a digitized version of their product, and I do still hear teachers saying I only want digital products because it does save them a lot of time, especially with like Google Forms and what that can do for self grading and things like that. But it is. It's a different demand than it was just a couple of years ago.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely, and I think too with having an additional version. It is a value grab, even if you can't, maybe in this day and age, just depending on what you're selling, I suppose. But I know used to, if I had a digital version of something in a printable version I'd mark the price up, and nowadays I'm finding I can't necessarily do that because teachers are going to use either or not both, like they would so. But at the same time it still adds value to your product because they're seeing that they can use it in multiple different ways if they so choose.
Speaker 2:
And I always say that if you only have it in one format, you're missing out on a whole other group of buyers. So if you have it in both formats, then you can capitalize on those buyers who do need a digital product version. And so that's one of the mindset changes I like to promote is open your eyes to the digital version, because you don't know what you're missing. You know you don't know those buyers that you could have if you had both options.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely All right. So let's talk about this. Let's talk about underutilized tools. I'm a huge Google Drive person. Like everything's in my Google Drive. I use it for VAs, for curriculum writers, like everything gets put in there and everything's housed there. But and I use Google Keep and those those are about, with the exception of, you know, like some slides are formed for products those are about the only things that I use and I know that I'm probably under utilizing many, many tools. So tell us, when it comes to Google and the suite of tools that we have available, what would you say are the three most underutilized tools?
Speaker 2:
Well, for one of them, I'm going to say Google Drive, but a specific component of Google Drive which I think I talked about last time but I've delved into it and helped so many more people with it this year, is the shared drives aspect.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and I think that there's not as many people who know about that and how amazing that can be for your business, especially if you have a team and you work with others, because ownership is so important. In Google, whoever starts a file is the owner of the file and so, as a business owner, you want control, you want ownership of your own files. So if your virtual assistant or team member uses their own Google account, originates that file and then suddenly leaves or does something different or heaven forbid something happens to their account, you've just lost part of your business assets because it's not under your ownership. So shared drives is, for the Google workspace, the $12 a month plan, so it's the middle tier, but it's worth its weight in gold, because I have worked with business owners who had me make shared drives because they did indeed lose things.
Speaker 2:
And it just makes sure that you have control over your own assets for that regard.
Speaker 1:
That's very important. I actually put that into place after you came on the podcast last time and it does make a world of difference. It really does. The other thing that I didn't realize with the shared drive is you share storage right, so, like your team member is not having to? That was an issue that my VA was running into. Is she's like I'm out of storage, I'm out of storage, I'm out of storage and I don't really want to give her my I can't give her my credit card information. Like I don't want her to have to pay for it upfront and then me have to reimburse her. So it just makes it so much easier that we can share storage now, a hundred percent.
Speaker 2:
And then you can also manage who has access within that shared drive. So you could have six, seven, eight people, but they all have different levels of access. You could have one person who just can view things. You can have one person that is able to add things, but they can't delete things. You can have one person who can do everything, but they're not allowed to add people to the drive or take people away. So you can really like mix and match who has the correct access to that shared drive and make it work for your business. I love that.
Speaker 1:
So what's something else that we're under utilizing on Google? Do you know about Google Tasks? Google Tasks Okay, I actually think you talked about that one the last time that we were on the podcast, but you're going to have to refresh my memory because I don't remember Like it sounds familiar. I'm like I think that you've told me about this before and I still am not using it.
Speaker 2:
No worries, because since the last time I was on, they've done a huge like revamp and upgrade and it's actually part of Google calendar. Now, on Google calendar, up at the top, kind of close to where you would have, like your, your dates and stuff or like your, your, your hub, up there, there's two little buttons there's and I can actually do you want me to demo this and I can talk through it so that it's on there. That way we can actually see and I can show. Okay, so let's go to calendar.
Speaker 2:
So in Google Calendar up here at the top, so the upper right, there's this little calendar button which is your calendar, but then there's a check box or check mark in a circle which is tasks, and so it is actually now integrated within your calendar where you can have different lists for your products, for your, you could have a CEO list, you could have something for your course, and then you can add all your tasks in relation to your list there. But then the really cool part about it is is that if I add a task and I type in the title and then I choose a date and time, so we'll just say today, april 7th, and we'll just say later today, so that would be like 2.30 my time. It will put it onto your Google Calendar in a specific tasks calendar that you can turn on and off, but you can see your tasks directly on your Google Calendar. When you click on it you'll get all the information and you can include links or whatever you need to put on there, and then you could actually mark completed when it's done. So you can take care of your tasks from within your Google Calendar.
Speaker 2:
And the mobile app for tasks is really great as well. So I have that as a widget on the front of my phone, so if I'm thinking of tasks along the way, I can just go ahead and quickly add them to my lists, because that's usually when I'm not at my computer is when I actually think about something I need to do. So it's a really powerful tool that they just like this little button up at the top didn't exist about like two months ago.
Speaker 1:
Wow, okay. So I have follow up questions about this. In my head, this seems like a really great tool if it can be shared and others can mark a task as complete. Is that possible? Not yet, to my knowledge, not yet Okay.
Speaker 2:
Not yet, so this would be more of a personal thing. Google did have a like beta project management system that they tried to do and it didn't. It didn't go anywhere, so it's not necessarily a project management tool. This would be more along the lines of like a to do list or your own personal like things that you need to get done. So if you're a solopreneur, that just is on your own or you just need a place to maybe brain dump all of this and then go put it into somewhere else, like this could be a really, really great useful thing for you, but unfortunately it's not shared yet. Hopefully.
Speaker 1:
No, I love this because this is exactly what I use Google Keep for. I just have my running to-do list, and so I could take that to-do list and just build it here instead, and then that way it's on my calendar so I can see when everything needs to be done and it's not in just some like. I mean, you can organize Google Keep so that it's not in random order, but it's a little bit more difficult to kind of put them in order versus like looking at the calendar and going, okay, it's Monday, this is what needs to be done first, and I have my checklist.
Speaker 2:
I can just click on the date. I love this. This is awesome and you can like. I use this inbox, so this is my like on my home screen of my my phone, but then I can drag whatever task from the inbox and then go put it in wherever it belongs. So it's a lot easier to reorganize your tasks. So you can just have like a brain dump all in one place. You can also star them so that they go over here, and then a really cool thing is you can actually use Gmail, and tasks is always on the sidebar of your Google tools and then if there's a email that you want to connect to your tasks, you can just drag it over to your tasks and the email becomes a task and then it will link to that email as well.
Speaker 2:
So if this is something that I need to take care of, you know, on Friday you can repeat tasks too. That wasn't what I was trying to do, but on Friday you know at, let's say, and you, you don't have to put a time Actually I won't put a time, so we can show where that goes. If I go back to tasks, you know, here it is in my inbox. It has a link to that email that, if I click, it will pull up my Gmail with that email so that I will have a direct link to it. And then, if I go to calendar all if you don't have a specific time all of your tasks will live up here at the top, so it'll be up up here.
Speaker 2:
So then you can go through and I highly recommend it being a color that's different than everything else, so that you know it's a task. But here I can click here and then it'll say view related email and I can just go ahead and click that too. So I love that Pretty dynamic.
Speaker 1:
You click on the event in your calendar or the task in your calendar and then from there you can just pull up the email directly. I love that. That's amazing. They need to figure out how to allow you to share a calendar with somebody, because then you could just immediately drag and drop that email onto there and you have a VA that know that that's what they need to answer Like that's what they need to work on.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I agree. I was just looking to see why you said that, to see if I could get into settings for this particular one, but it doesn't allow me to do settings like I would for the other one. So, yeah, I will.
Speaker 1:
I have some contacts at Google. I'll drop them a line and say, hey, let's do this, absolutely, absolutely, all right. So number three, what's our number three?
Speaker 2:
most underutilized tool on Google. So I have to say Google sheets and the reason why it's so. I was like sheet phobic for a long time because it overwhelmed me. And then I I really made a like resolution at the end of last year for this year to lean into using Google for most of my business because I have shiny object syndrome, like I want all the tools like give me everything that I think could benefit me.
Speaker 2:
But then I realized like I'm a Google person and then I'm also like paying for this tool that can do so much. Let me look and see what I can do actually in there. And so I have learned two things about Google Sheets. One is you can make it really super basic. You can just add some checkboxes and you can put in your information, and it can house so much that you can keep track of. But you can also link it to other, like Google Docs or slides or even things in your Google Drive, and it'll create what's called a chip in there, and so instead of seeing the URL I'll pull it up to, instead of seeing the URL, then you're going to see this little chip, this little thing that gives you the name of what the document looks like, so that it's really easy to organize. And I actually created a whole dashboard for my business that was just on Google Sheets. So now I have one Google Sheet that just houses everything in relation to my business that I access on a daily basis, and I just have links to documents sheets, you know, hyperlinks to the tools I use most often, things like that and it is really transformed the way that I work right now. Okay, if you go into any of these cells and then let's just go to my Google Drive and find just a random thing like this Meteo bio template, if I just grab the link and there's many different ways to grab the link you can right click or you can look for the link symbol up in the toolbar and then I paste the link. It's going to say tab to replace with, and then whatever the name of it is. So instead of having this long gobbledygook of a URL, you actually get this little chip that just gives you a snippet and I mean you have to name your files appropriately so that you know what you're talking about. It's not going to help if it's like untitled or whatnot, but then you can have everything you know, all of these chips here, and it keeps it nice and organized. So this is a great way of like having a database of all of your digital products in here so you can link to your Google Drive and get chips in here.
Speaker 2:
You can do you know a lot of data. I have a whole KPI tracker that I use and then I have a sheet that keeps all that data and so that goes in here, but this is an example of the dashboard that I built that I actually have for $5. It's a $5 challenge, but you can add. This is just my homepage that I look at every day, that I can put my website link here. I have a quick link to my Instagram, quick links to my lead magnets or my offers, so I always know if I need to grab a link. I can just go in here and quickly grab something. And then I also have, like, some information on my marketing data. I have a whole tab that keeps a whole bunch of other links that I need to grab. Of course, purchase library that has a bunch of things in here. So Google Sheets if you give it a chance, it can really do a lot more than you know we realize it can do without being overwhelming.
Speaker 2:
Like this sheet has barely any formulas in it. Like I think it has like one formula that I chat GPT so that it could tell me like what formula to put in.
Speaker 1:
I love that because I'm a formula phobic person, like I like Google Sheets but I have like a form which, you know, for a math teacher.
Speaker 1:
You would think that I would enjoy that, but I don't at all.
Speaker 1:
And it wasn't until like the recent, like few years that I started kind of, oh, I'll use Google Sheets no-transcript, so they all get access to the Google Sheet and it's like this is the product that needs to be created.
Speaker 1:
This person checks it off when it's created. Then this person you know the next person, the VA or whatever is looking to see what's done and in the folder, so I can do, complete the next steps, and then I can just pull it up and look and they're not having to send me an email every time they finish a product. They're not having to send me an email every time they complete a task. I can just pull up the sheet and see what's done and what's left, you know, or what needs still needs to be done, and I've really enjoyed that. Or like we're planning right now for teacher seller summit and we're using that with our project manager, who knows more about sheets than I do, and she's got. I haven't figured out how to do this. I'm sure it's a very simple, but like the little tab where you can like, we can create a tab like a dropdown menu in.
Speaker 2:
Sheets. It's just what you do is you go here and you go to insert drop down.
Speaker 1:
Oh, and then you can put in all the different.
Speaker 2:
Yep, so then you can put in all of the different things that you want for your dropdown, and then you can also customize the color. Fortunately you can't do like brand colors or hex colors or whatnot, but then you can do. Yep.
Speaker 1:
You create your dropdown and it's just as simple as insert and dropdown. Yeah, that's the. That's what she's. I didn't even know you could do that in sheets and she took our Google sheet that we had with everybody all the presenters and everything and she had, like I go in and I open it up and it's like this person has a question that needs responding to. Like this person has is already like green light they're good to go. They've turned in their stuff. This person we need to check back, you know. Or this person we've declined their application or they declined our request or what have you like we can. You can go through and you can just see at a glance. She's got a color coded too, and I have been blown away by how beneficial sheets can be for somebody who's like me and doesn't want to the formulas, doesn't want to learn the formulas, but also seems like a very time consuming thing. You know, when you think Google Sheets or you think numbers and Apple or Windows Excel, like it just seems very daunting. But Sheets has been very easy.
Speaker 2:
And it can just be. It can be as simple as you want it to be and as complex as you want it to be, and I wish I would have given sheets a chance earlier, because it really has really transformed my business by making it so that I can really have like one central place, or even like I have multiple like sheets that become hubs, but that I just know quickly where to go and grab information, and I think that's so important. As a business owner, your time is precious. You need to have your time being used on actually what makes you money, and so if you can like simplify the backend like you talked about with your project manager and stuff if you can make those systems something that works for you, then that alone is worth its weight in gold.
Speaker 2:
And that's one of the things I aim to do in like my YouTube channel and my Instagram and things like that. I want to unlock those things. Like you said, like the dropdown menu, I didn't even know that was possible. I like, wow, it was that simple. Like that's the type of things that I love to teach people and say, yeah, really you can do a lot of this if you just know what is possible, and that's what I want to do for you.
Speaker 1:
I love that. Okay, so you mentioned your YouTube channel. You mentioned your Instagram. Tell us where we can find you, and then we're going to talk a little bit about your teacher seller summit.
Speaker 2:
So my website is adrienneferrocom, my YouTube is also Adrienne Ferro and then Instagram is the Adrienne Ferro because Adrienne Ferro was taken, and so those are my main places to hang out with me, and you can also go to go to dot adrienneferrocom, and that's where all of my memberships and my products are, that I have my freebies, my one central hub that has everything the dashboard that I just talked about is on there. I do a five day challenge that walks you through exactly how to set everything up and I teach you a ton of Google tricks along the way. And, yeah, that's where you can find me.
Speaker 1:
I love. It All right, so tell us about your teacher seller summit session. What are you going to be teaching us during TSS?
Speaker 2:
So my topic is how to use Google to organize the majority of your business, and I'm going to continue to talk about a lot of these little things within Google to help you like, eliminate the majority of the tools that you might be paying for and really hone in on using Google so that you can cut down on those costs and streamline your business. Google can do, I say, probably about 90% of the things. There's some things that you need to look for other tools for, but if you're paying for Google, why not use it? So that's what my session is going to be about.
Speaker 1:
Oh man, I'm so excited for that, especially as someone who's just been going through all of my tax stuff and setting you know, getting all of my spreadsheets and seeing how much money I spent last year. Yeah, absolutely here for cutting out a few subscriptions and a few other paid services, if Google can do the trick. Thank you so much for being here, adrienne. I appreciate your expertise, as always. We're so excited to have you at Teacher Seller Summit and to learn more from you, and thank you for coming back on the podcast a second time. Thank you, lauren, for having me.
Speaker 1:
Thanks so much for being here. If you want to connect with Adrienne, you want to have her help you do something inside of your business which, by the way, after she was on the last time, she helped me set some things up for my Google calendar for my membership, so that everything was always automated and all my members always knew what was going on, and to move that over actually into the membership itself, and that was super incredible. She is a wealth of information when it comes to all things Google. So if you want to connect with her, follow her on social media or attend her TSS session then you could find links to do all of that down inside of the description. Thanks so much for being here today. I'm going to see you guys right back here in the next episode.