You’ve got the skills, the service, maybe even a killer website, but how do you actually get people to notice? In a world flooded with content and AI-generated everything, standing out feels harder than ever. So, what do you do?
In this episode of Action Antidote, we’re joined by Reed Hansen, Chief Growth Officer at Market Surge, to break it all down. From finding your true audience to navigating tech overwhelm (hello, AI everything), Reed shares practical tips on marketing smarter, not louder. He also drops insights on how to stay human in your message, even as the internet gets noisier by the minute.
If you’re running a business, building a brand, or just trying to get traction in a crowded world, this one’s for you.
—
Listen to the podcast here:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:52 — 38.3MB) | Embed
How to Get Your Business Noticed Without Losing Yourself in the Noise with Reed Hansen
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about getting a business noticed, and this conversation may even get into this broader concept of getting noticed in general, because anyone that starts a business, your product could be amazing but you would need to actually get that product noticed. But, increasingly, in the traditional job market, we’re also seeing people need to find a way to get noticed, in the sense of every single job you apply for online now has 700 or whatever resumes, all kind of pointing in and it’s just a pretty crowded world out there in general with the internet having kind of connected everything with everything, everyone with everyone, and we’ll talk a little bit about whether or not AI tools have the potential to change that. But here to talk about just what you need to do to get your business noticed, I would like to invite my guest, Reed Hansen, the chief growth officer of MarketSurge and owner.
—
Thank you. I’m really glad to be here.
Oh, thank you for coming on. And so, I’m envisioning a situation a lot of people have where, okay, you’ve developed a product or a service, let’s just say someone just decides to go freelance because they got laid off or their job didn’t really work out well, it wasn’t what they wanted to do and someone just has a skill, say, you’re even like a graphic designer or something like that and this is a great skill set for a freelance option. So, if someone’s doing something along those lines, what do they need to be thinking about as far as, “Okay, I have this great skill set but now I need to get customers. Now, I need to get people to buy it,” essentially?
Yeah, no, that’s a great question, and I think really the essential question is you’re going into business for yourself. Obviously, you will have a certain set of skills from previous experience and attributes and talents but you want to be super hyper-focused on the needs of the customers you want to work with. And that is tricky because you want to understand both where are they located? Where are they found? Where is their attention focused on? And we talk about social media platforms. Is your audience more of a Facebook audience or more of a Discord or Reddit audience? And you need to understand those things and put yourself in the shoe, because you are not your customer. You don’t just instinctively have all the same interests and likes as your customer. You have to understand where they are and that’s the first thing. Where are they? And then you want to think about what do they need, what do they value. Some roles might be a little easier, like if you are an expert plumber, you kind of know what is needed and what they need, but if you come in as a creative, you have a wide, broad range of things that you need to tailor your offering.
An example, the plumber, right? I mean, your customer is a homeowner who had some sort of plumbing problem happen to their home. That’s just great, like 100 percent clear example.
I think it’s well established what those kinds of needs are, but I think a lot of us get into businesses that could work across a wide variety of different use cases and we need to decide which of those use cases we want to work on. It’s like you don’t start by saying, like, “I really like to blog and, therefore, I’m gonna sell blogs,” or, “I’m going to sell writing.” That’s just not enough. You have to make it more tailored and actually understand a group or a cluster of customers to take that to market.
And what goes into the understanding of the customers? Because a lot of people have traditionally talked about customers as in, okay, your customers tend to be upper middle class, age 35 to 50 something like that, right? But that’s not really a deep understanding of someone. I think what you’re talking about is understanding the customer’s needs, their pain points, what they’re going through when they’re going to see your service, and why they’re going to want to buy your service.
Right, exactly.
And so if you have previous experience in this role, it’s helpful to understand the people that you’ve worked with previously, and you want to look at motivations. You want to look at what are their needs. Share on XAnd even I think people might do the surface level of what are their needs and kind of cherry pick like, well, they need photographs, and I’m a photographer, so that’s what they need. It’s like, no, no, you need to go one or two more levels deep. Why do they need photographs? Do they see a visual medium is really important to preserving their memories and relationship with family? Do they have family that’s far away? Do they like to send out Christmas cards or holiday cards? Understanding what drives that need is really important. Say they really want to preserve the memories of their family. Okay, well, what’s important about their family to them? Is this an activity to create closeness or is this something –– do they just like wearing nice clothes or is this –– think about the depth to that and know the other products that might be part of this scenario as well, like, oh, they’re shopping for new clothes, or they really like to spend a lot around the holidays or –– like knowing the timing and all those things will affect what you go to market with.
And is there a possibility of going too deep?
Certainly, yeah, because you can definitely go too deep and be too focused on too small of a group. I like to use the customer persona approach and create usually it’s like a one page sheet and you’ve described your customer demographically, age, maybe gender, but also some like range of like incomes and kind of housing or maybe family status and maybe even occupation. But then you add little snippets of like frames of like if they were speaking their thoughts out loud, what would be some bullet points you jot out? And you can even give this person a name. You can create multiple of these personas, but that helps you identify your approach to messaging, any of the content you create or the platforms you focus on, are they primarily looking at the mobile website or the desktop website, and understanding those things through your persona.
Yeah. And how often do those things change? Because platforms seem to always be really fluid and I have some ideas about who’s on what platforms, but it seems like that’s something that like every year could be different.
Yeah, and I agree. I think yearly is a good –– that’s a good exercise to revisit your ideal customer profiles or personas every year, and maybe even more often, as our technology landscape has changed and big events happen, like the COVID shutdowns and that disruption, things like that can really affect buying processes for people and decision making. So, I’d say revisit it when there are major events that affect your ideal customers and annually.
Yeah, and I can’t speak to anyone listening any of your specific businesses but I know one kind of big event that’s happening right now that I think everyone is thinking about is AI and how AI is unfolding and how it has a potential to transform, I guess, everything about how businesses get themselves noticed.
I’m following this closely because I use a lot of AI tools for the work I do, but also I’ve just become aware that it’s a disruptor, it could replace things that I do, it could help accelerate things that I do, but also that it’s like changing at a logarithmic pace, like it seems to be even accelerating the rate of change within the AI world. And it’s a little intimidating because it’s hard to stay on top of all of it and I think, unlike some of the previous big leaps forward in technology, it’s like really cheap for consumers and businesses to use. At first, there was high barriers to entry with like phones or personal computers or things like that. It required some setup. But with AI, people that just try it, you can kind of take off right from when you start with ChatGPT. All of a sudden, you’re really using it and getting a lot of value out of it. So many factors kind of combine that make it concerning, and, of course, we’ve all seen the horror movies, the Terminators, the Matrix movies, and we fear this major cultural collapse or societal disruption. Doesn’t seem to have happened yet but I think it’s something to be attentive to.
Yeah. How attentive? I mean, because we’re thinking about, obviously, how AI has potential to disrupt industries, and when I think about historic disruptions, I think of disruptions that just kind of changed the way we do things. So, for example, the car kind of put the horse and buggy business out because it changed how we get around but it wasn’t a catastrophe, unless someone had invested their entire life savings in a blacksmith shop or something like that, kind of became a different way in which we get around. So how much should we be paying attention to AI as a potential disrupter on that level of how it might change the way we just interact with the internet in general, how we decide what to do and when versus some of these nightmarish, disruptive ideas that a lot of people have in their head?
I think we should be very attentive, and everybody that has the ability to read or has internet access, I think, should be using at least the free AI tools available to get familiar. I mean, I feel like this is not going to be something that we can avoid, not that we need to all of a sudden increase our screen time, which I know is a topic that you cover well, but I do think that if you’re doing Google searches on the regular, you should try to occasionally do the same search on ChatGPT and see how that works and get familiar. I haven’t seen, personally, a lot of jobs just vanish. I have seen a lot of people be able to do a lot more faster, so where you take like a solopreneur that is able to turn out a lot of marketing content or create more webpages with the assistance of ChatGPT where they used to have to hire or move more slowly. So, from the marketing function, it enables an individual to do more. And then an expert, like a blogger, can turn out a first draft or an outline faster, so they also can do more. I’ve been trying to push the limits, things like content generation and coding with the AI tools that I use, and they’ve really helped, but, honestly, these are projects I would not have attempted, I would not have even hired if I hadn’t had AI. So I don’t believe that I’m replacing human work in this case, I think I’m expanding my own reach. Now, there’s of course of balance. You don’t know when there’s a tipping point. One hopes that the economists from the early 20th century that thought that as technology came that we’d be able to work less and still have the same standard of living or better when technology increased and I really hope that’s the case with AI. I really hope that we can allocate resources that make our lives better. I mean, I don’t know that we necessarily –– like I don’t think the first thought should be save jobs. If we can maintain the standard of living and work less, that would be great too.
Yeah. So if we could just work 25 hours a week instead of 40, to use kind of standard numbers, and people can have their own thoughts about how much work people actually do at a four-hour week job these days, but if we just take that at face value, if we had the same standard of living or even better. My optimistic side has a view of AI as having the potential to actually reduce screen time because it could take something that would have required, say, hours of searching through the internet for an example, or hours of searching through the internet and building a chart, say, I want a chart that says, and I did this for a video recently, how many hours do we spend at home per day? And I want a chart that shows how it’s changed, because one of the things that’s kind of surprising is that the number of hours we spend at home starts really increasing around 2012 and it really jumps up at the pandemic, of course, but it hasn’t actually come down that much since the pandemic.
Okay, so it set a new floor on the time that we spend ––
Yeah.
Okay, interesting.
Yeah. And I don’t know if that’s going to change that much given some of these new shifts and priorities. A lot of people are more interested in outdoor stuff again and a lot of return to office pushes at a lot of jobs and so that number may actually be –– this is a number I only got for 2024 so 2025 number might actually start to show a movement back in that direction, but generating that chart was something that AI, I was able to do with maybe three prompts, one to set up the chart and a couple to kind of finesse it around what would fit the right dimensions and the right time periods and stuff like that. So that’s just one example I’m seeing where, like you said, generating that chart would have, without AI, taken going researching numbers, probably typing those numbers into an Excel spreadsheet on the basic level, or database in Power BI or Tableau and generating that chart and setting up the colors and stuff like that.
So far, I think it’s been great. And I think it has really improved my work quite a bit and I hope that continues to be the case. Looking forward to –– I mean, because the way we interact with AI is on our devices, but I’m looking forward to future innovations where we’re interacting with physical manifestations, like robots that can move objects back and forth or move from place to place. Did you see the Jony Ive from Apple who’s got his little device that he –– I’m kind of vague on the details but it’s like a little disc that you interact with without a screen and does a lot of thinking and processing outside of the platforms, which I think is going to be cool.
Yeah. I haven’t seen it but it does remind me a little bit of like Alexa or any of these other tools where –– and the most common example that I see in my life is, “Alexa, make the music volume five.”
Okay, right.
Something like that, because that’s like not even interacting with a screen at all, just you get the result, whatever change in volume or some weird fact like, “Alexa, who was the first person to serve nonconsecutive terms as president?” and then they’ll say it was Grover Cleveland or something and then everyone can move on with their lives without having to look it up online.
Right. Well, you brought up something that’s interesting. I remember the way we used to have dinner table conversations at my home. My kids sometimes think this is funny, because somebody would throw out a question and they’d be like, “Ugh, I can’t remember. What was the name of the lead actor in this movie?” and we’d have like three different guesses at it and we didn’t even know if we were right or not. It’s like, “No, I swear it was Harrison Ford,” “No, no, no. It was definitely Tom Selleck.” The conversation would just continue and we’d debate over actual facts, whereas that’s not even a conversation anymore. It’s just like, “Who’s that actor? Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll just check. I’ll just open my phone.” I mean, I think those conversations were sometimes fun, like trying to remember that thing we used to do, it’s just not something we do anymore.
Well, I grew up watching Seinfeld and that anecdote reminded me of an episode of Seinfeld where Elaine meets this guy who literally develops a loophole to get dates where he makes stupid bets on things he knows is wrong and then they have to ask someone else, so he bet Elaine that Dustin Hoffman was in Star Wars, that was one of the silly bets he made, and then she goes and asks someone else and they say no, and then he does a bunch of other similar antics like this to get girls to go out, he’s like, “Okay, I lost. I have to buy you dinner,” which is something that would make no sense to anyone who doesn’t understand a world before you could pull out your phone and look it up.
Right, right. Well, to that point, I do think our brain is almost kind of like a muscle that you need to work, to work it and practice recall and practice analysis. I think our recall muscles must be a little bit weaker because we have so much access to the internet at hand and, as we were talking about earlier, I worry that our ability to analyze things might be weakened by using the AI engines and how will that further challenge our conversation skills? Guess we’ll see.
Yeah. And my other question about AI is related to your example of pushing out a lot more content. I don’t know if you’ve heard anything about what people refer to as the dead internet theory.
Oh, actually, I’m not familiar. Yeah, maybe give me an overview.
Yeah. I’m sorry, yeah, I’m sure not everyone listening is familiar too but the dead internet theory is essentially a theory that the internet is essentially dead because a lot of it is bots or AI-generated content so it isn’t actually people interacting with people that if you go on the internet, you’re more likely now to interact with something that’s not human, a bot or something like that. And I think there’s some point recently that Facebook, probably the worst offender of this, the nonhuman-generated content now exceeds the human-generated content. And so one of the things that I wonder given, if you look back to, say, social media, no one would have thought that this tool designed to connect people would make us lonelier, whether or not we could get to a place where the world is just so crowded with content that, all of a sudden, it becomes this kind of secondary counterintuitive fact where content just kind of, I don’t know, just becomes no longer an effective tool.
Yeah, yeah. Well, there’s a lot to cover there. I, as you described there, I mean, that definitely resonates with me. I do think that there’s some material there. I have an automated voice bot that answers our corporate phone line. And a lot of calls come in after hours and that’s primarily when the voice AI picks up. But it’s been funny to hear occasionally a bot, like a AI voice bot is calling my receptionist voice AI bot, and we have a recorded conversation between the two and then they interact and ask questions and it’s like this is just bizarre that this interaction exists, and it’s going nowhere. I remember from the early days of Facebook where you used to just be presented in your feed all the posts in order as they were posted and you’d scroll through and you could check each day and you can see all the posts that your connections had made and you just kind of felt fulfilled, like, “Okay, I’ve got all the updates,” but then, in recent years, it’s been –– I mean, I think even before AI came about, it seemed to be very corporate, very like –– and then a lot more ads, and then now, with generated content, there’s a lot of gaming of this algorithm to know what gets promoted and I see very little personal anymore in Facebook or Instagram, like there’s a couple at the top but then you scroll through and you’re like, “I don’t follow any of these people in my feed.” It’s hard to know what’s authentic but I think it does push to the forefront, say, like in in a marketing context, the importance of authenticity and how that authenticity becomes more novel as time goes on, where you make posts with your real typos or you talk about something that isn’t necessarily promotional but actually it was just top of mind. And those kinds of posts, I think, almost catch your eye more than the very polished ones, and something to consider too when you’re creating content is to include –– I mean, don’t make it all produced by AI or automation but to include sincere thoughts and real experiences that you’re having.
Yeah. And I’ve actually seen some content pointing at that particular point. I guess the easiest way to put it is people who make a video where it seems like you just thought of something and then opened up your phone and recorded it as opposed to something that was like premeditated, rehearsed, thought out, and how the former, the, “Okay, I just pulled up and said, ‘Oh my god, I just thought of this,’” and blah, blah, blah is starting to get better received, particularly by the younger generations.
Yeah. I’ve had this theory for a while too that maybe one of these next generations or many generations will –– like there were in the 60s, there were people that were kind of throwing off a lot of societal constraints or mores around like sexual value, drug use, or whatever, but like the hippies of one of the next coming generations will just be like, they’ll just drop technology. They’ll just say, like, “No internet for me, no phone for me. I’m gonna live screen free,” or something like that. I could totally see that being a movement that they abandon and then we’ll be like, “You’re crazy. How do we get a hold of you? How do we text you?”
Well, I know there is a movement toward repurchasing some of those flip phones.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, some of us are old enough to remember, some aren’t, but I remember my first cell phone was one of those flip phone where you just pull it out and you had to like type and there’s a reason 143 and some of these other like three-number things that are kind of irrelevant today were like code words for things because it made it a lot easier to say something on these text messages than having to type like the number 3 three times to get the letter F or something like that.
And what was that? I don’t remember what that technology was but where it could kind of like understand, you just press the letter but in combination with the other letters, it would produce the word, like it would know ––
Yeah.
I got to be pretty proficient at that. And I kind of miss it a little bit because I felt like I could text super fast. But even in that phase, there was a real like tactile quality to those phones, the click of the buttons and the –– they felt a little bit more solid, like I always worry about dropping my very expensive iPhone whereas, what is it, the Nokia, whatever, that just was indestructible.
The story about the chat bot talking to the other chat bot, that’s where my brain goes into some of these scenarios and movies like I, Robot and Terminator or South Park’s “Funnybot” episode.
How many of these conversations are going to happen? I mean, I think we were kind of, when we started with automation, we’re sending mass cold emails out and then I’m getting out of office replies and nothing of value was exchanged but a lot of energy was burned, the remarkable amount of communication that happens that is just like thrown away or somebody has a sophisticated spam folder filter that all these emails just never get seen, they just get deleted. I have evolved over the last year or so away from the mass approach to and the quantity approach in marketing to spending more time with people wherever I can and I’ve actually found a lot of people, strangers, even, pretty receptive to kind of an open-ended invite to just like, “Hey, can we chat?” and I think this exercise of connecting over a podcast has actually been really productive, personally and professionally. It’s good for my brain, it helps me think through the issues of the day, but it’s interesting to hear the questions you asked and know what are you interested in, what can I dive more into in my own learning? What can I do to make my product offering better? Those are things that you just can’t get the same way from a ChatGPT conversation.
Yeah, and the same goes for like text messaging or even forums and stuff like that, because you’re only looking at words. You’re not seeing facial expressions, you’re not hearing tone of voice, like video calls, at least, you can hear tone of voice and see facial expressions versus in person, you can see everything and you could almost feel like you say something. You ever had one of those conversations where you say something and the person just kind of sighs because something about what you said unexpectedly, just, I don’t know, reminds them of something they didn’t want to think about?
Yeah. Oh, absolutely, yeah. And then all the body language cues, like are they surprised at what you said or reacting some way that kind of informs the response more. Yeah. I mean, I don’t know that I necessarily came in with this huge like thought about this but I think just over the course of just our conversation over the last few minutes,
And from a marketing standpoint or from a reaching your audience standpoint, how does someone maintain a balanced mindset in the sense of I need to look at what’s happening now. Where’s my audience now? But I know that that can change in a year or two. And I think there’s a potential for someone to look at all this change and say what’s the point of investing resources in what made 2025 looks like if I know 2028 is going to look so different?
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think, on the one hand, AI really does help us adopt new technology very quickly, and it can do a lot for us. A lot of these coding tools, they code for you, they create apps for you. ChatGPT can create a lot of things for you, but it also, if you ask questions about –– ask it to teach you something, and it can help really get you up to speed on these things. Essentially, I think now’s the time to learn the new thing that you think is difficult to pick up and use your ChatGPT tools, Gemini, whatever platform you use, utilize those to help you get started on those right away. The barriers to entry on these technologies is lower than it’s ever been. And feel confident that, like I said, it’s going to change in 2028 but just feel confident in your ability to be able to pick up technologies as they come or different processes as they come. There are just an endless number of resources available that weren’t before to teach us, to perform for us, and it’s going to increase. So I think now, carpe diem, you got to move now, and there’s no reason to wait.
Yeah. Well, that makes sense, especially even thinking about, say, a more traditional career path, there’s still a lot of AI tools that, as you mentioned, are going to be kind of incorporated into the jobs. And it’s kind of weird, like I always look at these technological advancements as always, in general, historically, following a similar pattern, which is it comes in, it disrupts a lot of people, it puts a lot of people out of work, and it creates a wealth disparity for a little while, and then people figure out how to like bring it to the masses and it ends up creating new jobs. I think of 200 years ago, there was the Luddite movement that was mad about the Industrial Revolution and they had no idea how to comprehend in their brain at that point an automobile industry. That was just something in 1825, who would even envision a railroad industry, let alone an automobile industry, but that stuff was coming, and so I try to use that to stay levelheaded about where things are going in the future, but I do know sometimes it gets a little bit –– it’s a little bit difficult to even want to invest in learning something if you think that that thing that you’re learning now is going to be obsolete in only a few years’ time.
Yeah. Yeah, and I could totally see why, but maybe even just as an exercise, like I think we should –– even our analytical muscles may atrophy a bit over coming years if we don’t focus on trying to apprehend the new things that are happening in our world. So I think even if you treat it as like the 30 minutes of physical exercise you budget, now, try to add 30 minutes of learning something or 30 minutes of a conversation where you’re trying to talk through a problem. These are –– it like almost sounds kind of silly but it is important for our overall health.
Yeah, and I think there’s other ways to learn things too, because you want to just keep exercising that learning things muscle, right? So let’s just say someone right now is like, okay, technology, I’ve just had it with technology. I want to learn a foreign language right now so I can go visit the world and by actually like going on Rosetta Stone or wherever and learning to speak that language, you’re still exercising that learning muscle.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And there’s the traditional ways, read a book, get the worksheets. There’s a lot of free education. I mean, YouTube is just so rich, there’s so much depth on very applicable ways to learn things and people are so generous with this content. Even these companies, they put out a ton of educational content about their products for free on YouTube and there’s just a lot of opportunity and there’s definitely reason to keep learning.
Yeah. And now, your program at MarketSurge tends to focus on the individual story, that particular aspect of as opposed to kind of just generic marketing advice. Tell me a little bit about how it actually works, how your interactions with a client go?
Yeah, sure. So we’ve built our CRM, our relationship management platform on the GoHighLevel framework, and within that, the platform, we have the ability to call, text, email, and manage buying cycles like manage a purchase pipeline. And so for any business that does sales or has a need to interact with clients, this is a great way to –– you plan out –– so you identify the repeated processes you do in your growth process, any sales process, identify those, and you can kind of codify those into a workflow and so you know that every time that somebody wants to do business with you, they fill out a form on your website to get more information, and so you automate the response to that and ask them to set up an appointment with you, and that appointment then triggers the creation of a calendar invite and the meeting happens and maybe an estimate is created or an invoice needs to be delivered and all those things can be automated. A sales process can be different but each step of the way, you can replicate a lot of the busy work that you were doing before, and that enables you to do more with your own time. I mean, if you’ve ever had a contractor that just doesn’t get back to you, just never gives you this, that’s a problem that generally needs to be solved. But if you have a system that does it for you or sends you reminders and notifies you of outstanding tasks, then that saves a lot of business that is otherwise lost. So, with my clients, I work a lot with photography studios, it’s a very busy job because there’s a lot of back and forth with clients in addition to the actual shooting and editing and formatting of the printed products. So we can connect other systems but we can also deliver all the paperwork that needs to be signed and received and customized for each project and just really allows a photographer who doesn’t have a degree in process management or logistics to focus on the art they like to create.
So, in your description, what I heard from based on what I know was a combination of like six different products. You talked about calendars, I think of Calendly. You talked about payment process, I think of Stripe or any other payment processors. Even like marketing communications, I’m imagining –– I’m sorry, envisioning like Constant Contact, all these things. And one of the things that can get complicated for a lot of business owners is, well, all these tools you have, like first of all, for each one of those tools, you had to choose between, if it’s a calendar thing, maybe ten Calendly alternatives, if it’s a payment processor, God, how many there are out there, right? So, yeah, so this product, it seems like it kind of just ––
So it’s like a single login and you can manage all –– like you said, a lot of products that maybe you’re using independently and you’re going back and forth between browser tabs, now, it’s all in one place.
All the communications, all the calendars, all the invoices, it can be found in one place. Share on XAn invoice could be created with prepopulated information from your contact or calendar invite goes out based on the fact that they filled out a form on your website. So we’re connecting the website to an action and I think it really simplifies a lot of things and I think, frankly, it’s quite a bit cheaper to do it this way than to have ten systems that you have to pay a subscription for.
And for people out there listening, if you’re intrigued by what you hear, the site is marketsurge.io. You can check it out there. And I checked the website myself, it has a lot of information about each of these individual services. And then where does the customization of determining what platforms you want to use, is that part of the service as well or is that just something that you recommend clients do to figure out their customers?
Yeah, yeah. Definitely give us a call and we can talk through your tech stack and see what pieces could be consolidated with our system. In addition to the technology that we offer, we also have a lot of services for SEO, ads management, content creation, to augment all these efforts. But, really, we try to enable you to have all this at your fingertips and be able to just extend your reach. So, I’d love to chat with anybody.
Extending their reach is really important. And how did you come to own Market Surge? What is your story there?
Yeah, great question. Market Surge was founded by a friend of ours, and we, my wife and I, were running a photography business, photography studio. She’s the photographer, not me, so I was the marketer and operations and doing a lot of the sales work for the business and developed a lot of processes that were working for us. We were growing the studio quite rapidly but thought that automation would help us. Our friend, we connected with and embedded a lot of those processes into the tool that he templatized and was able to, in collaboration, we were able to share with other photography studios. Now, a few years later, as many entrepreneurs, he got the itch to do something else and since we were so embedded in the system, we were able to take over. And so I’ve taken over and made the transition away from the studio to now doing the marketing agency, and as far as getting into entrepreneurship, it’s a great way because I’ve seen it from the client side and had a chance to learn a lot of the system and I can speak from experience a couple things that needed to improve and a lot that was going great and a lot of wins that I experienced using our platform.
And what I’m hearing in this story is that you got to the place you are now it seems like with a combination of three traits: being curious, being proactive, and being in contact, being friends with the right kind of people. And that’s kind of maybe what I want to leave my audience with is that those are three great things to think about, even if you don’t know what you want to do right now, even if right now you’re just thinking, “I’m not satisfied quite with this life that I have right now, with the job I have right now. I wanna do something different but I haven’t found that spark, that inspiration, that light bulb moment where it’s like, ‘Oh, I was meant to do that,’” but if you continue to be mindful of who you’re in connection with, be in connection with people who are going to be good influences on you and have their own things going on and be curious and proactive, then that’s a good start, at least.
Absolutely. Yeah, thank you. That’s a great summation.
Well, Reed, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, for giving everyone some ideas and as well as a really good balance between the AI doomsday stuff but also like what it could really mean and what we can practically think about, because, I mean, I did recently rewatch the Matrix but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be the thing I think about too much beyond when I turn off the movie when it’s done.
Right, right. Yeah, I’m personally an optimist, but want to pay attention.
Yeah, just keep that all in mind. And I would also like to thank everybody out there for listening today, for taking time, for being curious and being mindful of yourself enough to be tuned in to this type of content as opposed to so much of the other stuff that’s out there that might not necessarily be enhancing your mind and enhancing your life.
Important Links:
About Reed Hansen
Reed Hansen is a seasoned digital marketing executive and the Chief Growth Officer at MarketSurge, where he helps businesses turn smart marketing systems into scalable revenue. With a career that spans scrappy startups to Fortune 500 giants, Reed brings a rare blend of data-driven strategy and creative firepower to the table.
Prior to MarketSurge, Reed led growth at companies like Northwestern University, Punchkick Interactive, and Solstice, and also ran his own successful firm, Million Dollar Studio. He’s built a reputation for helping brands cut through the noise, capture attention, and convert consistently.
When he’s not automating lead gen or launching bold campaigns, you’ll find him hosting Inside Marketing with MarketSurge — the podcast for real talk, smart strategies, and marketing that actually moves the needle.