Google Makes Our Small Business World Go Round

Some people are Mac/Apple fans. Some people are Windows. I like the great, all powerful Google. Yes, it is possible they have a big brother ruling over all that is internet, but hey, they’re making my life as a small business owner much more simpler.

Perhaps some of you merely use Google as a search engine, perhaps some of you use Google’s e-mail service (gmail), and maybe some of you are die-hard Google users and abusers such as myself (as we flash our nerdy Google fan hand sign here). If you are, you probably don’t need to read any further.

But if you’re not, let me try to convert you.

So, a little bit of geek history for you. Google derives it’s name from Googol. And if you recall from your elementary school (if it was taught to you), Googol was created by 9 year old Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. (We also love Wikipedia, but it’s not by Google). So the story goes, Milton asked his uncle what 1 with a hundred zeroes behind it was called? The genius Kasner had no answer for his nephew, apparently Kasner may not have kids of his own, because most parents make up something at this point. Regardless, Kasner did not have an answer, so Milton came up with the term “googol”.

But that’s all besides the point, in fact, that has nothing to do with what I want to talk about, just remotely. The All-American Fencing Academy and myself has been a big user of the services that Google provides, not only for individuals but for small businesses.

Let’s just start with some of the basic benefits of Google for small business owners. Memory…gobs of it. Just for starters, users have a combined memory of over 7GB that is shared for all the services you use in Google like e-mail, document storing, web albums and more. That may not sound like lot, but since starting to use Google’s e-mail system (Gmail) 3 years ago, we’ve only used 29% of the total memory…and we don’t delete ANYTHING. Emails, photo attachments, documents, PDFs, images, you name it, all saved in our e-mail system…just barely putting a dent in our memory allotment. And if that’s not enough for you, you can purchase 20 GB additional memory for only $5 per year. You can’t buy that kind of satisfaction from a Happy Meal, ok, maybe if you get a Happy Meal with a milkshake.

Gmail
Google has an wide array of services, but I’ll cover the ones that are most important to the operations of the All-American Fencing Academy. First off is Gmail which is Google’s email system. The All-American Fencing Academy swears by it and we will never look at another service again. But what makes it special to us? One is what I mentioned before, the unbelievable amount of storage space. Any file that we need and use like forms, logos, images, flyers, etc. Whether we’ve sent it, we’ve received it, or we’ve sent it to ourselves…nothing is deleted from Gmail, everything is archived. Why would we send it to ourselves? Gmail is wearing a double hat as an online file storage. Whether we’re trying to have t-shirt done or new flyers made, our files are always available online somewhere in our Gmail system.

But if we don’t delete anything, how do you find anything? Gmail’s search function is just as easy as Google’s search function for web info. If that doesn’t help narrow things down for you, label your e-mails. This works similar to putting your e-mails into folders, but with folders, most likely you can file your e-mail into only one folder