Days Away Creative is my wedding photography business. For years I was using a mix of Apple’s iWork suite paired with iCloud and Microsoft Office 365. They worked just ok. Each had some limitations in file sharing and more importantly collaborative productivity. Even when using BOX’s cloud service the collaboration was terrible.
So after years of not using it I decided to give G-Suite another try. SO stoked that I did. I pay just $5 a month for a custom email address with my personal domain, upgraded Google Drive, and the entire G-Suite.
With G-Suite I can make customer forms and questionnaires for my couples. I also use it for extensive notes that automatically sync across all devices/platforms. Once that’s done and I’m planning the day of the wedding. I start to build all that in Google Docs and I can share that with fellow photographers and videographers I’ll be working with during wedding day.
Before we dive in if you want a discount on signing up for G-Suite Click Here!
These are key for collaborative planning with my 2nd photographers and videographers or anyone else for that matter who may be a part of the day creatively. They make it super easy to drag and drop images if I feel inspired to throw some photo ideas to remind me during the wedding.
To be honest I don’t use these too much (yet). I’ve got some wishlists of gear I need to purchase and an overall idea of income and expenses for the year but quickbooks does a great job at this for me. It’s basically google’s version of excel so people who know excel with get so much more out of it than I do at the moment.
Even if you’ve got the most basic webpage Google forms is amazing for allowing you to get leads. In the past I’ve built out a page on my website only accessible via the direct link and used that in Facebook and Instagram adds by embedding a Google Form and it’s helped me get 10 leads per add. It’s also a great way to collect feedback from your couples after the fact.
With Google Voice I plan on getting a secondary phone number that I can use directly with my current iPhone. This is great for being able to give my customers this contact number instead of my personal and guess what? It’s free!
If you need to move larger files around you can cost effectively upgrade your basic Google Drive account to accommodate more storage. I doubled mine from 15GB to 30GB. This makes delivering large amounts of files to my couples a breeze if they prefer. Also all of your Google Docs, Sheets, and, Forms are going to live there.
This is where I haven’t even had the chance to scratch the surface yet. Google being a company build on an open source platform allow so many 3rd party apps like Honeybook, Quickbooks, and more to sync with your contacts, projects, calendars, etc. This is what I’m hoping to dive more into once we get through wedding season. Do you have any favorite 3rd party app integrations? If so let me know in the comments below.
If you want to go head and try out these amazing features be sure to get your discounted offer here.
