Plotting Out The Next Year For Pearl Lemon

  Morning guys, Here’s the time today: I thought I’d use this blog as an opportunity to do some planning or ‘brain dumping’ as these blogs end up being a lot of the time – about my next steps with Pearl Lemon. So – We’ve rolled out Pearl Lemon PR into a separate website (this was a ‘long-time coming’) as it felt the time was right. I’ve actually just done a quick count of all of the service pages related to PR on the Pearl Lemon website: 17 service pages all related to PR, and a further 12 blogs. So that’s 29 pages, with about another 10 coming. [convertful id="197358"] Let’s round it up to 40 pages total. It seemed like a good time to build out a PR website. The same thing is happening from the ground up with Pearl Lemon Web: Pearl Lemon Accountants: And Pearl Lemon Properties: i.e separate website that we hope will drive traffic and a decent amount of business over time. As I write this – it’s evident to me what’s lacking…. An inside sales team. i.e 3 people solely dedicated to generating new business for the Pearl Lemon Group. People that can get on the phone, be effective with it and start drumming up new business across all of the brands. This is the part of the Pearl Lemon equation that needs solving. Let me think about what would be the biggest changes I could make to accelerate the business:

• Hire 2 more inside sales reps paying anything from £15-24k in their first year depending upon their experience and ability
• Hire a PPC expert to spend £1,000 per month on ads and pay this person £500 to manage the campaigns possibly?

On balance – there’s no ‘perfect solution’ to this. Any route I will take requires significant investments of time and energy on my side. All of them will take time to work and I need to make a concerted effort on one niche to ensure it delivers results. The irony of all of this is that it makes me think the best way to do this is to build funnels. A funnel that can generate sales and applying ad spend to it. With all of that being said – I’ve still got the growth of Serpwizz and Sendkoala that could power a whole new load of clients. With all of this being said – it is useful to consider the marketing activities I’m about to get engaged in/am currently engaged in that I think are going to drive success:

• Vasco our first full-time inside sales guy has come onboard
• We’ve got rid of some of our weaker sales performers and in Gary (my nephew) have someone who can stick to the path and become a powerful asset to the business
• Lydia is being continually upskilled to make the whole lead-generation team’s management and reporting better
• Our Philippines team in Chill, Anne, Kristel and Macky hopefully continue to do well
• Anusharee seems promising as well – everyone is happy with her, the same with Carlos.
• In Lydia, Chill, Anne, Kristel, Macky, Anu and Carlos we hopefully have a much much more stable lead generation team
• We’ve discovered with onlinejobs.ph and internshala that we have two websites where we can unearth great people at very effective prices
• We have an office in Kampala, Uganda and I hope that this will become a powerful place of recruitment and growth for the business
• We’re slowly scaling cold email outreach to 500 emails per day in a bid to generate more leads via cold email

These are things that have all happened over the last 2-months, and I guess I forget how much progress has been made in a short span of time. One of the things that I definitely am doing badly is the ‘go slow to go fast’ philosophy – in all of this madness – some things aren’t getting worked upon effectively – and perhaps this will be the subject of my next blog. A kind of rant that will walk through all of the things that need to be worked upon that I’ve just not done yet…. Yes – let’s do that!