Hey all,

 

I started the week being extremely tired and looking forward to going back to the weekend mode but actually, after Monday, days went by quite quickly!

In the past few days, I’ve worked on tweaking things on the three landing pages that we have built for Pearl Lemon Academy. They’re all part of the same sales funnel which has companies going digital as the target audience.

 

When you’re building something from scratch, you’re most likely going to take longer than planned to finish things because of the numerous unexpected issues that you’ll have to sort. Problem-solving can be fun at times but also quite frustrating if it delays your projects too much. The silver lining is that you’re always learning and that’s the best way to do things because you’ll remember them more easily!

This week more than ever I realised how important understanding the thought process of things is. This applies to different situations that I deal with almost every day. Examples include:

• Building sales funnels
• Understanding what your potential customers want and need
• Identifying the best strategy to enhance collaboration with teammates 

 

We’ve discussed this aspect during our weekly training when Deepak shared tips about project management. The learnings that stuck to my mind and that I find the most important are:

• If someone is not delivering something they have promised, try to understand the reasons why this happened and let them walk you through their thought process.
• In communication, be very precise and encourage people to be as specific as possible. For example, when you give a deadline, pick a date but especially a time. 
• Show people what you do instead of telling them about it and ask others to do the same. Regardless of the situation, the impact of this kind of communication will be greater.

 

Earlier this week, I’ve also attended another training session about leadership and here’s what I’ve learnt:

• Take inspiration from other leaders, but embrace who you are and find your own style of leadership.
• Check-in with your people and ask them direct questions about what is not working or not going well. Chances are that they may think something isn’t such a big problem and therefore they may not come to you to share it. But if you encourage them to talk about it with you, it will be easier to raise problems and find solutions asap.
• Giving someone the benefit of the doubt often isn’t a good idea because ‘how someone does one thing may be the reflection of how they do all other things’.

 

Last but not least, this week I’ve started working on a new project and that is Plant Sumo Italy! We’ve already considered the idea of opening Plant Sumo in Italy months ago but then we’ve preferred to launch it in the UK first. This time we may take a different approach and the start was all about market research. We’re still unsure if this project will ever be launched – for now, we’re just testing the ground.

I’ll keep you posted in my next updates!

 

My pizza is waiting for me on the table, time to go!

 

Ciao,

Federica