Autumn Gran

Luck and grit, honestly. The relationships I built over the years are what actually made my success feasible in the first place. Past clients reached out to me the moment my full time job came to a close, which led to me starting my business. It wasn't easy, starting a business, growing a human and starting a networking group all within the first few months, plus navigating all the legal and operational foundations needed to run a business successfully - but when the only other option is to fail and give up all of the relationships and trust I've built with my clients and community you just keep going.

Luck may open the door, but the relationships and the determination to see it through are what get you invited back in!

Don't take no for an answer. When I realized my passion for marketing and wanted to pursue it as my degree, everyone told me to just transfer to a different school that offered a marketing degree. I was already involved in numerous departments on campus, on a billboard representing the school and couldn't imagine leaving my university. My supervisor at the time, the Career Services Director, told me to fight for it and build my own major instead of walking away from everything I had built. So I did.

I graduated in 2015 with an Individually Designed Bachelor of Arts degree in Creative Advertising and that same university now promotes designing your own major to incoming students. Just proving that you don't always need to take the easy road, as sometimes the journey itself is worth it.

People love to say that marketing is women's work. That behind every company's social media post is a twenty something female intern posting pretty pictures.

Prove them wrong. Marketing isn't the floofy, pretty side of a business, it's the grit of getting into the dirt and muck of a company to find what actually makes them different. Lace up your boots, grab a hard hat if you have to, and go get it.

The biggest challenge is that everyone thinks they're a marketer with the age of ChatGPT and other AI tools. Having the tool doesn't mean you know how to turn that prompt into actual leads or revenue. It still takes experience and the skillset to get into the mind of a customer, take data and apply it to a businesses goals and ensure that everything you do actually makes sense.

On the flipside, the opportunity is that if you know how to use AI technology correctly and can stay ahead of trends and Google's policy changes, you can do amazing things.

Being a human first. Not everyone understands all the crazy marketing jargon, or cares how the algorithm works, they care about running a business. So I prioritize speaking like an actual human, in plain terms with examples and I always keep not only the actual customer in mind, but the client too.

Transparency. No one likes sharing their address, phone number or email just to get spammed with an over the budget marketing agency. I believe in putting my prices and my packages right on the website, so any customer, competitor or perspective business can see exactly what they're getting into before we ever even speak.

Be yourself, have your dry humor, have your little puns, your dad jokes, whatever makes you - you. In the age of AI and em-dashes, we need more of our actual personalities to come through.