Mission Matters Business Podcast

Own Your Digital House: Paige Wiese on Asset Control and Exit-Ready Ops

On Mission Matters, Adam Torres interviews Paige Wiese, Founder & CEO of Tree Ring Digital, about digital asset management. They discuss what it is, why common issues arise, and how to resolve them. Paige outlines a three-phase strategy—assessment, a comprehensive 300+ point audit, and continuity—designed to secure ownership, prevent expensive outages, and protect a company’s valuation during an acquisition.

 

Full Transcript

“Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest of the show, just head on over to missionmatters.com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so do I have Paige Wiese on the line, and she’s founder and CEO at Tree Ring Digital.

Paige, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be talking with you.

All right, Paige, so digital asset management for business owners and entrepreneurs, it’s a big topic, and I think it’s one we don’t talk about enough because it’s highly important and I think there’s layers of benefits to it when it’s done correctly. But before we get into that, I mean, how did you get into this business of digital asset management? Like, where did that start for you?

Yeah, that’s a great question. I started with architecture, actually, and that’s where I got my degree in, and spent a couple years doing that. 2008 was not a great time to enter the architectural market, so I shifted gears into website design and development, all self-taught on what that looked like.

And then over the course of the last 16 years, I’ve just gone from freelance website design.

What year was the website thing? For website, what year was that? Just roughly.

Roughly 2010.

Wow, so this is early on in terms of the tools and everything else. So you really have a context for beginner tools all the way up to now, what’s going on with AI and otherwise. That evolution is a trip to watch, huh?

Yeah, it’s changed drastically. I think even just watching how people are building websites now to like, it was a great start though for me, right? Like it was more code, it was more this and that.”

“And so it’s what allows us to get deeper into the nitty gritty than some that are just used to like, oh, WordPress as a builder, here’s how we use it or oh, it’s so easy to use these marketing tools like conversion.

You’re like, let me tell you back in my day, you little digital marketers, no, that’s my words, not yours, my words, but that’s because that’s me talking to people though.

You read my mind.

So when was the time, and I see obviously the term founder, you’re obviously a founder, when did Tree Ring Digital come about? Like, how’d you know there was going to be a need for this?

So I think 2010 is when I started doing more freelance, probably around 2012, 2014. I had a full client book and ready to really dive in, and then probably 2016 is when we started diving even deeper into marketing needs and everything, and just really listening to the clients of like, it’s a great site, but it’s not converting. So that’s when we started bringing on more websites, more marketing because they weren’t marketing.

That’s why the website wasn’t converting.”

“Well, so you’ve kind of like through your career gone pretty much full funnel, huh? Like from building to top to bottom to like that’s interesting.

And that’s definitely a piece that I’ve admired as I’ve grown it. It’s like, hey, I want to learn all of the aspects. But when I get to talk to clients and businesses, I get to see all sides of it.

And because I sat in like the graphic design hat, the website, the marketing, the analytics, it allows me to have a more informed conversation and really ask the great questions instead of like, I don’t know, we just got someone else who’s going to go handle that. I just got to take it back to the team. So it allows us to, I think, to get a little bit closer with the clients to really get those results they’re looking for.

That’s great. Let’s get further into the digital asset management side of the discussion. So first off, I don’t want to assume anything.

What is digital asset management? Let’s start with the basics.”

“Yeah. Digital asset management is making sure that you actually have access and control to all of the digital elements that run your business. A lot of companies have someone else set that up.

So it might be like an employee, a vendor, an intern, whoever sets up a third-party tool, a CRM, a social profile, website hosting. But no one really knows who has the actual ownership of it or how to log in past some of the two factor. So digital asset management is making sure that the company owns all of the digital assets that go along with their brand.

What have you seen when this is not? I want to start at the horror story on this one. What have you seen when this isn’t done properly?

A lot of panic clients and very much of a like…

I can’t imagine. They’re like, I can’t even imagine what those calls are like. Go ahead, please.

I’ve been on the other side of it where I’m like, oh no, my laptop. Why? Why?”

“I only know how to edit the back end of my website. I don’t know how to fix my website. And so it is just a lot of like, what do I do now?

And they’re just frantic and panicking. And we’re able to like, all right, let’s get back to the basics. Let’s go through what we can.

Let’s figure out what’s going on here and walk them through it. But I mean, two weeks, four months before a client can be back up and running on, depending on the situation and what it is that they’re missing. And that’s not to say it’s not without lots of unexpected expenses because they may not have been expecting to pay for a new website.

They may not have expected to pay for a lawyer to fight ownership on, you know, trying to get it back from a past employee or the letters of handover, the login details, you know, you set this up. They’re like, that was my email address, is that mine or yours? So, you know, there’s a lot that goes into that and it’s always unexpected, which just adds to the frustration.”

“

“And so how do we be more proactive in that and really making sure we have all of that up front?

Yeah, I witnessed one of those third party from a buddy of mine and he was telling me about what it was like, you know, going to court and all this other stuff with one of somebody else that had access to his site and all these other things and like I swear it was like this thing on the back end and also the amount of time like they had sponsors and also sponsorship inquiries coming in. And since this was set up incorrectly into the other person’s like email like that became like, okay, well, what sponsorships, what ads were run during that time, what blah, blah, blah, like the rabbit hole of what that entailed was like insane. I had no idea like it could be that bad.

And you know, I mean, think of it when it’s even more than that, how much are you spending in AdWords or social campaign ads? Are you losing because, yeah, we had a client come to us like our site’s not working. And we’re like, okay, well, let’s take a look into it”

“Like we just haven’t received payment since the developer set it all up. They said it was all working, but we haven’t received a single thing. And then we log in and turns out PayPal was still connected to the original developer.

So we’re going to the original developer, not the client. So we’re like, well, this is a quick sense, at least, but not when we have to go back and track all of the money and the payment and ask, like, when did you want to tell them that you’re accepting all of these payments on their behalf and not handing it over? So, you know, yeah, it can come in a lot of ways.

It doesn’t just have to be my websites down.

Yeah. So how do you, when you’re working with a new client or a business or they come to you, they may need some help in a couple of different ways. Like how does someone even start going down this path of cleaning up, let’s just say, their digital house, if you will?”

“Yeah. So one thing we start with is more of our digital asset assessment. And that means to start to identify, like, what are the tools that you’re using?

What is set up that you know about? What, you know, like, do you know where you’re hosting is at? Do you know who has access to your social account?

And just kind of understanding how the infrastructure is put together of the company from a digital side. And then after that, we can move. And that just helps us identify the gaps, right?

Like, all right, we’ve got some issues here. This is the best place to start what we want to do. Or I’ve rarely seen it.

But best case scenario, like, wow, you really got things put together. Like, you’re doing really good over there. Like, let’s keep moving.”

“Second phase then moves into more of our digital asset audit. Well, we’re going to go in and like start collecting over 300 data points of who has ownership, how do we, how do we recover? Are you following compliance with ADA and privacy policies?

You know, who has your logos and your brand materials? And we just go through about seven different pillars of what does that all look like? And really figuring out where are all of these things?

And we put them all into a handoff package so that we can hand it over to the business owner and say, here’s everything that you’ve got in your digital portfolio, and this is what you need to keep your brand running. And then after that, we just move into digital continuity management, where we’re managing it, updating it as employees come and go, vendors come and go, making sure everything is still where it’s supposed to be, did a credit card expire, did we get that updated when that happened, and did we even know that there’s an account attached to that credit card, right? So that’s what the ongoing does, but that’s kind of the process that we take to get a clean speed on everything.”

“How does this concept like play into or play a role when it comes to entrepreneurs that are looking to sell or exit their business? Like, how does, why does this matter?

It matters when a business is getting ready to exit or sell because one, you have to handle all of that over. So if you don’t have it, it’s going to start impacting the deal process, and one, it might just slow it down, but two, it can start to impact the valuation. So if they’re going through the due diligence side of it, and it turns out that a previous owner is the one who owns the domain name and not the current owner, they were co-owners, let’s say, how long is it going to take if we even can get that domain transferred over to the current business owner?

Wow.

And then hand off to the, yeah. But if we can’t get that, that could tank evaluation if you can’t get the domain to come along with it. But now we’re getting into legal fees to start fighting that potentially, right?”

“How does this concept like play into or play a role when it comes to entrepreneurs that are looking to sell or exit their business? Like, how does, why does this matter?

It matters when a business is getting ready to exit or sell because one, you have to handle all of that over. So if you don’t have it, it’s going to start impacting the deal process, and one, it might just slow it down, but two, it can start to impact the valuation. So if they’re going through the due diligence side of it, and it turns out that a previous owner is the one who owns the domain name and not the current owner, they were co-owners, let’s say, how long is it going to take if we even can get that domain transferred over to the current business owner?

Wow.

And then hand off to the, yeah. But if we can’t get that, that could tank evaluation if you can’t get the domain to come along with it. But now we’re getting into legal fees to start fighting that potentially, right?”

“Well, Paige, I mean, this has been great having you on the show today. The final thing I want you to do is number one, how do people, like what kind of companies, whether it’s size, employee count, revenue, like what kind of companies get the most value do you feel out of working with you and your team, number one. And number two, how do people follow up?

How do they connect?

Yeah, great questions. Clients that are good at finding that value out of us are typically going to be about the 1 million in revenue and up. Our digital asset management tools are really good for any business size, whether you’ve got just a startup with your VA all the way up into multiple brand, multiple location, businesses that are managing lots of different assets.”

“We’ve really made sure that it’s a model that can grow and scale like that. But even with our websites and marketing efforts, really come in well at that million and up range and then in the industry as well. As far as staying in touch and following us, you can find me on LinkedIn at Paige Wiese.

Then you can also go to treeringdigital.com/missionmatters. If you go there, we’ve actually got a free checklist that you can download. It’s going to help you start to identify some of those gaps.

You can even decide, is digital asset management something I should even be looking at or not? That’s a really cool resource that will walk you through what those seven pillars are and start to give you a better idea of what all goes into that.

Amazing. For everybody watching, just so you know, we’ll definitely put some links in the show notes so that you can just click on the links and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button.”

“This is a daily show. Each and every day, we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Paige, thanks for coming on the show.

Thank you so much for having me.”