Grow With Google, a digital coaching and resource program that launched nationally in 2017, has grown to have a presence in 18 states, including Alabama.
The program utilizes seminars, workshops and various partnerships to provide free digital resources to small businesses and entrepreneurs starting or growing their businesses. These tools cover topics from branding to finance while also allowing local business community members to communicate with each other and entrepreneurs elsewhere.
“We’re allowing small business owners to have access to the same tools that large corporations had been taking advantage of for years,” Alabama’s Grow With Google Digital Coach Gilberto Herrera said. “So we put them in the same place if they apply that information.”
Herrera, a New York transplant who arrived in Birmingham in 2004, was sought out by Google in 2021 to become Alabama’s next digital coach for Grow With Google. He has a background in sales, marketing and branding and currently sits on several boards including serving on the board of the Birmingham Urban League and as president of its young professionals board, the president of the Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama Junior Board. He is also involved with the A.G. Gaston Girls and Boys Club of America and City Club board of directors.
Herrera hosts from three to five workshops per month that typically average around 50 people per event. His goal for January 2023 is to reach 250-plus entrepreneurs and continue to hit the average of at least 150-plus business owners monthly in order to increase the program’s impact statewide.
The workshops allow business owners and entrepreneurs to meet and build a network which often leads to collaboration between business owners. Herrera said he often sees his events bring people together across industries from retailers to real estate ages.
“They don’t just use it as an opportunity to learn, but one of the beautiful things is that when you have 50-plus people in the room they tend to build their own community,” Herrera said.
With remote work an important facet in today’s workplace culture, the Grow With Google program gives business owners the advantage of both in-person and virtual training and other digital tools that can be accessed from anywhere at any time.
Herrera said he believes it is important to be coached by someone you can relate to. In addition to offering his seminars in both English and Spanish, Grow With Google also has an indigenous community digital coach and a national coach.
“It’s a sigh of relief that I have a tool belt at my disposal to give to that small business owner because I can remember being in their shoes, and not knowing where to go and failing fast and failing forward and falling on my face a hundred times, so I can save them a lot of those headaches.”
