PARTNER'S TESTIMONIAL
The story started
About Tenny's Experience!
Hello Everyone!
This is Tenny, current Head of Research and Lead Manager at the Pearl Lemon Group.
Today, i.e. 14th of November 2020, is the 200th Day I have been part of Pearl Lemon Group, meaning I have completed more than the six-months with the company and am now transitioning into a full-time role, where I will be leading a small team of research analysts on process based tasks, supporting the SEO, Lead Generation and Sales teams for both internal development and client projects while also working on administrative + managerial roles.
The Start!
It was around March of 2020, and COVID-19 hit hard in India and lockdown hit harder. The worst part of the Lockdown was I was supposed to take my final exams in April’ 2020, but they got postponed and so the graduation too.
For obvious reasons, I went back to my hometown. A month passed by, and I was doing nothing besides focusing on academics. Eventually, I became dissatisfied, and I wanted to learn something new while getting some hands-on experience, because all the YouTube and Udemy (also other MOOCs) knowledge was just theoretical and there wasn’t a platform to practice my learnings.
On April 26th 2020, I jumped onto my Surface Pro and started browsing for programmes offering hands-on opportunities on different platforms, I was looking at multiple platforms suggested by Google and then I found angel.co to be pretty useful with this compared to other websites.
Scrolled through many digital marketing startup partnerships & similar programmes on angel.co for a day. I saved ten companies, applied to five of them and heard back from two.
They were from different parts of the world, One was from Bangalore, India (didn’t hire me) and obviously the second one was Pearl Lemon Group! I was hired on 28th of April, 2020.
At the time I was applying, Lydia was overseeing recruitment, In case you didn’t know her, she is the Head of Internal Growth. I answered Lydia’s questions on angel.co, and the next day I was asked to DM Deepak on What’s App.
WhatsApp-ing the CEO of the company directly was pretty unconventional, and I was like, “what, should I text the CEO of the company?” well I did, and we exchanged a few texts and voice notes (Lol! I never had to send a voice note on WhatsApp before).
After the initial introduction Dee then added me into a WhatsApp group for the trial period where Lydia & Sam Vanmeter, Head of Lead Generation, then.
Both Lydia and Sam monitored me, during the trial I did a variety of tasks ranging from funneling leads for podcasts, SWOT analysis, couple of researches and seven days later, I was taken into the programme.
I was added into the ‘Internal Pearl Lemon Group Team’ WhatsApp group which had Dee, Lydia, Sam & Kaushal, in case you didn’t know Kaushal he is the Head of Web & Design, + Me There were only five members from 03 countries then, and now the team has four times as many i.e. 20+ people from different parts of the world.
The First 02 Months
After being accepted into the programme my University began online classes which weren’t on the schedule before and were assigning me a lot of projects, though I was into Pearl Lemon Group work, I had to deal with Uni work a bit more but I was doing some basic tasks for Pearl Lemon Group, mostly researches on business expansion possibilities and listing Pearl Lemon Group & its sister businesses in directories and business pages.
One week into the programme we were asked to write weekly update blogs, while writing mine I got struck onto Lydia’s update blog about the block time management technique and guess who also uses it Elon Musk!. I tried it and apparently I was successful in sorting my classes and the programme.
Then came Friday and I attended my first team meeting on May 08th, 2020 and there were only five people in the Whereby meeting room. Meetings used to be a quick 30 minute chat with weekly updates on what everyone was working on and now it’s 60+ minutes each Friday because of 4x more people.
Things were happening fast. I was handling a few tasks which were mostly lead funneling from multiple platforms, researches and SWOTS, I was rotating in different roles in the company to try different things to find my sweet spot in the company.
Although we were a remote-based company with only five people from different coasts of earth, working on different time zones i.e. when I was about to wrap for the day, Lydia used to start and so I never felt alone or left behind.
During the first two months Lydia trained and mentored me personally. She helped me feel comfortable in my role and in coping with new tasks, making them feel easy by giving me tips and teaching me to use different tools though she was super busy.
The Next 02 Months
Dee is the coolest boss I’ve ever had. He wanted us to find their sweet spots in the company, as there were so many things that needed to be handled and he was also launching and partnering with new companies.
I was also asked to find my interest in the company and after evaluating all the opportunities I wanted to try something with SaaS Marketing i.e. handling Marketing for Word Pigeon, Dee’s first venture into software as a service which was solving a niche problem in an easier way.
After some initial training on SaaS marketing and a lot of help from Dee, I started working on Word Pigeon- a WordPress plugin which helps in posting blogs written in Google Docs into WordPress editor in a click! Without Word Pigeon, the posting process could cost more than 20 mins for each blog using the default WordPress editor.
I started enjoying my job, and the way I was doing things was surprising- What I was taught in school was completely different from Dee’s hands on methods, believe me Dee’s way of doing things is really cool, you can check out some of his free courses made for the hustlers!
Then, school ramped up again before the end of my 4th month at Pearl Lemon Group. My final exams were scheduled which were all online. They didn’t bother me too much, but they interrupted my regular workflow.
After exams, I was more available to work. There were also a couple of new people onboarding during that time period, Skylar- Lead Gen Manager & Sam Lawrance- one of the Marketing Executives, who took over some of my tasks and reduced my workload a bit.
SaaS Marketing was going fine, marketing outreach was working, and I had some responses, but nothing was super astonishing. And I also didn’t get to do more things for Word Pigeon.
People often say that the 3rd time’s the charm, but mine turned out to be month four. Finally relieved of all the academic burden, I started exploring new things with Pearl Lemon Group.
In no time I started doing so many different things (and learned a ton!!!!)
I started managing some crucial things for the company.
- Emails
- Inbound Invoices
- Starting Lead Generation Funnels For Clients
- Chatbot
- Recording leads and supporting, Head of New Business- Ion Farmakides.
I now had so many things to do in a day, and I was liking all of it, as they are all hands-on work.
The transition from being Lydia’s trainee to managing things for Dee was real smooth and quick. From that point of time, Dee is the top person on my WhatsApp 💬 i.s. one of the most frequently messaged.
He started monitoring my work personally and guided me in improving my productivity and polishing my modus operandi,
Fun fact- I’m an introverted person, but now I talk to colleagues, aka friends, from
- London and The Lee in Great Britain
- Michigan, California, New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio in the United States
- Turin in Italy
- Warsaw in Poland
- Madrid in Spain
- Lugano in Switzerland
- Istanbul in Turkey
- Lagos in Nigeria
And almost every day I’m still e-travelling from my couch to meet new people and learn new country codes 😂. As you can see we are spread across different continents and we are just missing an Aussie and a South American to be fully worldwide.
The Last 02 Months
Time had passed real quick, and I was about to enter my last two months of the programme. I took a couple of University placements and got selected for both, but I was sure that they would be monotonous and I wouldn’t learn much working for them, so I decided to stick to focusing on Pearl Lemon Group.
That was also the time when Pearl Lemon Group started growing rapidly, from ten or so people to over twenty people and this is the time I was also starting to get involved with SEOs and other core team members from sales and affiliate sides of the business.
Then my bachelors results came in from the university, and I got a pretty decent GPA. It was also during this time that my parent’s perception of my work changed- they thought I would run down into some dead-end with Pearl Lemon Group and put aside education and now they are convinced that I would settle up for a good time.
During this period, I was involved in various projects, both internal and clients from SEO for internal websites, new researches for supporting lead generation team, link building and PR for both clients and internal websites.
The best part was I was given the freedom to use all the tools required. I’m kind of a techie, so I loved playing with all of the tools we had. Almost all of them were premium.
Here are some of the premium tools I almost use everyday while working for Pearl Lemon Group:
- Ahrefs- For SEO tasks, Ahrefs is my go-to. I used it for keyword analysis for client tasks, backlink analysis for internal link building and competitor analysis.
- Mailshake- it’s kinda funny, I have actually been using Mailshake for months, but I had never run an outreach campaign on my own until a few days back. When I use Mailshake, I scrape emails from the internet, take email copy from Dee, upload it and then boom! It’s also funny how easy and tricky it is to send emails to so many people in a click.
- Find That Lead- I would say Find That Lead is one of my favourites (also this is the first tool I used when I started working for Pearl Lemon Group). As someone responsible for research and analysis, Find That Lead is a lifesaver for me because the emails scrapped from Find That Lead are 90% accurate when compared to other available counterparts.
- Clear Out- If Find That Lead is bread, clear out is butter, all the emails I mine go into clear out before putting them all in an outreach campaign. It helps in reducing the bad emails and maintaining the domain rating.
- Good old Google Sheets!- Before Pearl Lemon Group, I didn’t use Google Sheets or Docs. I was a Microsoft Office-guy, and once I started using the G Suite products, I never went back to Office tools as they feel more old school.
And there are so many more tools I still use frequently, such as Content Studio, Lemlist, Night Watch, SERPstat, Loom etc.
Not to mention the services, communities and platforms I have been introduced to:
- Indie Hackers
- Facebook Affiliate Groups
- Other Affiliate Networks
- AppSumo
- Pitchground
And a ton more that I didn’t know even existed!
LTDs are super cool, easy and money savers and obviously good investments. I recently purchased an AI-based LTD from AppSumo to support my friend’s MedEd blogging venture, Medrenaline.
Of course, Dee’s own courses and looms have also been super helpful! One of the many perks of being With Pearl Lemon Group is I get access to Dee’s wide range of courses.
Courses are very interesting and knowledgeable, and Dee’s easy-going and candid teaching methods make them a very enjoyable watch. The course uploads are quite raw, but the insight he provides in them is invaluable!!
I have learned so many new things and how to improve what I had already been doing. You should definitely check ’em out if you are a hustler!
Recently, I cracked an Upwork gig just by following Dee’s Upwork and LinkedIn courses. Although the contract is quite small, it’s something I’m really enjoying because I’m improving my marketing and outreach skills while building a network.
Now & Moving Forward
My growth over the last six months has been quite evident, and this shows that anything is possible at Pearl Lemon Group.
As the Head of Research, I am now managing the Pearl Lemon Group Research Team in taking care of the R&D needs for SEO and Marketing, in this new role I would be taking up newer tasks from different teams of the company to delegate them between all the research analysts and manage them to be on track before hitting the deadlines, while working alongside.
I’m also responsible for exploring and implementing new strategies, keeping track of industry developments and bringing new useful tech into the company. I am also working in an administrative role as the Lead Manager, in near future I’m also planning to venture in the lead generation side of the business too.
I’ve been part of the family since its crucial growing stage, i.e. from five people when I started to 20+ now, and we are still recruiting continuously. We’re also branching off into multiple sister companies and acquiring many global partnerships, which are opening up greater opportunities and personally I’m going to stick with Pearl Lemon Group till I can, to learn by doing more.