Megan Boyd

Honestly, I attribute my success to knowing the work and not just the marketing. My current company focuses just on home service businesses, and I grew up in home service businesses. My dad has been in HVAC for most of my life, and my uncle owns his own HVAC business, so I was crawling under houses and diagnosing systems as a kid. When I sit across from a home service business owner, I can actually understand what's at stake for them, and I feel like that changes how you build for someone. The rest of it matters - 20 years in digital marketing, building my own websites, leading agencies, I even led SEO at Forbes - all of that mattered, but the foundation is the empathy, I think, that comes from genuinely understanding the trade. I think people can feel when you actually care versus when they're just an account number to you.

The best career advice I ever received came from my Memaw, which is the southern way of saying grandmother. She told me that time's gonna pass anyway, so why wait a year for something to happen when you could start today? That advice came from a woman who actually lived it - she was a trailblazer for women in our part of North Carolina and the first woman ever hired by any gas company in North Carolina. When men tried to push her out of coaching her son's Little League team, she stayed coach even though she had death threats, and she won the championship anyway. I think about her every time I try to talk myself out of starting something because the timing isn't perfect. The timing's never perfect, so start anyway. Her voice always lives in the back of my head.

I would tell them to tell the truth, even when it's uncomfortable, maybe especially when it's uncomfortable. So much of what I do is tell business owners the hard reality that really nobody else will, and usually that's that they're paying for marketing that isn't working. Being the person willing to say that honestly is a superpower, and I feel women are often conditioned to soften things. I say don't. Your perspective is an asset, not a liability. In home services specifically, which many people believe is male-dominated, women actually make the large majority of choosing which companies to hire for their projects, so I feel my point of view is something most agencies can't replicate. For women, stop apologizing for what makes you different, and start charging for it.

AI has fundamentally changed search, and I believe most agencies haven't really caught up to that. AI really turned things upside down. People are getting answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, even Google's AI overviews, without ever clicking on a website. That's terrifying if you're standing still, but it's also the biggest opportunity of my career if you're paying attention. I'm building expertise in answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization, so that my clients show up wherever their customers are actually looking, not just where they were looking 5 years ago. I think visibility, trust, and being the obvious choice in your market - that's really the game now, and the rules are getting rewritten in real time.

For me, I would say honesty and integrity. In my business, I only take one client per market. I don't mark up ad spend, and I tell people the truth about their marketing, even if it might cost me the sale, because I'd rather lose a deal than keep a client in the dark. And then just generally, family. I'm a mom to 6 children, and as I mentioned, two are autistic, and I've learned the hard way that working myself to the bone isn't really a badge of honor - it's usually just my perfectionism getting in the way. I'm still chasing that balance, but I want my kids to see a mom who's built something she's proud of without losing myself doing it, and I think that's the version of success that actually counts for me.