When building a business or taking the one you have to the next level, it is important to consider how you want to grow your nest egg. What happens when one marketing campaign turns into a rush for your product and service and is this the way you want to grow? Or do you want to maintain a regular increase in sales month-on-month at a sustainable level so you can keep customer experience at an optimum level and ensure that your team of people are growing with you?

In such a competitive market, small businesses face a unique blend of marketing challenges. Maintaining, achieving and succeeding as a small business is hard. Finding time to market your business in such an environment is not easy.

Catalyst, a non-profit organisation providing research services into women in the workforce recently reported that females made up only 16.3% of CEO positions and 34.1% of senior management positions in 2016.

Being a young woman with high hopes in business and seeing these kinds of statistics is both disheartening and motivating. On one hand, it pushes you to think “I can do this, I can really make a difference”, then some days you see the number of male figureheads of a company or even the country, shake your head and wonder if it’s worth it (pro tip: it is).

After relaying my 'two days from hell' to a confidante, who had an interesting reply, I realised the reality of my world. 

To put it in context, I replied to a text message with: "Life has to have challenges and your feelings have to be hurt to be alive. I wouldn't change a thing."

As a entrepreneur who has a belief that you should always finish something you start, I am hell-bent on Marketing Eye's global expansion, and the only thing that holds the company back is my ability to travel more often given that I have a dog at home to look after.

Baring this in mind, we expanded to the US, and have done so in a way that we can trial operating remotely and within a management style that is conducive to me getting enough sleep and being present to whatever team I am working with at the time.

People often ask me how I do it. I travel continuously and have so for many years, without as much as blinking an eye lid. Booking my next flights is to me just part of the parcel of having a job that takes me across three continents.

Fuck it! Seriously, I know I just swore but that's exactly how I feel right now. We keep holding ourselves back in fear of something. Actually, everything. But where does that get you? Nowhere, that's where.

Entrepreneurs are often driven by an idea, and many of them have not only a great idea but a way in which they believe will help make it successful; and that includes marketing.

The problem is that not all entrepreneurs are born marketers. Some may be born sales people and perceive this to be "marketing" but there is a distinct difference and once an entrepreneur is completely across this, only then are they are to make the right decisions for their businesses.

I've recently changed the narrative of my business. It's not something I took lightly. Re-defining what value you provide to the market place can be game-changing, or business destroying. 

If you look at Uber for instance, they could have failed, but yet they succeeded. Is it sustainable? Most probably. Is it worth the market value associated with the business? Not really. Did they not only change their original narrative, but create a new narrative for the entire industry - disruptive in design?

I am sitting in my hotel room in Atlanta reading the New York Times, as I do most Sunday's.

For me, it's the best newspaper in the world, with no other comparing to the ability of the NY Times to cover intelligent, thought-provoking stories that are based on facts, rather than a publicist's spin or worse, a journalist that is just trying to make headlines.

As I read through the business section I came across this: