Google Workspace is the “new default” for The Carbon Group's fractional C-suite services
Alex DiNunzio
Co-founder, The Carbon Group
Brandon Groeger
Co-founder, The Carbon Group
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Snapshot: The Carbon Group provides fractional C-suite service to early-stage startups, many of whom face systemic information challenges and are under pressure to be ultra-efficient. The Carbon Group helps them standardize with Google Workspace to provide a secure, organized, single source of truth, eliminate excess tools, and collaborate more efficiently.
- Eliminating information access issues for clients by standardizing document sharing with Google Drive
- 75%+ reduction in time spent on deep research with NotebookLM
- 2x year-over-year growth by working more efficiently with Google AI
Origin story
We started The Carbon Group to help early stage companies focus on what they do best. While they build, we can offer the guidance and operational support of a C-suite team without requiring them to bring on permanent headcount. We find that many of our clients struggle to locate up-to-date files, so information ends up spread across disconnected platforms.
We’re a small team, so we need secure, scalable solutions for us and our clients. Since our clients are scrappy and innovative, we can easily make technology suggestions, but we also need to bring them along culturally and behaviorally. The best way we’ve found to inspire that change is standardizing with intuitive, connected tools.
The Carbon Group leads its client relationships with a “Google Workspace first” approach to digital and organizational transformation.
The switch to Google Workspace and Gemini
When we step into a new client engagement, our primary goal is to add value as quickly as we can. That’s why we lead with a “Google Workspace first" philosophy. We don’t see Workspace as a collection of apps; for us, it's a fully cloud-native, reliable, and secure ecosystem for running a modern business.
One of the most immediate benefits of bringing Workspace with us into a new organization is having a single source of truth to close information gaps. This centralization helps support our clients as they share company information with investors. Before Workspace, due diligence workflows were chaotic; version control was difficult to track, and our early-stage clients rarely had dedicated security tooling to protect their data. Now, we set up a shared Google Drive, and our team, our clients, and their investors all work from one secure, organized place.
In addition to easing information exchange, bringing all of our productivity needs into Workspace has an immediate impact on our clients’ bottom line because we can reduce or eliminate licenses for other apps. By moving video conferencing to Google Meet, for example, we can cut other video conferencing tools, and our clients can put those dollars toward other work.
Since our clients are typically early stage companies, such as Sandy Health and DataHaven, they also tend to be leading technology adopters. Having Google Workspace with Gemini built directly into the tools we use every day has fundamentally shifted how we approach work. For instance, we’ve used Gemini in Google Sheets and App Script to create an invoicing template, allowing contractors to batch-send a quarter's worth of invoices with a click instead of submitting individually. We’re also using NotebookLM to speed up research time. In-depth competitive analysis that once required weeks of work and hundreds of documents can be done in a quarter of the time or less. Reducing that workload by 75% has shown us that using generative AI in these workflows is the new default, and the results speak for themselves.
The Carbon Group works closely with early stage companies, such as Sandy Health and DataHaven, to drive standardization, efficiency, and accelerate their growth.
Looking ahead
After founding and operating our own companies, we know firsthand that our clients’ time is their most valuable asset. Workspace has become our go-to for all things work because we can spend as little time as possible setting up a foundation to get things done and simply focus on doing the work and providing value. As consultants and advisors, our greatest value add to our clients is operational efficiency, and Workspace helps them level up out of the box.
Going forward, we’ll continue to go deeper with our clients more quickly. We can deploy our teams, gather information, and deliver results faster, and Workspace is even helping us unlock new revenue because we can serve our existing clients so efficiently. We have nearly twice as much business as we did a year ago, and using Workspace with Gemini, we don’t have to double the size of our team to meet the moment.
