Hello,

I’m back at work after my day off on 15th August. In Italy, it’s called “Ferragosto” and was initially created on 1st August as a public rest day for all workers. It was then moved to this day to coincide with the Catholic feast of the Assumption of Mary. As a tradition nowadays, Italians gather with friends and/or families and spend the day outdoors, usually having a barbeque or a picnic. I had a big barbeque at home with my family and as always, a lot of delicious homemade food was made, we still need to finish it!

Trying to recover from yesterday and despite still feeling tired, I went for a walk in the morning and am now taking care of a few tasks to end my work week.

This week was great and I am happy with the things I got done.

In particular, I created from scratch my first complete training course which I called “Pearl Lemon partners Toolkit”. Because we’re growing so fast, especially since I joined the team again this year, so many resources and databases were created and things were getting very spread out. That’s why I decided to build a place where all rules and links – to use in our daily life at Pearl Lemon – were recorded, organised and stored. This course is intended for:

• New partners who will learn what they need to do on a daily or weekly basis
• Older partners who already implemented some habits but still need to become more familiar with new ones
• Everyone who needs to find links, watch video tutorials, add things to shared spreadsheets where we brainstorm ideas, read training courses again and so on.

I got feedback from Deepak and Lydia so next week I will work on improving some details.

Here’s how the first page and general structure look now:

On Monday, we had 6 new people joining Pearl Lemon. These were:

• 3 social media managers on trial – we will keep only one of them
• 1 content writer on trial – we may or may not keep her and then will decide if we want more writers to hire in addition to this position
• 1 SEO Analyst who is on a programme of 1 year if everything goes well
• 1 Digital Marketer who will stay with us for 2 months only

The beginning of the week is always a bit busier as Lydia and I have to set things up for everyone. As I’m gaining more experience in this role, this time I tried to get almost all administrative tasks done by myself before Lydia woke up – she lives in a different timezone and is 6 hours behind me. I feel like I was able to support her more even if she still had to guide me in some steps.

After this, she is usually leading all groups on trial, while I am supporting and learning. However, for the first time, I was assigned to have at least one person to lead and manage by myself as a new challenge. This partner is Dan, our new digital marketer, who I was happy to meet and introduce to the main team.

Managing Dan was quite easy so far as he is just starting. This is possibly going to be my focus for next week when he slowly gets busier. I need to say though I’m satisfied with how I killed two birds with one stone. One of my tasks is to check that all partners have an appropriate workload and don’t feel overwhelmed nor bored. While speaking with Paula, another digital executive who joined us less than a month ago, I realised she was feeling too busy and needed some help. I offered to share some of her tasks with me so that Dan could get started with his first challenge and she could feel a little relieved. She thanked me many times for easing a bit of her stress.

What’s good about this partnership is really the opportunity. There’s always the opportunity to do more, learn more, try more. Challenges are encouraged as these are the only way to push yourself further than you think, quicker than you think. It’s all about learning to deal with the flow and making the most out of it.

This week, I learnt a lot about administration. There are so many details that need to be remembered and that are essential to avoid mistakes. I had to redo the same things many times because I wasn’t sure of how to do them. Little by little, I will create training and storage for this too.

About my Lead Generation role, there’s nothing much to say apart from the usual. Things are getting a bit slow now as most people are on holiday and suggest discussing it later on in September. As a consequence, I have stopped contacting new leads for at least two weeks while Francesco, our Italian Marketing Director at Kemistri, is also unavailable.

That’s all for now. I’ll catch up with you next week!

Federica