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“John is the founder of liveyoungandwell.com<\/a>, which powers businesses by building their websites and amplifying its reach through PR and SEO.<\/em>”<\/p>\n He shares his experience of struggling to get their training business off the ground and how Google Workspace<\/a> (formerly known as G Suite) helped them to increase their sales and enhance the workflow.<\/p>\n He also stresses the importance of credibility markers such as having a company registration number, custom website domain and email domain, and how these markers, when taken together, can improve a business’s flywheel effect.<\/p>\n Lastly, John also discusses why businesses are looking for contractors who can deliver what they need reliably, and how Google Workspace helped them to improve their customer support and work efficiency.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When I first started a training business, delivering speaking and training to schools, universities, and other organizations, all the cold emails I sent was met with\u2026 crickets.<\/p>\n I would send one, then a follow up, and even a message, but would never hear anything back.<\/p>\n Maybe that\u2019s you. In the early stages of your business, you may be cash strapped. Paying for a business domain, then hosting, and a custom email account, may seem a little too much.<\/p>\n Add on the costs of company registration in Singapore with ACRA at $300, and you might be wondering what the point is.<\/p>\n I know, because today, we pay about $1040 a year for all of that.<\/p>\n It may seem silly to even pay, when you\u2019re struggling to pay yourself.<\/p>\n I confess. In April 2022, I was eating baked beans. Lots of it.<\/p>\n Simply because I couldn\u2019t afford much else.<\/p>\n We were earning an average of $1900 from our business. We didn\u2019t know how else to earn more.<\/p>\n Then I saw the Go Digital Programme under DBS, who we used for our corporate business banking.<\/p>\n That\u2019s how we were introduced to Exabytes, who set up our Google Workspace account<\/a> at a discount offered under the Go Digital Programme<\/a>.<\/p>\n Since then, the benefits have been tremendous.<\/p>\n From hearing crickets when we used to send out cold emails, the 10% reply rate has now risen to 70%. From the initial conversation to the eventual closing of the sale, that has now risen from 20% to 50%.<\/p>\n But why should you<\/em>\u00a0bother?<\/p>\n In and of itself, things like:<\/p>\n may seem to have little point.<\/p>\n But taken together, they have a flywheel effect.<\/p>\n The flywheel effect, popularised by business guru Jim Collins<\/a> in his book Good to Great, shares about how the initial phase of the flywheel can be difficult, and slow.<\/p>\n But as you constantly and consistently turn the flywheel, it eventually comes to a point where it reaches escape velocity, and starts to spin rapidly on its own.<\/p>\n In the same way, in the early phase of your business, when you\u2019re earning less than $3000 a month, when you\u2019re getting all these things in place, it may seem like things are moving slowly.<\/p>\n But as you continue to put them together, you will see how fast things start moving.<\/p>\n Think about it this way.<\/p>\n You\u2019ve probably received the scam emails from a random Gmail account, asking you to transfer money.<\/p>\n Your suspicions are piqued.<\/p>\n Why then do you expect someone to hand you money, if you\u2019re emailing from a personal Gmail account?<\/p>\n Why do big businesses buy your service?<\/strong><\/p>\n Let\u2019s take a step in their shoes.<\/p>\n After all, they have money and could possibly hire someone fulltime to do training for them. Or think about their strategy. Or write for them.<\/p>\n Why buy you?<\/strong><\/p>\n Because you\u2019re cheaper than getting someone fulltime to do it. A fulltime member of staff would need a salary, medical benefits, insurance, a space to work, IT equipment\u2026 the list goes on.<\/p>\n But if they brought on a contractor like yourself, you can offer something cheaper for a very specific piece of work.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not enough just to be cheaper though. There may be many other businesses though.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why the next differentiator, at least from our experience as a business, is reliability.<\/p>\n Businesses want to pay contractors who are able to deliver what they want, on scope, on budget, on time. <\/em><\/p>\n In Botelho and Powell\u2019s study of 2500 employees who eventually made it to the top CEO position, they found that the most important factor was\u2026<\/p>\n Take a guess.<\/p>\n You may think of Steve Jobs and think it\u2019s creativity. Or Barack Obama, and think it\u2019s charisma?<\/p>\n Nope.<\/p>\n It\u2019s reliability.<\/p>\n Sounds boring, but it\u2019s not.<\/p>\n It was the one factor that they found was more vital than anything else in predicting whether someone eventually became a CEO.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why in your business, reliably delivering is that<\/em> important. Businesses want to trust a service that delivers the goods, without any fuss.<\/p>\n As a web development agency, we were not new to the idea of custom domains. In fact, we were using Webmail, a custom email service provided by our hosting provider to process our emails.<\/p>\n But it was a real hassle to get into it. We had to go into our hosting provider, toggle through the tabs, and then find the mailbox. And often, we would get nothing inside. It just wasn\u2019t worth it checking.<\/p>\n So we simply stopped checking it.<\/p>\n We bit the bullet and decided to commit $104 to 3 accounts, for a year, for our team under the Go Digital plan<\/a>.<\/p>\n Whilst $104 doesn\u2019t sound like a lot, it was a lot for us, especially when we weren\u2019t necessarily sure if we would even survive for the next 6 months. Committing for a year seemed incredible.<\/p>\n But Google Workspace\u2019s email helped us in 3 specific ways.<\/p>\n With access to a central customer support email, our whole team could now reliably deal with customer issues, without worrying about missing them.<\/p>\n This raised the sense of reliability in the business world, where there were expectations that one would reply within 24 hours. And yes, this meant weekends too.<\/p>\n After all, in a competitive centre of commerce like Singapore, if you couldn\u2019t reply fast enough, someone else would do the job better, faster, and more cheaply.<\/p>\n We simply had to compete to provide faster customer support.<\/p>\n As a web development agency, much of our work does involve plenty of back and forth with the clients.<\/p>\n In the past, we would have to save documents, send it through to the client, get back the next version, and send it back again.<\/p>\n But with Google Workspace<\/a>, we could all work on the same shared document.<\/p>\n Whilst this sounds elementary, the other part was in terms of collecting all our team\u2019s documents in a central, shared location.<\/p>\n A big decision behind why we used Google Workspace was because of how easy it was to share across organizations, compared to other providers such as Microsoft OneDrive.<\/p>\n
\nMarkers of Credibility Come Together<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Here We Need to Understand Why Businesses Are Getting Contractors<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Reliability Wins You Clients<\/strong><\/h2>\n
How Does This Relate to Google Workspace?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
We Could More Reliably Handle Customer Support Emails<\/strong><\/h3>\n
But It Also Improved Our Workflows.<\/strong><\/h3>\n