I want to tell you a scary story.

No spooky, like “around the campfire” scary story…
… but like Business Owner scary story.

In case you don’t read very far down this post, let me start with the moral of the story:
BE SURE *YOU’RE* THE ONE IN CONTROL OF YOUR GOOGLE WORKSPACE ADMIN PANEL.

Here’s the story, shared with permission, from my student that this happened to:

– She had a falling out with an employee, who then quit without notice.
– That employee happened to be the administrator of the company’s G Suite/Google Workspace account.
– The employee refused to hand over admin rights to Google Workspace.

and the worst part?

– Google wouldn’t hand over admin rights *even though she could prove that her credit card was paying the monthly bill AND that she had ownership and control over the domain attached to the account*.

Let me say that again – even though she OWNS THE DOMAIN and was PAYING the Google Workspace monthly bill, Google would NOT hand her the admin access.

– She was locked out of the admin panel.
– She had to shut down the whole Workspace account and start from scratch.
– She risked the disgruntled employee gaining access to her email and the contents of her Google Drive files (thankfully this didn’t happen but it could have).

Please please please learn from this mistake.

1. If someone else set up your Google Workspace for you, go check to make sure that YOUR user IS an super administrator (and, if applicable, that they are not).

2. Audit your users. Make sure that if you have users who have admin rights, that only one or two accounts have super admin rights. Here’s a 1 minute video to show you where to look.

3. Go to Google Admin Panel > Security > Account Recovery and read about turning on super administrator account recovery. Turn it on if you feel comfortable doing so.

There’s nothing worse than feeling powerless, especially in your own business. Protect yourself, and make sure that you know who has access to what, ok? Ok.

Want some help to make sure you’re setup properly? I have three great options:

  1. My comprehensive course Get Productive with G Suite comes with Office Hours – monthly access to me, live, in the flesh (over zoom) and the course is a steal.
  2. I offer Tech Rescue which is a one-on-one Zoom appointment, where we can cover anything that I teach (or know).
  3. You can reach out to Google Tech Support for free inside your Google Workspace Admin Panel. Not sure how? Here’s a little video demo how to access Google Workspace Support.