I love fall. It is by far my favorite time of year.  Living in Texas, I just wait for the cool-down after a brutally hot August. The State Fair of Texas, football, beautiful foliage, cool morning runs, pumpkin everything, and lovely weekends spent outside.

Beyond the weather and family fun of this time of year, it also becomes one of the best times of year to re-set your business and begin putting into motion the necessary plans to make 2016 great. I know many of my finance friends tend to grumble every October when the stock market does its usual third quarter roller-coaster, but as a marketer I'm putting plans into action. 

Here are five reasons fall is great for your business.

The business world is changing and how we search and consume information has drastically changed in the last five to ten years.  Possibly no other business disciple has changed more dramatically than that of marketing and staying on top of current trends is becoming increasingly more difficult.

As a company, Marketing Eye invests and trains its people to stay abreast of current trends impacting the market. We find for many of our clients, what has worked in the past as effective marketing and sales, no longer works.  We understand that when operating a business, staying on-top of the ever-changing marketing landscape is not only challenging, but time consuming and in some cases just not possible.

At Marketing Eye Dallas, we have not only owned our own businesses, but we have helped many entrepreneurs who struggle with the new sales funnels, automations, and digital communication landscape.

Deciding to outsource your marketing function is something business owners don't take lightly.  Here are the advantages and disadvanges of deciding to hire someone to manage your business' marketing.

There is so much discussion on the need to be more creative in the work place.  After all, 'to create' means to bring about what has not existed before.  The newest creation, innovation, or way of doing something, can make or break a company.  Netflix was able to create an entertainment market of watching movies, programs, and shows that had not existed before.  While other companies, such as Blockbuster, could not envision past the physical movie rental market.  It may be easy to identify creative companies like Apple and Google, but it is more difficult to tap into our own creativity.

Work, life, and the demands of everyday life are actually hindering our ability to be creative. The secret to tapping into your creative side, and letting your mind explore, may be found in a simple box of crayons.  The childhood activity of coloring is gaining in popularity with adults and may be our answer to increasing innovation by calming our mind and stimulating our imagination. 

For many years bids have been won based on two factors; one, who you know and two, being the lowest bidder.  If your company was able to perform the work and your proposal came in at the lowest price, you got the job. Over time, there has been a gradual shift towards design-build requests for proposals, along with an increased importance on qualified bidders.

This shift in preference of design-build proposals over lowest-bid proposals, and the increased importance placed on qualified bidders, has created a need for a B2B marketing strategy that did not exist in years past.

Every entrepreneur has a secret weapon of success.  It's what drives them to succeed, brings them up when times are tough, grounds them when business rocks and makes the entrepreneurial journey worthwhile. For me that secret weapon is my husband.

Today is our fifteenth anniversary and not only do we celebrate our time together, but our family and the life we have created.  As with most marriages of this length of time, we have had great times and rough times.  There is nothing like two lay-offs and a sick infant in the hospital to challenge your strength. Being married to an entrepreneur is no cake-walk. Often there is investment, risk and a whole lot of hoping, praying, hard-work and long hours. If you are an entrepreneur or are married to one, I am sure you can relate. 

Here are the qualities that every entrepreneur needs, in a supporter, to make them successful.

Let's face it, we are all busy.  Keeping up with the ever changing landscape of marketing, entrepreneurship, social media can be a challenge with an already full schedule. A tool that I have found that is both educational and entertaining is podcasts.  When stuck in traffic or sitting at an hour and half swim team practice, I really enjoy listening to others experiences in business. Not only is it a distraction from the parking lot of Dallas rush-hour traffic, I usually learn something that I can apply to my own business and life.

A good podcast is more than educational, it is entertaining. The more you listen, the more you really get to know and enjoy the host.  While the podcasts I listen to all have a business, entrepreneur or marketing spin, they also have a personal side. Think  more along the lines of "This American Life", and less like an economics college lecture.

Here are my top ten picks:

There's just something good about Friday. Most people see it as the second best day of the week (next to Saturdays).  But, Fridays can be the best day of the week for an entrepreneur.  Monday through Thursday is reserved for working like crazy in your business, but Fridays is the day to work on your business.  For me, Monday through Thursday is spent marketing my clients' businesses, meeting with prospects, attending events and writing marketing strategies for my customers.  I reserve Friday to reenergize my business and myself.  This is when I put together marketing plans for my own business, I set goals and budgets, write blogs, engage in activities that inspire my creativity, and connect with mentors, friends and others in my field.  

In the contest between the two sides to marketing, inbound and outbound, inbound is winning. While traditional marketing efforts have been placed on obtaining customers through creativity, understanding customers' wants and needs, going out and finding the next sale, the sneaky inbound marketers are servicing customers coming to them.

There will always be a need for outbound marketing, but for any company that wants to engage with their customers and is looking to offer a unique customer experience, inbound marketing is really the only way forward.

Most businesses have a marketing component, and if they don’t they should, but what makes a marketing department successful is the quality of the marketing manager.

A great marketing manager can be the difference between success and failure, or growth and stagnation.

I've been around the marketing scene in Dallas for over 15 years and I've worked with the very talented and some who ended up in marketing due to a misaligned company reorganization. In that case, marketing is being lead by someone for whom marketing is a foreign language.

As I continue to grow my firm, I'll be searching for marketing managers who are strong tactically. They can apply marketing and business tactics to real world situations. They are super organized. They understand analytics and they have a great attitude.

What do you do when you biggest competitor has endless amounts of revenue to invest in marketing, and you have very little?  You start a grass roots campaign.

We are still early in the 2017 presidential race, but one candidate has caught my attention.  Not from the issues for which he stands, but the creativity of his grassroots campaign. Bernie Sanders may be this fall's  ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.  He is looking  to get the democratic nomination for the 2017 presidential race and his competitor comes with a big 'brand name' and an even bigger budget. 

No matter what side of the aisle you sit, as entrepreneurs we all have been up against a competitor  with strong name recognition and a large marketing budget?  Tackling the behemoth in your industry may be as easy as rallying your supporters and spreading the word through grass roots campaigning and social media.  This doesn't mean you don't invest in marketing, it just means your investment should be spent in a way to maximize the greatest return.