Speaker 1: What if we stopped working with that contractor, right? And our old accountant of three years ago still has access to our files. What if you employ a contractor to do some work with you and you share all of your SOPs, you know, your operating procedures for the business, and then years later, they still have access and they want to start their own business in competition to you. This what this does, and this way of thinking gives us hygiene and how we share things. So most people when they get started with Google Drive, they just go ahead and they chuck all this stuff into their My Drive, and they end up with not only a bunch of folders here, but what people also end up with, let me show you this is something that looks a little bit like this, a Google Drive, that's just a complete mess. Now, here's an interesting little fact, Google actually designed Google Drive to not need any folders. And internally in Google, they actually don't use many folders. Their philosophy is to just search for documents rather than actually storing them into a million different folders, which is, I think a bit weird, probably not workable for a small business, because I like to be able to browse through a folder hierarchy myself when I want to go and find something, and I don't know what to search for. But anyway, that's a little Google story for you. Now, most people's My Drive quickly gets out of control. But the second big issue with using My Drive, if you're using just normal shared folders, usually what happens is, if somebody else places a file in that folder, they are the owner of that file. And so what ends up happening is let me go here we go, I've found a file here, I won't open the file. But can you see here that there is somebody else that's the owner, what ends up happening is you have your My Drive, which is your kind of like bucket of stuff sitting in your Google Drive. And then you have other people potentially, who can create files. Now that might be a contractor, that might be a virtual assistant, that might be a friend, it might be a supplier, they've created a file with their own Gmail account, and they've placed that file into the folder in your My Drive. However, you do not own that file, even though you own the folder, you are the folder, you don't actually own the file sitting in that folder, what ends up happening is somebody goes to clean up their My Drive, they delete files out of their My Drive. And because they're the owner, they disappear, they disappear from your My Drive. And so therefore, you lose data. And what happens is customers will come to us every now and again. And they'll say, Hey, guys, I've just had Google eat all of my files. And we say, Huh, that's interesting. Did Google eat your files. And then you know, when we look deeper into it, it's because there's been one of these old folders sitting in the My Drive that they've shared, they're not the owner of the files inside the folder, someone else has deleted files, and then they're gone until that person reshares them or undeletes them, they're gone unless you had some kind of backup that was copying them, they're gone. So what's the solution, the solution is to switch to shared drives. And shared drives give us a company owned drive, just like when if you've ever worked in corporate before, when you had a company server, you would have a company drive. And if you saved a file there, instead of your my docs, the company would then own the file. And in some cases, you would be restricted from deleting that file, you wouldn't be allowed to delete it anymore, because there would be security omissions, which would stop you from doing that. And so new rule and I want you to write this down, no folders in my drive zero, the only folders that I've got sitting in my my drive are these are some of my screencasts, you can see meet automatically puts my recordings into here, I've got a demo folder, I've got like downloads from my computer that I sync to my Google Drive, that's it, nothing that I use for my business that I share with any of my staff or anyone outside of my business sits in my drive, because it's just pretty much useless once you have a team of more than yourself more than one person. So we set up a shared drives. And if you don't see shared drives in your Google Workspace account right now, you just need to make sure you're on the business standard plan. That's important. Here's how we get this working in a very, very clever way. Now what most people do is they create a shared drive and then they just start adding people right. So you know, you create a shared drive, you go to add members, and then you just start typing in people's names. However, that's not actually the smartest way to do things. Because when you're onboarding staff, what happens is you've got to think to yourself, Oh, what are all the files that they need to get access to, right? And then you've got to add them to the marketing drive, their marketing, add them to the finance drive, your legal documents, those kind of things, you're going to find all the places where you add people. So what we can do instead is configure groups inside our admin panel. And then we can use group based permissions for sharing resources inside Google Workspace. So I'm going to show you how to set up some very basic groups inside workspace. So we're going to go into our admin panel, admin.google.com. If you don't know where this one is, we're going to go to directory and then groups. And we're going to add a group in here. Now I'm going to create a group. And the easiest way to do this is to just create, if you're a small business, and I'm assuming small business means like 10 employees or under, if you're larger, you might want to go for more sophisticated group structure. But if you're a small business, you just keep it very simple. The first group you're going to create is for the team. So I just call that one team, then I'm going to add, I'm going to tick the box for security group, it probably doesn't hurt to untick this box, if you don't want people to be able to email the group, that's, that's a good one. So if you if you switch off who can contact people switch off external or stop people from being able to email the group from outside your company. All right, cool, been created. And let's add some people into this group. So let's add members add gypsy, my PA, let's add red, our head of revenue who met already this morning, let's add Scott is on a call to our CEO. Cool. So I've added some users to a group here. And now when I set up my shared drives, let's create a fresh shared drive, I'm going to create the team drive, that's going to be my files for everyone in the company, I don't need to, you know, restrict them from anyone got my team drive, I'm going to go to manage members. And I'm just going to add all I need to do is test dash, oops, team. And I can then choose the level of permission for this team. Let's say, all right, I'm going to allow everyone to add and edit files, but not not delete any files using the contributor feature. And there we go. Okay, so we've added this, I'll just let it refresh. Excellent. Okay, so we've created a group, we've created our shared drive, and then we've added the group to the shared drive. So only the group have access here. So you can see that I'm the manager of the drive, I'm the only person who can say who has access to the drive or doesn't have access to the drive. And then anyone who gets added to that team group automatically gets access to this drive. Now, if you want to replicate this, and you're a small business, you only really need to create four groups for your business. If you want to keep it simple, four groups and get ready to write these down. Number one is executive. So that's your owners. So that's you and any other directors, business partners or owners in the business. Number two is, you can call it management, or you might have a dedicated one just for finances, right just for accounting. So you might call that management group or the finances group. Number three is all team, that's the one I just created. So that's everyone in the company. And number four is contractors. And so what your shared drive ends up looking like is and you can see I've got quite a few here in it genius, we're large business 50 plus employees in the group. And so we have this by department or by area in the business. And you can see we've got executive, we've got finance got up level, we have attract, which is marketing, we have excite, which is sales engages our concierge team. And then we have deliver and support, they're pretty self explanatory. Now notice all of these, except a few naughty people who've been added there somehow, all of these are just shared with groups, they're not shared with individuals. What this does is it stops the accidental leakage of access to files or access to resources, which is very easy to happen. Now, what do we normally do with create a document, and let's say we've got a contractor in the business, maybe it's our accountant, or maybe it's someone else, right? With that contractor, we just share resources, you know, willy nilly, what if we stop working with that contractor, right? And our old accountant of three years ago still has access to our files? What if you employ a contractor to do some work with you, and you share all of your SOPs, you know, your operating procedures for the business, and then years later, they still have access, and they want to start their own business in competition to you this, what this does, and this way of thinking gives us hygiene and how we share things. But it also means that you don't end up with the dreaded misfortune of having files disappear or data disappear. When you share something with someone, and or share a folder with someone in your My Drive, and then they become the owner of files that get placed in there. If you'd like this content, please hit subscribe and hit the bell notification. So you can be notified when we go live or drop new content on the channel. If you'd like to connect with us, hit us up on social media, or join our free community group. All the links to that are right below this video. 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