Heyo,
I’ll try to make this update quite short because my eyes are begging me to get away from screens but I have a few things to say, so here’s me trying to be as clear and concise as possible!
Monday morning
I get started on my day focusing on the two big projects that needed more work:
- Plant Sumo Italy – finish the market research and record a loom to summarise the main points
- Pearl Lemon Academy – tweak a few things in the landing pages about design, content and strategy
Monday afternoon
Something felt off and I had been trying to set up a call with Deepak since last Thursday to get his feedback on these projects.
On Monday, we were supposed to have a team meeting with Pearl and Giulia too but unfortunately, they couldn’t make it so I ended up doing a 1-to-1 call with Deepak because I didn’t want to put this off anymore. The girls and I had already discussed a few points on WhatsApp so I tried to report their thinking too.
Plant Sumo Italy seems like a great project but the timing probably isn’t right. Even if Covid-19 forced the Italian population to choose the delivery service way more often than before, the food and beverage industry is going through a significant crisis and opening a new business now wouldn’t be that easy. Not to mention that in Italy there is way more bureaucracy and laws to deal with than in the UK, so we expected things to take way longer than it took us to launch Plant Sumo in London.
There are also other reasons why we were unsure about the overall project. But long story short, Plant Sumo Italy is now put aside for a while.
When it was time to discuss Pearl Lemon Academy, I showed Deepak the sales funnel that we’ve built and we both agreed on the fact that it wasn’t bad at all! However, we were still not there and Deepak realised it was better if we put this on hold until he builds a sales funnel from scratch and then can share his learnings with us.
Yes, we stopped everything that I was working on. But our decisions were made on logical reasoning and, even if it is a bit disappointing not seeing the results we wished and worked for, we’re happy to take the time to do things right. We’re glad we got this unique opportunity to experiment with things in the field and we’d love to start working again on Pearl Lemon Academy as soon as we have a clearer direction to follow.
In a matter of minutes, I had no more tasks to do apart from everything that is related to HR and that I am still involved in. I’ll be honest when I say it didn’t feel too bad and I was curious to see what I was going to be focused on from that moment on.
Tuesday felt like a fresh start at Pearl Lemon.
As always, you go from “uh, I don’t have much to do” to “I am swamped with things” in half a day (or less!) haha I was ready for it! At Pearl Lemon, there’s always A LOT to do, you just need to ask a few people and they’ll be happy to share their work.
I’m not going to list out everything I had on my new to-do list, but these are the two branches where I’ll be working on the most:
Serpwizz
- Our On-Page SEO Tool that we’ve been developing with a technical team for the past 7 months or so
- We’re about to launch it and things are getting busier and busier
- I’ve always heard about things at Serpwizz but was never really involved in the day-to-day tasks
Plant Sumo
- (As you probably already know) our plant-based food delivery service in London
- The business is going great and growing little by little
- We currently have a new digital marketer, Aishah, who is working on a lot of the marketing, lead generation and social media activities
Deepak told me he wants me to be
- REACTIVE with Serpwizz and help only when needed – apart from the next 2 weeks when the tool will be launched and there will be more work to do
- PROACTIVE with Plant Sumo, suggest anything I think has to be implemented or changed and help Aishah organise the big workload she now has
I’m quite happy with the new plan and there’s clearly a lot to produce, work on, build from scratch, and adjust. It’s like a new adventure and I’m curious to see where this will go.
I lied, this weekly update was actually quite long and I would still have more things to say but I’ll keep them for next time.
Well, at least I hope you enjoyed reading my blog!
Until next week!
Ciao,
Federica
P.S. This is me and my puppy waiting for people to join calls 😀