Marketing maven, Tegan Addinsall, a senior marketing manager at Marketing Eye Melbourne came rushing through the front door of the office today with the biggest smile on her face. It was 7.30am in the morning, and although I was at work, I hadn't even put my makeup on and certainly hadn't finished my first cup of coffee.

"I love my job!" rejoiced Tegan. Indeed she does. Every day she enters work with the greatest smile on her face. She is incredibly smart, and knows her "stuff" better than most. Sometimes annoyingly, she laughs and smiles so much that I want to bump her over the head with a book, so she can come down to my level (not really!).

I can't help wondering what I did to deserve to be continually packing things up and moving but somewhere along the line in the last year or so, it has been something that has become almost second nature. So much so, that I don't think I had time to unpack everything.

Four hours of checking to see if I have everything, and packing up my most valuable possessions, I am finished. My dog is looking at me scared about what possibly could be next. Moving still isn't something she is use to and I realized early in the piece that it is what brings her the most fear. For that matter, it does the same to me, however my New Years Resolution this year was to put myself in "uncomfortable" situations and I have certainly lived up to that.

You may be thinking that I am plain mad. What is a 40 year old woman doing moving around like an unsettled teenager? Well, its simple - I have a plan and it requires my undivided attention and for now, I have to keep living out of a suitcase - and its not fun, nor easy and it certainly isn't comfortable in any way.

There is one thing we all know for sure about business as we go into the future:

The way your business wins in the future is very different than the way it has won in the past

Just when we think we have got it 'sorted out' something else comes along and again, small businesses fall behind the eight ball.

If I look back on the past 20 years or so, business has changed dramatically. 

• Globalization is changing the way we work, play and learn
• Technology affects every element of our lives and being
• Employees have become the single most important part of any business
• A person can no longer just blunder into business and expect to survive
• Old business models and paradigms have changed and will continue to do so
• Connecting with customers doesn't come just by word of mouth, a strong sales team or advertising in the local newspaper
• People have changed.

There are so many things that have and are shaping our world and with that businesses are now required to make changes that not only impact their businesses but also the way their employees, community and stakeholders view them.

When evaluating the marketing budget of our company, it became apparent that printing was a significant cost. As such, when it came to printing our custom published marketing magazine, it was time to do things a little differently. 

At first, my design department sourced quotes. They ranged from $18,000 up to $33,000 for exactly the same product. I was fine with paying $18,000 but not so fine to find my normal printers quotation significantly higher at $33,000. It literally had me stopping in my tracks and evaluating what I was doing and whether it was worth it.

Then, as if someone was looking down on me, a company was referred to Marketing Eye to do some of their marketing. It was an online print automation company that specialises in reducing the cost of printing so that marketing departments can reinvest the savings back into their marketing campaigns. I personally worked on this account because I was interested in seeing what they did differently. In the end, I became as passionate about their business, as they became of ours. On top of that, they saved us 45% of our printing costs.

Today, I thought I would give the founder of this business, Mark Alioto a call to talk about what they do differently at ECM.

It was eight years ago when I first came up with the idea of producing a custom magazine for my business Marketing Eye.

I put it in my business plan and had every intention of doing it. 

Over the years, I have been dumb-founded by what former employees have written on their LinkedIn profiles about what they did while working at Marketing Eye.

The first one that had me gob-smacked was a French assistant, who wrote that she had developed and managed the Marketing Eye brand, building the company’s marketing strategy and executing it.

In reality, she was a personal assistant, who had poor English and was struggling to do any task at all from an administrative perspective. She didn’t write anything, had no contact at all with design or branding but was excellent at organizing my dinner appointments, assisting me with my wardrobe and in general being a great personal assistant, albeit one that could not write on an email on my behalf because of the poor English factor. She worked for me for a few months only which I did it as a favour for her boyfriend who was a good friend at the time. In the end, I had to tell him, that her English was so bad, I couldn’t afford the luxury of her impeccable taste in clothing, makeup and picking restaurants at that stage of my life.

Well for starters, if everyone is walking in one direction, turn around and run in the other.

That's according to experts, who admit that yes - creatines often do their best work over a game of ping pong.

Mark Held from www.thinksalot.com.au says the key to good advertising is keeping the message simple.

"You're essentially telling a story," the award-winning creative director tells news.com.au.

"So the story should always appeal to its audience, and be delivered in the right tone of voice.

"It's about finding something interesting and truthful about the product or service, then giving it a pinch of wit and charm so it becomes more easily palatable to the people you are talking to.

It's a cold but sunny Sunday morning in Buckhead, Atlanta. After a nice of soft snow flakes and below freezing temperatures, the sun has decided to come out and shine, and everyone has decided to get out from beneath their doonas and brave the beautiful spring day.

I am sitting in a crowded coffee shop, sampling yet another Caribou carefully brewed coffee that lacks the lustre of Italian coffee but all the same, isn't so bad for a somewhat subdue coffee culture.

As business owners and managers in an ever evolving world, our jobs become more challenging every day – every hour – to cut through clutter and make consumers notice our message.

How many times do we find ourselves repeating what we say to co-workers to get a message across?  For most of us, this isn’t a reflection of how we’re gauged as professionals or individuals but 95% attributable to the ‘151 rule’.

They say a person needs to hear new information at least three times before it registers into his/her mind for immediate recollection.  This has been taught over and over again to us and you can test it by saying aloud a new name you come across three times consciously.

When you target a market with a specific message the same rule applies, all except your target isn’t one person and those three times won’t cut it.  It’s all about repetition.  You have no control over which people are listening at what time of the day - so the logical bet is to be accessible and available 24/7/365.