Emily Merrell  00:00

Hey, my name is Emily Merrell. I’m a taco loving people connector. And I’m obsessed with playing the name game and all things networking. I’m the founder of secondary society, a female focus networking community, as well as a business coach for female business owners passionate about bringing their business to the next level with the help of events, community and connections. I crave deep conversations, and I’m continuously curious to see what makes people tick. And I’m invested in uncovering their stories with some life lessons along the way. This podcast is aimed to inspire and educate as you tackle your busy day. So join the conversation and tune in for the second degree podcast. Hey, I’m Emily and today’s guest. I’m so excited to have the fabulous, most wonderful, smartest person I probably know Megan Hardy, the founder of happy mean ideas on today’s show. Megan, welcome to the show. Thank

 

Meghan Hardy  01:01

you. That was like a very low pressure introduction.

 

Emily Merrell  01:05

We’re gonna do math drills now. Are you ready? For one plus one, five. No, you got it. Nailed it nailed that. We’re in business. Now. Guys, I true story. Megan has been teaching Lexi and I all there is to know about launching your own Facebook and Instagram. I guess we just say meta I like I never got on board with meta so far. On fact, meta ads. And it is I feel like I’m in physics senior year. It’s a lot. Like it’s so much harder. This repeated.

 

Meghan Hardy  01:47

Yeah, it’s, um, there’s a lot to it. And I think, you know, metal likes to seem like it’s very easy to run your own ads. And I know, there’s like courses out there that are like, pay $89 and learn how to run meta ads, and you’ll have them set it up in five minutes. And I’m like, I mean, you could do that. But they’re probably not gonna work very well. No,

 

Emily Merrell  02:06

I mean, every week we learn something new. And I I am taking copious notes, like rewatching the videos that that Megan’s giving for us. So it’s been, it’s been really cool to learn about it really empowering. And really humbling all in one.

 

Meghan Hardy  02:25

Yeah, it’s been fun. I’m so glad to have you and Lexie in the class, and it’s been fun chatting with you guys. In the Slack channel. So we’re,

 

Emily Merrell  02:36

we, it’s funny being a coach and seeing how we are coached versus how people are coached. Like, I feel like we’re super users where like, we are going to take advantage of your Slack channel. And we’ve had super, you know, like super high tiered clients who never use us at all. And I’m like, what? Ah, awesome. You know,

 

Meghan Hardy  02:59

I love how engaged you guys are. And in the Slack channel and on the calls. Although I will say like, I am still learning how to manage like zoom comments while doing a zoom call. I’m always like, there’s too much to look at what button do I click, I accidentally going to hang up? What am I doing that?

 

Emily Merrell  03:16

I’ve done that before midnight presentation.

 

Meghan Hardy  03:19

I do that frequently on Google meet? Anytime like I go to share a screen and Google meet, I will like hang up on the call. That’s phenomenal

 

Emily Merrell  03:27

that you’ve I think Google, I don’t want Google to like, punish me for saying this. But I think Google meet is a piece of crap. Oh, it’s terrible. It’s terrible. I’m always so disappointed when someone sends me a Google meet link, I just automatically resend them a zoom link.

 

Meghan Hardy  03:45

That is a power move. And I love it. I’m

 

Emily Merrell  03:48

like, hi. I don’t like where I am on this. I don’t like any of it. But anyhow. Well, so Megan, I am so curious. How did you learn how to speak? Meta, and ads? And like understand all of this technology? Yeah,

 

Meghan Hardy  04:07

that’s it? That’s a great question. I’m like, do I have an answer on that? It’d be a little bit rambling. Um, any meta ads, I would say for about 10 years or so I don’t know when they launched their ads technology. But I started pretty early on. And, you know, I ran ads for a couple of years for different businesses where I was like working in house. And then I went to a really large business where they had a whole team that was like, dedicated to running meta ads. So I was like, Cool. I don’t really need to know how to do this anymore. I just need to know how to kind of like manage, or oversee a team that’s that’s doing this on my behalf. And then six years ago, when I left that very large company and went into consulting, I found that you know, even though I’m coming in As a fractional head of marketing, I actually need to know how to run these ads that are really granular level in order to get the most out of them. So it was a lot of, you know, diving in very deeply with our, with the channel managers that I’ve worked with and the agencies that I’ve worked with and asking just like, so many questions, and then starting to get a little bit more hands on. So I feel like I learned meta ads, and then I didn’t touch them for four years. And then I had to come back and, like, relearn everything that had changed with them during that time. Well,

 

Emily Merrell  05:36

cuz that’s the thing. Like we were talking about this the other day, just how, how much things have evolved and changed and the tools have her clunkier? Well, were we just boosting posts in the past or taking existing content? And so did you think that you would be this meta whisper? Um,

 

Meghan Hardy  05:58

I did not know. And I still, you know, I still, when I talk to people, I’m like, I’m really trying to pull myself out of the weeds of execution in all channels, I’m really trying to, like, just focus on the strategy. But I love the data. And I just love kind of getting in the weeds. And I’ve just found that a lot of the time, you know, if I’m working with a client that has an agency running their ads, a lot of the agencies are not all that great. Or some good ones out there. But there’s a lot of bad ones. And so I’m like, Okay, we’re gonna get into the weeds, and I’m gonna be very prescriptive, and giving you direction until we can get this account to a place where it’s performing better. And so, yeah, did I think I would be here? No, do I love it? Yes.

 

Emily Merrell  06:50

No, it is true that I feel like you’re kind of taught especially, or your pitch by agencies in a way where people feel like, they have to, like, you can’t do it on your own. You have to hire an agency. Oh, and you have to be the agency $6,000 a month, and you have to have a budget of at least $6,000 to run ads. Oh, and if you don’t have that, then you’re a failure. And you’re gonna die. Like, that’s kind of yeah, that’s, that’s the bad outcome for sure. So it is, I think, wildly empowering to be able to be in the position you’re in to empower people to do their own and, you know, be more brave and doing something that seems wildly intimidating. Yeah, it’s

 

Meghan Hardy  07:37

been fun. And I didn’t, I didn’t expect to be launching and leading, you know, the meta ads masterclass. So that was kind of a fun thing that evolved. Yeah, really, just during December of last year, I felt like I was getting, you know, through the online communities. I’m in so many questions about how to run ads. And most of them were about Matt and Google. And like, I don’t really get in the weeds of Google for many reasons. But I was doing kind of all of these free 30 Minute Calls just to like help people navigate meta ads. And I was like, Okay, this is, you know, I only have so many hours in the day. And so I decided to host a couple of free info sessions on meta ads. And I was kind of putting together the content for those. And I was like, this is like, really just scratching the surface. So like, How can I? How can I help these business owners be able to run ads on their own or be able to, you know, manage an agency more effectively? Yeah.

 

Emily Merrell  08:42

It’s so cool. So let’s break it down for our listeners today. So I know, this isn’t a 30 minute free call with Megan. But I level can we talk about who needs? Like, at what point in your business? Is it a good idea to invest in meta ads? Oh, that’s

 

Meghan Hardy  09:02

such an interesting question. Um,

 

Emily Merrell  09:05

it’s like the chicken or the egg. Yeah, um, I think that,

 

Meghan Hardy  09:14

you know, before you invest in meta ads, there are a few foundational things that you need to do. One is, you need to have a pretty good understanding of who your audience is, and kind of what drives them. Um, I would say to us, you have to have a willingness to like, get real comfortable with your with your business metrics, both like from a profitability perspective. And just from getting into the weeds of like, marketing, performance metrics. You don’t have to be an expert going in you just I think you have to have that willingness to learn then, and we talked about this in the course and it’s one of the reasons that I think like doing a six week course is very important versus just kind of Like, Oh, I’m just gonna, like, start some ads and see what happens. Um, I think you need to have, like, meta ads don’t exist in a silo, you need to have a solid website in place before you spend money to drive traffic to that site. And generally, having a good email program in place is also really important because it’s going to take some of the pressure off of those ads to do the heavy lifting. And so those are the things that I think are really important to have in place before you start to think about ads. And I guess the one other thing I would say is, you’re going back to the data, having a sense of what sort of profitability metrics that you need to be hitting. And if you’re like, I absolutely need to be profitable on day one, I’m running these ads, like this is not the time for you to launch those ads.

 

Emily Merrell  10:47

Well, and I think that’s, that’s a lot of the mindset to where people are like, well, I need to, I need to see this return on investment yesterday. And so there’s a lot of scarcity going into it with, with launching ads. So. So backing up, you say basically having like a strong understanding of what you’re selling, having a website that makes sense and isn’t just empty, and says coming soon, having an email presence, or an email list or a structure, at least of some sort. And then when we think about running ads, what’s a realistic amount of time that you recommend people run ads before they see results? This is like a multi part question. And two, how much money should they anticipate spending? When running ads? Yeah, um,

 

Meghan Hardy  11:39

so my annoying answer is always depends. There’s, you know, there’s no silver bullet and marketing. And if there were like, everybody would figure out what that thing is, and do it and everybody would be crushing it until the audience gets tired. That sad, generally, you know, I see it take about two or three weeks to start to get traction on an ad campaign. And I would say, you know, I’m like, I say that, and then I’m like, No, that’s not really true. Like a bit of a ramp in terms of if you’ve never run ads before, and you don’t have data on, you know, this is exactly who I’m targeting. And this is the message that resonates with them. There is a bit of a ramp period in terms of doing some testing and optimization. And there are types of ads that you can turn on, and they are optimizing for conversions, and those might start driving results real quickly. But those results are going to be a little bit more expensive, versus if you run ads that are optimizing to drive traffic into your site. And this is maybe the first time people have heard of your brand. And they need to be the nurturer down the path to conversion a little bit. Most apps are gonna be a lot more cost efficient in general. But, you know, that timeline until you start seeing results is going to be longer. So there’s kind of this tension between speed and efficiency.

 

Emily Merrell  13:06

And to your point, so there’s traffic ads, can you actually I was gonna say them all, but I’m gonna butcher them up? What are the different ads that people generally run? For the end result? Yeah,

 

Meghan Hardy  13:22

um, so there’s a bunch of different ways that you can set up your ads to optimize or different ad objectives, I guess, I guess, I would say, there’s two that I tend to use the most. And those are either going to be traffic ads, or conversion ads, and with traffic ads, meta is optimizing them. And when I say optimize meta, it means that meta looks for the people who are most likely to take the action that I want to drive, and it’s going to try and serve my ads to them. So if my objective is traffic, then I am optimizing either on link clicks or on landing page views, which kind of sounds like the same thing, and they kind of are. One is a little bit higher intent than the other. So those are ultimately going to drive traffic to my site. And as I was saying, those tend to be cheaper. They they cost less per 1000 impressions, but they’re driving people who are likely to visit your site and those people aren’t necessarily ready to purchase right away. The other type of ad that I run a lot is ads with a conversion objective. Those ads, meta is looking for people who are likely to convert on your site and typically conversion means purchase in this instance, but it could also mean something like add to cart although tend not to run the add to cart ads. They tend to not perform as well. And so, because purchasing is a much higher intent action than visiting a site, those conversion objective ads are much more expensive on a cost per 1000 impressions basis, but you aren’t going to see people typically convert faster. So those are like the two main types of ads that I usually ran in, there are lots of other objectives and actions that you can optimize towards anything from driving engagement with your organic social to driving email or webinar signups on your site. And I love that, you know, in the course that I’m in with you, right now, you’ve

 

Emily Merrell  15:45

shared some incredible examples of past clients of maybe they were doing ads on their own and didn’t really understand it, but then they worked with you, and you were able to optimize the marketing a little bit more. So like, you would give an example where someone was sending people to the DMS and you think about the how someone has to hang out in your DMS and you have to manage those DMS and how annoying for your thumbs. And, and then you I think you’ve got them on a mailing list instead? Or can we can we talk about some case studies? Yeah, for

 

Meghan Hardy  16:20

sure. So the one you mentioned, yes, I was working with a, a wellness coach, who she’d been running ads, and those ads had been driving people into her DMs. And to your point, she was like spending so much time in her DMs. No one was ultimately converting. And there was something else going on that was causing that with her targeting. She had been targeting, look alikes, as we call it, of people who followed her organic social accounts. But those people were just hanging out there for the free content, they weren’t going to convert to like a high ticket program. And so we made a bunch of changes for her to her funnel. We actually turned off ads initially, because they were a waste of money. No one was no one was converting.

 

Emily Merrell  17:12

We got let’s see, what did we do? We

 

Meghan Hardy  17:17

she had already a webinars so we knew we wanted to drive people into that webinar. From the webinar, we wanted to move people into an email funnel that would nurture them along the path to applying for and then ultimately enrolling in her coaching program. So we mean sure that her webinar page was like cleaned up easy to figure out what do I do had a compelling message to get people to give their email address to access the webinar. And then we did a lot of work cleaning up her email funnel post webinar, as well as her actual coaching application. And then once we had those pieces in place was where, you know, we turned back on the ads, and we had been parallel passing on new ad creative. With the new ads, we changed her objective from

 

Emily Merrell  18:12

engagement with the kind of optimizing

 

Meghan Hardy  18:14

events of driving people into her DMs. And instead we ran traffic ads. So we were driving people to her landing page with the webinar. We also changed up her targeting to be based on interests and demographics rather than targeting look alikes of her organic social followers. And that made a huge difference. And I don’t have the numbers in front of me. But, um, for one thing, we we cut her cost per lead, but by I want to say like 36%, it was over 30% I know that and she had been like, pretty happy with her cost per lead to begin with. So that was a big win because it meant that she had to spend less money to get the same number of leads. Phenomenal. Yeah, that’d be great. Yeah, right. She was also no longer spending all of her time in her DMs. And then she started to see people actually convert with the new targeting and the new funnel we were moving them through. So that was that was an exciting one.

 

Emily Merrell  19:16

So it’s like she had good intentions for doing the ads. But it was a little misguided in how she was doing it initially. And then you were able to clean up the the process and the flow. Yeah.

 

Meghan Hardy  19:29

And I mean, she also, you know, she had been working with an agency on her old ads. And I think this is often a challenge because agencies can they can they can talk a good game. There’s just putting it bluntly, there’s a lot of marketing bros out there.

 

Emily Merrell  19:48

Who taught me Yeah,

 

Meghan Hardy  19:49

a real good game. And it was one of those and he was like running the same style of ads for like everybody he worked with. He wouldn’t run Anything but DM ads. And so my client kind of knew that like, maybe this is not the way to go, she knew that she didn’t want to be in the DMS. And she just needed somebody to come in and be like, here’s the right way to do it for your business. Like there are other businesses where like, maybe they want to be in the DMS and maybe they want to be running the same style of ads as like everybody else. But

 

Emily Merrell  20:23

next life, I’m going to be a marketing bro. Like, really? Sounds great.

 

Meghan Hardy  20:29

I just have their confidence.

 

Emily Merrell  20:31

I know I want the confidence of a marketing bro. No, like a 23 year old marketing, bro. Absolutely the younger, the better, the more confidence, I feel like, like we’re all given a bucket of confidence when we’re born. And then like, it just gets sucked out of you. As you get older and older. Even though you’re wiser and wiser. It’s just like, nope, where did that?

 

Meghan Hardy  20:53

Yeah, I was chatting about this in the comments of LinkedIn earlier today, where just somebody had posted about some absurd feedback that she had received in her career when she was like, you know, in her early 20s. And I was like, I also received very absurd feedback in my early 20s. And like, are the men not getting this feedback?

 

Emily Merrell  21:16

Yeah. Oh, yeah. And that, like, paralyzed you for half of your career? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Let

 

Meghan Hardy  21:22

me change my entire personality based on this feedback that I should try smiling when I write emails.

 

Emily Merrell  21:29

We if you write him not smiling, does it come across in the emails?

 

Meghan Hardy  21:33

Apparently, I was being too direct in my email communication. And I needed to smile when I was writing them so that I would sound friendlier. That’s

 

Emily Merrell  21:41

incredible. That is beautiful, jerky feedback that I’ve ever heard. Let’s, I was thinking about this today as my husband was ignoring me. I have this. I, I feel like I’ve like golden retriever energy, basically. And one of the things that happens is, when I worked in corporate whenever my boss would come in, I’d be like, Hi, good morning. And then she’d like leave for lunch and come back. And I’d be like her. She sat me down once and she was like, Can you not announce my comings and goings? And I was, and I was, I think I like went to the bathroom and cried because I was just like, when you see someone you say hi to someone like that’s what I learned as a kid and growing up like you’re being polite. Well, I was actually like, not being polite to her. I was announcing that she was running late, or she was coming in or leaving early or whatever. Yeah, so that was like a whole complex. And so I noticed that I do that though, with my husband. Like, he’ll like come in from the rock is Brian and I’m Mike. Handy. Do you like leaves the shower? And like, how are you? So that’s one of the advice definitely didn’t stick? It’s still lingered. Good. I mean, I’m glad it didn’t stick. Yeah, even he just ignores me, so it’s fine. instead. Please, stop. No. But yeah, anyway, sorry. I derailed. But okay, back to meta ads. In fact about ads. Sounds so and then in addition to meta, you also you have an expertise in your like a rent a CMO? Yeah,

 

Meghan Hardy  23:25

that is one way to put it. Yeah. So I am a fractional cmo and growth advisor to female forward consumer brands in the E commerce space. So

 

Emily Merrell  23:37

what else is encompassed with your fractional CMO? Yeah, so

 

Meghan Hardy  23:42

the way I typically work with brands is I will come in and be there. They’re part time see my most most of my clients call it ahead of marketing. I work with startups for the most part. And we don’t like to talk about C suite in startups, I guess. But I come in, oftentimes, if they have a team in place, I will be leading and managing that team. Oftentimes helping, you know, figure out who else do we need on this team. I’m scoping those roles, helping with hiring. I do a lot of work with hiring and overseeing and sometimes managing out different marketing agencies. And really, like helping get a strategy in place because I work with startups a lot of the brands that I work with, they’ve kind of been like, operating and get shit done mode. Sorry, can I swear on your podcast? Fuck yeah. Okay, amazing. They’re operating him get shit done mode, and they’ve got like this great team of doers. But they’re like, we’re kind of just throwing spaghetti at the wall. We don’t really know what works. We feel like we’re not being as efficient as as we could be. And so I come in and help them stop throwing spaghetti by figuring out like, well Let’s dig into the data and figure out what’s actually working. And then you’ll build strategy is maybe a strong word for a lot of startups, sometimes it’s more about like, we need a roadmap, we need a strategic roadmap of here’s what we’re going to be focusing on. And getting that in place and leading the execution.

 

Emily Merrell  25:21

And I don’t mean to be putting calling out all of your strengths in one one, you know, 30 minute session, but you also have a skill set in Amazon, too. Is that correct?

 

Meghan Hardy  25:33

I do. Yeah.

 

Emily Merrell  25:37

Oh, God, now we’re going down a different rabbit hole.

 

Meghan Hardy  25:40

Yeah, so I spent four years working internally at Amazon, which I loved to stay there for four years otherwise. And I’ve worked with a lot of clients, actually, you’ve probably worked on Amazon in some way, shape, or form for 20 years at this point? Yeah. It was, I was working on it very early. And then I’ve worked with clients who are selling on Amazon. And that is an area where I’ve really pulled myself out of the weeds of tactical execution, it just takes it takes a lot of time. And so it’s not efficient for my clients to have me being hands on keyboard in that channel. But I work with I will typically help them bring in agencies help them evaluate the agencies that they have in place managing Amazon, and then naturally I love like Amazon advertising and getting into the data of that and figuring out what’s actually working and not. And

 

Emily Merrell  26:38

when you say Amazon, like selling on Amazon. Okay, which I feel like could be a whole episode on itself, like how to create your own profitable Amazon store. Yeah. What we could sell. You sell anything on Amazon?

 

Meghan Hardy  26:55

I don’t. I think there’s a perception that Amazon is easier than it is.

 

Emily Merrell  27:04

And it’s not. That’s not. Yeah, no, it seems very cumbersome. Like a lot of the steps in terms of like, figuring out the right product to sell advertising the product getting the getting the reviews, like it seems like a multi, multi step game. Yeah.

 

Meghan Hardy  27:22

I think that to do well. You know, it takes time. It takes a lot of energy. And it takes ad spend to make it work. 

 

Emily Merrell  27:32

Yeah, a lot of ad spend. And I don’t know, I That sounds like a lot of left. Fun fact about me. I hate going to the post office. Does anybody like it? People love it. Like I have, I’d actually be curious if anyone’s listening, like, shoot us a DM afterwards. But people talk about their like love of going to UPS or love going to the post post office. I kid you not like three out of five times that I go, I cry. I get so overwhelmed this like, normal adulting thing that I’m like, What am I supposed to do? And they’re like, you pick out one of the things to ship it in. And then I’m like, where do I write the thing? And they’re like, you take a label. I just get so overwhelmed. And the guy’s always so grumpy and so mean. And I cry.

 

Meghan Hardy  28:23

Yeah, no, it’s bad. I mean, I try to avoid it. I mean, I’m in Seattle right now. And I try and avoid it just because it’s a whole thing of like, I have to drive there. And then I have to park and I have to go in and there’s a line in the slots like deal with but like, when I’m visiting my dad, he lives in a very small town, I think population maybe 3000. And like that post office is the bane of my existence. And he has a Pio box for all of his mail. And like I try and time my visits to the post office to avoid this specific person who works there and is just like, terrible to

 

Emily Merrell  29:02

deal with like, yeah, these lips. He’s worked there for 49 years. He was born in the back of the post office. Basically, it was delivered work. I don’t know. Yeah,

 

Meghan Hardy  29:14

I don’t like I can’t. And did

 

Emily Merrell  29:16

you know that also passports like I got my son’s passport there and you have to get it through the post office? Yeah, mind boggling. I was I feel like now when you renew your post when you renew your passport like you don’t really deal with the post office you just mail it in somewhere. Which is ironic because you have to mail it in. But yeah, you have to deal with a human and you have to go in and you have to get thing you can only pay with debit card. It were or checks like it was so overwhelming to me every executive functioning bone in my body was like freaking out. I had to get it notarized things notarized because my husband wasn’t there. It was just it was a lot Yeah. And they’re like, we’ll give it back to you in like, six to six weeks to like nine years. You’re like, oh, cool, okay. Yeah, no, it’s fine. It’s, I’m gonna just rock back and forth. Right. Um, so I love, I love that you are so multi dimensional. And I love all of the things that you bring it. And I think every person at some stage in their lives needs, needs a Megan, who just really enjoys the data and really enjoys that side of things. Because as business owners to your point, like there’s a lot of creatives or a lot of people who just want to bake the pies, they don’t want to deal with the advertisements that go to selling said pies. And you do a beautiful job of handling that. Well, thank you. Yeah, wasn’t

 

Meghan Hardy  30:53

always the thing that I thought I would like about my job, to be honest. Yeah. I was one of those kids that hated math, like hated math. And I would say even early in my career, if you’d told me like, how much data was involved in marketing, I probably would have run screaming. And despite that, I used to call myself data driven. And I’m like, looking back, I was actually just like, reporting on results. Like that was all that data driven. But now I’m like, I don’t know what the turning point was. But like give me a spreadsheet and a few hours on a Friday night and I’m very happy

 

Emily Merrell  31:34

sharing spreadsheets with you and you go to town, you don’t you love that date night.

 

Meghan Hardy  31:42

Somebody in one of my online communities reached out to me like last Friday, very end of day and was like, Hey, I have a financial model that like one of my customers have questions on? Could I share it with you real quick? And I’m like, I would love to do that this

 

Emily Merrell  32:00

weekend. Just like buying you dinner. Amazing. Well, I am happy that we know your love language and attachment style. So this is awesome. Well, Megan, how can people find out more about you and happening ideas working with you? And all the goodness that you provide? Yeah, I’m

 

Meghan Hardy  32:25

mostly it’s it’s LinkedIn. I am on LinkedIn more than I would like, but I am there at Meghan M eg HN or DH AR dy. And I do have a website. It’s happening. ideas.com Um, yeah, those are places you can find me I’m like, am I forgetting something?

 

Emily Merrell  32:44

Nope. You’re like, no, that’s it. That’s those are the places. Yeah. And you’re. You’re great on LinkedIn. Well, we are gonna switch gears and we’re gonna move over to some last questions for you, Megan, you ready? We’ll find out. I will find out to you. We will make this happen real time. Okay, what is your favorite TV show? Currently? Oh, gosh. I’m so embarrassed. No, don’t worry. We’ve heard some deep dark secrets on the show. So yeah, everything you’re in a safe, you’re in a safe place.

 

Meghan Hardy  33:18

I am in such a long term relationship with the bachelor franchise. Like I have years. Has it been like what are the kids on it yet? Are

 

Emily Merrell  33:26

we at that point?

 

Meghan Hardy  33:27

I think we’re getting there. Yeah, I think I think it’s been like almost 20 years. And it’s not like, I feel like I need to qualify it. It’s not my favorite. It is one that I watch. A lot. It brings me joy. It’s nice to have on in the background. If we’re talking shows that like I don’t hate watch. I’m really excited for the next season of the Gilded Age. I’m very relieved that they renewed it for a season three.

 

Emily Merrell  33:55

I thought that was what what they’re gonna call the old like the Gilded Age now. Yes. I

 

Meghan Hardy  34:07

love that. No, I’m talking about the HBO show.

 

Emily Merrell  34:09

I like that one too. That’s good. Um, tell us an unknown fun fact about you. Um,

 

Meghan Hardy  34:19

I thought I was gonna be a movie director for my career. And I actually spent my first year of college and film school. And when I was in high school, I actually directed a music video for a local band that won like a small Film Festival Award.

 

Emily Merrell  34:36

What changed? Um,

 

Meghan Hardy  34:40

so your first year of film school, they make you take critical studies classes where you’re just like watching movies and writing about them. And I was like, this is not not fun. For me. This is not what I wanted to be doing. So they use it to weed people out I think and it was successful in my case.

 

Emily Merrell  34:57

They won. Well, thank goodness They did is you’re, you’re doing great. Who would be a dream person to be connected with?

 

Meghan Hardy  35:07

Yeah, you know, I was listening to your previous podcast last night and I heard you ask this question. I was like, I really have no idea.

 

Emily Merrell  35:14

I don’t know. I don’t know. What’s good. I appreciate the honesty, too. I you know, it’s funny I actually, a lot of these questions I put into, because I always struggle on people like who would you like have dinner with? And I’m like, huh, I don’t know. Like I love Frida Kahlo, but what I love to have dinner with her. Maybe what if I hated her after dinner? What about I’m on a pedestal? And then they’re off the pedestal? I don’t know. Yeah, that’s sad. Yeah, that’s a keep on pedestals. What book? Do you have a favorite book or something that you’re reading right now?

 

Meghan Hardy  35:49

Yes, I read so much. I have my background blurred but like it is books. There are books there are books there. Right now I am reading called Hang on. I’m gonna turn around.

 

Emily Merrell  36:03

It’s funny. No one can remember what they’re reading this.

 

Meghan Hardy  36:05

I know. I’m, I am reading like in physical book, West heart kill, which is a murder mystery. And I’m like Jury’s out on how I feel about it. But I’m gonna stick with it. Normally, I don’t like mysteries. I only like murders. No mystery. But this is interesting. And then I am listening on audiobook to demon copperhead. Which

 

Emily Merrell  36:31

loving everyone. Yeah, that’s on my list. I need to read it. After this book. I will read it. And what is your favorite emoji? Are you most used? Ah,

 

Meghan Hardy  36:43

I’m like checking my phone. We’re all guilty. I think it’s probably like the laughing emoji. Yeah, yeah.

 

36:53

I think it’s called like joyful emoji. And then like I use the melting faced one a lot.

 

Emily Merrell  36:58

My favorite emoji right now. It just describes every feeling and emotion. It does good ad was a really good solid ad. Yeah. And then my final question for you today. Megan is what permission Do you have? Do you want to give our listeners? Oh, gosh,

 

Meghan Hardy  37:16

that’s an interesting one. Um, I think to just do the thing. You don’t have to have it figured out perfectly. Just start doing the thing. That’s how I built my business. I’m chaotic, but like

 

Emily Merrell  37:28

it worked out in the end. I completely agree with it. Oh, well, Megan, thank you so much for sharing all of your wisdom and your insight today. Guys, go do your thing. Play with Facebook, Instagram, meta ads, or whatever they’re called nowadays. And hire Megan to help you. Be confident before. Thank you. You’re welcome. And we’ll see you the next time on our show. Have a great day everyone.