Business Roundtable Podcast

Welcome back to the Business Roundtable podcast. I am your host, David Carr, bringing people together to accomplish great things, founder or steward your business. We are back this week with a brand new guest, Paige We We’re super excited to have her here from touring digital and Page is not only the founder, she’s been doing award winning digital agency work helping businesses for over fifteen years, and so we’re super excited to have you come and share a little bit about your leadership journey, how you’ve helped work with. I think you’ll like over two thousand clients.

You’ve worked with many, many people across different industries. Welcome to the podcast page. Thank you so much for having I’m excited to be here with you, David. Absolutely, absolutely, I’m excited to have you here too.

One thing I like to do before we get into the kind of the meat or the problem oftentimes that you’re facing our guests are facing, is hearing about your own entrepreneurial journey, like what got you to where you’re at today? What got you to you know, birthing this cool company now tree Ring Digital And if you wouldn’t mind, case just trying to take us back a little bit of our listeners that are encountering you for the first time, so they can know a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey. Yeah. Absolutely, So I started cheering digital back in two thousand and eight, twenty ten ish when the economy was not ideal, and obviously I’ve been through several other times of that over the years, and you know, really was just like trying to figure out how do I make money. I was twenty three out of architecture, which was not a great industry to be in at the time, and really just at a crossroads what do I do with life? Where do I go from here? What’s next? And decided why not give web design a try, you know, started learning and teaching myself web design WordPress most specifically, and from there I decided, hey.

How do I get business? I didn’t have anyone like you know, I left corporate bringing a bunch of clients with me, or I didn’t have a bunch of us you know, student colleagues with me where I’d be like. Oh, hey, let me bounce this idea off of you. So I really just head down and started putting some ads up on Craigslist. Understood their algorithm, what was working? What wasn’t all of that? And then about a year and a half in, I had a pretty full client list where I no longer had to rely on Craigslist, and from there just really developing and cranking out websites, but always listening to the clients of like I can design pretty sites, that’s not the problem, but like, if they’re providing content, it’s usually not that great.

So we started bringing writing indoor service offering, and then we were running into hosting issues, so we started bringing hosting into our services and just kept growing that agency into Hey, what else is not working? I joke with my team and I’m like, if we get one call too often, we’re gonna figure out how to fix that issue, Like for good, I don’t want to keep hearing why is this happening? Right, So. Let’s fix that for good. If it’s emails, let’s fix that for good. So that’s another way that we really developed out the company was listening to like what’s working, what’s not working? And how do we solve that problem? Well, I think that’s great.

And knowing that you you you started this business back, I remember that time when the kindom was really tanking in you and I share the background and the a’s a AEC industry. I’ve been in environmental consulting world for twenty five years and I’ve seen the ups and downs as well. But the fact that you’ve been able to weather the storms manage that, and I think to your point of communicating, well, what you’re trying to do, how you’re helping people, because you’re helping businesses. What I thought was impressive, as we talked before this recording was the use of multiple types of groups from restaurant groups, a fee back company, a variety different folks, so you have some flexibility and adjusting and that that’s challenging because sometimes people aren’t as flexible in that way.

Yeah, well that’s what we noticed. I mean, like it’s not a one size fit all shop, right, I mean, in general, marketing shouldn’t be. Websites shouldn’t be. And I remember having a lot of some conversations with my business coaches growing the business, and like, go to packages, go to packages, it’ll be so much easier for you.

You won’t spend all the time on proposals. And I was just like, I can’t. I can sit here and say a five page site is going to be blank, but at the end of the day, they might not need five. They might need four pages in some really robust contact form that’s a request to quote, right, And so we just really learned to keep that flexibility and found that we can keep a process, keep the customer journey very consistent, but still allow for that fluctuation and that customization.

And that’s really what’s allowed us to, you know, work with so many different clients on so many different levels, and again, what’s the issue. Let’s not create new issues, let’s not touch what’s not broke, and you know, really dive into let’s just get to the root of that. And if we can do that, you’re off and running and we’ll be back when you’re ready for us again. Kind of thing.

Yeah, No, I love that. And one of the things that we when we talked before we start this recording, and I think I liked your philosophy and why I wanted to have you on a guest because you look at this and I think, as I get it, as the digital presence is a business asset, it’s not just a marketing tool, and I think it’s a little different then sometimes you get a lot of digital agencies that are just trying to sell you a tool and like you to your point, it may not be the best tool or the resource or how they do that, right. Yeah, I mean we see it in a few different ways. One we see that businesses look at I need a website because everyone’s telling me I need a website, or people are online.

I need to be on social media because that’s where my audience is. So while I absolutely hate it, that’s where I got to be. And so you know, I think that’s one place where like, no, no, no, no, that’s an asset, like a digital presence is really like a foundation and really aids your business’s growth in a variety of ways. And a lot of them don’t look at it.

They just I think look at it as the necessary of evils, if you will. And then on the other front, yeah, it’s like you have all of these assets. Though as far as your CRM is still a digital tool, and I’m not here to tell you what CRM to use. As we’ve worked with so many different industries, we’ve seen there are reasons for certain companies to use certain pieces, and so we really like to say, what’s going to be the best one for yours or where are you at sometimes Mailchimp is better than active campaign and it just comes down to pricing and functionality and tools and what are you trying to run? And I think a lot of agencies get caught up in like that’s the one we know, so that’s the only one we’re going to do.

And for us, it’s like, no, how do we make your business make sure it’s successful with these assets? And then from there, how are we keeping track of all of these assets that make your business run and function well? So, speaking of digital assets, you’re bringing that up? Is I guess I’m the question I’m supposing. I know we’ve talked about this, but you know, you’ve worked with all these clients. What are the biggest mistakes that you see with when it comes to their websites or their digital presence out there page? What are you seeing as a big problem? Well, a big problem, Yeah, I’d say the biggest problem that we run into with clients is just not knowing who has ownership, not knowing where logins are to the important pieces that make their business run, or not knowing when those things are going to expire, just working and really betting on the fact that it’s on auto renew or that the credit card is going to just run the next time it’s set to run. And so that’s the one that we see more and more.

And I think as we’ve gotten thus far in technology and still obviously continuing to advance at a rapid pace, it’s more often than ever every phone call we get in there’s someone looking to hunt down log in details, and so it’s just really frustrating for the client. I mean, we’re used to it, we know how to recover a lot of things, but for the client it does. It slows us down. It doesn’t make the edits as fast as we want, and it doesn’t make recovery as quickly as we want.

It’s usually halting business. It’s usually halting leads or marketing efforts in some capacity. So it’s not just like, ohh, I’ll keep I’ll find that log in when it’s available and ready. It’s no, we need it now if you want your business to be back up and running.

In some companies, yeah, that makes sense, and I think probably when you’re starting with small companies that gets lost. I work with clients and they have like a lot of procurement sites I all go to and like one person signed up for this one per person signed up for this one. It’s like, does we have any like master one of this. No, I’m guilty of it.

I mean same thing with the procurement side, right, I mean yeah, like, hey, okay, this is something an intern can set up and if we can just have the standard fields all ready to go that we know they’re going to ask go set up another one and great, here’s a new portal. Let’s go set that up. And I mean that’s one example of yeah, there’s a lot of logins and if you let something like that go, you might be missing a lead that could be impactful for your business right out of the procurement ones really come with the heavy price tag and so you close that deal that can be mean so much for your business. And so I think that’s a great example where we start to see more so in smaller companies with like the use of VAS that has really taken off in the last few years.

We’re seeing more interns coming in. Sometimes not profits. We see a lot of interns come in and yeah, they’re just tasked to set stuff up and sometimes they’re like, great, I’ll use my personal because you never gave me an email address to use this or you know, they set it up under their own because they didn’t know that company policy was to use info at or webmaster at or marketing at, you know, so that there was always that consistency. Well, then that employee leaves, and do you guys shut down the email address that goes along with it, and no one’s getting the recovery emails anymore, and no one knows how to recover it because it’s not going anywhere.

When they do, the password resets. So now it’s again an even lengthier recovery process of who do we have to contact and support to get this, you know, back up and running and prove that we. Own this right well, and I would imagine a page. I was in a networking group today and I was talking with an intellectual property lawyer and she was talking about a lot of people hire folks or even their employees.

We’ll just grab digital assets out there, pictures, videos, that’s copyrighted, and they don’t realize that they’re using that and the damage that they can do being sued or you know, you know, litigated. They’d be like, you know, and if they don’t know or I haven’t accounted for all that stuff, right, So is that something that you guys look into as well. Let’s make sure there were. We look at.

Yeah, we look into it a bit. I mean the photos get a little bit harder. Is it’s like who is the one getting it? You know, is the graphic design vendor? Is it this vat When we look at like our digital asset management services, we’ve got about seven pillars that all fall into like where all of these assets go. And you’re bringing up a good point that the brand elements are.

So who’s got the logo? Is this the right version of the logo? Is this the logo from three years ago? And we’ve made tweaks? You know, what does that look like? But it does go even further into here are the set videos that we want to use. Here are the set photos that we want to use. These are brand photography that we’ve had taken. Can the team easily access that if you’re, you know, doing some sort of speaking event or workshop or something, does the team know what photo to pass along? That is an approved photo? And so you know, you get into it a little bit there and then yeah, beyond that, you start hitting some of the IP stuff too, And you’re correct, I think you know a lot of agencies aren’t fully paying attention to how are we providing you know, rights and copyright and I’m spacing on the word but ownership like icons and stuff right, like, great, we added the icon to the site, but do we site where we got it from? And so you know, those are areas for sure that can definitely create a lot of issues for clients.

And I think as that owner starts to get removed and hand things off as they should, and they’re growing, but as they start to do that, it really does go like, so what happens when you get the ce some desist letter? Right? And who because it’s gonna come and so now who’s responsible for that? Was this approved? Where’s the copy of the receipt that was purchased? Whose account was it purchased under? Sometimes we run into is fonts are purchased through like an account, but they don’t actually allow commercial use. It’s personal use. And so if you’re just going and grabbing fonts off of the Internet and then using them in your print media, you might not actually have the commercial license to use it in that capacity. And so all things you’re bringing up really really great points that businesses aren’t paying attention to.

You. They’re just like, it looks good, put it out the door. Put it out there. So you mentioned page you’ve got I’d love to hear you go through your approach of how do you do this? You said you have got these pillars that you go through.

So what if you wouldn’t mind just walk us through? What is it that that’s you know, the trieering approach different? And you know, why did you pick these pillars? What are these that you’re kind of holding up the business house so to speak. Yeah, so you know, one thing that’s different is a lot of agencies are going to focus on the marketing side, the website side, sometimes both, and that’s going to go into social media platforms, Google analytics, Google my business. You’re hosting your domain name, your website. But that’s usually where a lot of agencies start to stop.

They made, you know, maybe don’t even handle the hosting that’s handled through a different company, or you start to get multiple vendors involved, and so it’s like who’s taking ownership of this. Piece of it? What does that look like? And so that’s where we really started noticing that gap is when we started asking the questions of where are the log in details? It was always with somebody else. It was never with the owner or the person we were speaking with, right, And so we started realizing how much of a disconnect there is and a lack of ownership in these digital assets. So, for example, we had a client callus a couple of weeks ago and they were like, hey, can you help me? And I was like, yeah, let’s do what we can.

Tell me what’s going on? And they’re like, our web designer just passed away unexpectedly. I was like, oh, geez, I’m so sorry to hear it. I thought they were just calling us for like, can you update our website with some changes? Right? Well, no, they said, hey, he controlled the domain name, the email addresses, the hosting and the website, and even though he had at some point passed along the log in details to the website, it had changed. And so we’re sitting there going, is there any way we can recover these things? What does that look like? And they immediately had shut off Google Ads because the website was displaying an air that couldn’t be reached, and so, you know, that was one issue.

Then we had to go through, well, your emails aren’t working because your domain’s not working and so and so we can get the domain working, we you know, really can’t do too much on some of the recovery systems either. And then we had to start working through, hey, how do we go to the who’s hosting it? It was a resold account, so even that was hidden in lockdown, and so we into all of our tools and everything we knew, And so, I mean it just turned into a headache. That shouldn’t have been that way. They should have had some sort of seapanelog in details.

They should have had full ownership of their domain name and been able to quickly just reset a password and move on, or already had it and didn’t need to reset a password. And then the same thing with the website, where that typically would have been, you know what, let’s grab a backup, let’s move it to a new server, we’ll keep your on in and we’ll figure out what we want to do with the hosting later. We couldn’t even log into the site to pull the backup. So then the conversation starts, are we going to redesign? Are we just going to try to mirror what’s currently there into a new environment? And gets you going that way? And so I mean it just turned into this huge headache for the client and so much lost business that, you know, like it’s still weeks and we’re still find like, how do we fully get everything back up and running? How do we work through proof of death certificate? That’s a bit of an extreme example, but yeah, and that’s just because they didn’t they thought their vendor had it under control.

So that’s how we you know, kind of starts the domain and the hosting. Then we get into the marketing. Then we get into analytics and social profiles. Then we get into the brand development and what you mentioned with the images and the logo files everything there.

How are those all set and stored? Then we move into more of like the third party tools and integration. Do you have stripe integrated into your website? What do we need to do to make sure that’s recovered in the future should something happen and that you do in fact have ownership CRMs, all sorts of tools like that. Then we go into security and backup recovery. Are we having all of the right tools in place and what happens should something go down? And then finally we get into compliance and legal, So do we have the right disclaimers the ADA compliance, the privacy policies, all of those aspects that go into the site as well to make sure that you are staying compliant with the various pieces.

And to your point, what is the standard of practice and the policies. When an employee comes in or a vendor comes in and starts purchasing these things, do they go straight to you for ownership? Do they stay with the vendor? You know, are they providing you proof that they purchased it? So we really start to go through. First we do an assessment where we check on all of the like we just identify the gaps, yeah, and then we’ll dive into the digital asset audit where we’ll really work through with the client to go through every piece they have and gain ownership and not just of the log in details, but whose recovery emails on file? Whose credit cards on file? When do things EXPRID, what’s the two factor and work through all of this. Roughly at the end of the day, there’s over three hundred digital assets that go into a business being online and having an online presence.

And I say usually when we ask clients, they’re basically identifying domain hosting, website, a couple social profiles, right, maybe analytics, but we really start to see that they’re not identifying that there’s so much more than that out there that goes into their business being online and successfully online. Yeah, I mean, gosh, there’s so much you just outline their page. But one of the things the word that popped up to me was ownership, not like owning it, but I think and then there’s a owners of our delegation or people are given certain authority to do certain things. But I’m sure you’re seeing that’s probably unclear in the business, right, and then you’re probably trying to get this done and work with people like who is maybe not the owner but delegated a responsible party and there’s a breakdown because that’s one thing I work with is the people side of things, and how are they working together and collaborating And you just listed a whole bunch of different groups of people that I heard.

Yes, we’ve got to pull these different people together right. Right, And most of them aren’t talking most of the time, Like nobody knows who’s you know, handling the it compared to the Google analytics, right, Like those two pieces aren’t talking, whether it’s internally in a team or whether it’s vendors and whatnot, and so you know, yeah, and same thing. Boys and vendors are two very different things. If they set up Google ads, is it the company’s property or is it the vendor’s property? And if you cancel that relationship, what happens? And are you losing all of the key words and historical data of the ads you’ve ran? Is that you’re staying with the company, Like what does that look like? So you know, there’s more people just like, yeah, we’ll hire this company and we’ll be good and we’ll deal with it later.

And it you know, like yeah, sure that works to some extent, and. So it’s more you know, of an issue or just like that if they disappear, how are we going to get that back? How are we going to get the locked back in? We had that happen with the client where I mean they even just hey, we’ve contacted the web hosting companies so many times they’re unresponsive and now we literally have no idea how to access our hosting to move our site to a different provider. And so you know, that’s where we see it way too often. And I think it’s because where businesses are growing at such a rapid pace, and then there’s more and more tools out there and available than ever before, and so trying to keep track of it.

But yeah, we just most agencies won’t go into that entire of everything that’s covered. They’re really going to stop at No, we handle marketing. You can go talk to somebody else about that or Nope, that’s not in our wheelhouse. We can’t answer those questions.

So you to me what we’re hearing you Pagees. You’ve developed a team at Tributing that understands this process, this journey, if you will, so that they’re asking those questions because like you said, you’re probably like finding the gaps. They’re like, yeah, nobody is really responsible for that. And then that’s where I love having you on here because I love working with the business owners.

The team’s like, okay, Pages identified this problem. The true ring is, these are these problems. How are we going to solve that? How are you going to get those people? You’ve you’ve got solutions, but it’s ultimately too you’ve got to figure out I find sometimes empowering certain some people like I don’t want to do that, that’s not my area that somebody else is like, well, who else is going to do that, How are we going to develop how are we going to work to get you any because I’ve been on your side of working with folks and like, hey, we really to help you, but there’s nobody there getting me what I need? Right Well, they just don’t know. You know.

We see marketing teams come to us and hire us out and then I’m like asking questions and they’re like, we didn’t know we needed to look for that, or how do we recover it? And I’m like, how do you not know how to recover this? Like it’s just it’s part of marketing or it’s part of you know blank, and but they just don’t or if the company is not pushing pushing them harder to document all of these things, then it is just like we don’t know where the receipt is for that stock image that we’ve you know, purchased to prove that we did in fact purchase it and it’s not just a stolen version, so you know, it’s it really is honing it all in, And You’re right, it’s a mix of what’s the people say, what’s the company standards of practice side, and then what’s the you know, where do we store all of this. How is that all in place? And so yeah, that’s where we come into and are like, is this all in one location? Do you have it scattered amongst Dropbox, Google Drive and something else? You know? Is it all written down on the you know pad of paper next to the owner’s you know, desk, because the owner even no. I think that’s one that we’ve seen often is we’re working with a marketing team and while we set up something, they’re like, hey, can we have ownership or access of Google my business? And we’re like absolutely, But then we always kind of stop for a second, like shouldn’t the owner they’ll have access to that, Like I don’t mind giving it to the employee, but should the employee leave for any reason, the owner still does not have access to that. And we try to keep ourselves on a lot of these things.

Is just a second point of backup. We’ve seen the really save us, like clients by us still having something in place. But if they delete us, which sometimes they do as they come in like oh we don’t need you anymore, We’re going to delete this. That employee is the one who has sole ownership, and so you know, good luck trying to recover that and does anybody know that that happened? And those are usually personal Gmail accounts, it’s not necessarily a company account because Google won’t accept Microsoft.

So now we’re even getting more into the like, hey, owner, we should probably have a talk about how you guys are setting these things up, because they’re going to own your Google my business at the end of the day, or they’re going to own your Facebook profile at the end of the day. If you don’t also have some sort of adamant here and recovery of some of these things are extremely difficult, if possible at all, and it’s gonna end up coming down to cost sometimes legal fees of how do we get the lawyer involved to ask them to hand that information over so it can really quickly turn into a huge nightmare. Yeah, I think to your point, it’s how quickly it can be. I was just talking to a soloopreneur here locally, and he had a whole Instagram account and build up to like over forty thousand followers, all those things doing cool video stuff, and it got hacked and then it was tied to as meta account and then it shut that down too.

And you know, these people are sophisticated and they’re really trying to trick you up. Unfortunately, I get emails all the time, and if somebody doesn’t just doesn’t know this, and like you said there that they’re the gatekeeper, they’re one way in you have a vulnerability, and I think the cost of the ret Unfortunately, we preach on this podcast and why you’re here pages to be proactive rather than reactive and investing the money. Yes, it might cost you a bit more than you anticipate at first, but it’s going to cost you a lot more right in the back end, all the time and effort. If they didn’t do this well, I made.

Ans it right and out of the blue, so it might be like, sure, we know in the future we’ll have to redesign our website. But the company that called me with the web developer or the past, they weren’t expecting that that moment, you know, So then it’s like, here is this unexpected expense. And especially at a time where businesses are a little bit tighter and watching money a little bit closer with everything going on, they’re not preparing, you know, or they don’t have the massive cash flow that they used to have, and so you know, we see it really impact them more, or if your marketing’s down, your revenue starts to go down, and so to then offset and be able to cover these, you know, unexpected expenses really do start to set you up more for failure when it can be something that we can easily get ahead of and be proactive on to your point, and not have these and just saving the headache. I you know, we get so many calls of just frantic panicking nine to one one phone calls of like I’m lost, I’m stuck, I don’t know what to do, what’s going on? What does this look like? And I don’t mind them.

I just prefer not to. That’s not how I want to see a business, you know, I want to see them in a hey, we’re really good, we’re ready to do more, We’re ready to grow further. We want to do something different with our marketing efforts so that we keep growing and expanding. Those are the calls we prefer to a yes, yeah, but.

You know, inevitably we get a lot more calls that are on the reactive, panicky side, and so yes, I’m with you. How do we be more proactive over well. And that’s why we have you on the podcast page because we want others to listen to this and they’re they’re like, I picked up the podcast and we’re talking at digital assets and you’re like, oh, yeah, that’s not covered. That’s not covered.

Maybe I should do something about this today. So I know we’re getting close to the end of the podcast today, I would love, you know, to that point. If I’m a business owner, I’m listening, We’ve covered a lot of different things. What is one action that they can do today to protect or maximize their digital presence right now? Page? What would you say to them if you know is they’re listening to us.

Yeah, one thing I would say would be start documenting everything. But second thing I would say is we actually have a digital asset checklist that they can download for free at tre ringdigital dot com slash Roundtable, and that’s the best way to just start identifying a what are digital assets? What is she talking about? But to you know, like start to identify the gaps. It’s a checklist you really can just like go through and like do you know who owns this? Can you access it this second? You know, are you thinking about these things? What do you have in place for recovery? And so it’ll walk you through all of that, and then as you start to identify gaps, it’ll you know, start to help you see great, we do you need to start taking some action or well, we’re actually doing fantastic, Like we’re ahead of where we thought we were. So I would definitely recommend that they start there with the checklist.

It’s it’s a really valuable tool. Well, thank you, Paige, We’re going to put that in the show notes. I want you guys to make sure you reach out connect with page. We’re also on LinkedIn.

You can reach out there and Truberingdigital dot com. You want to go check it out. Paige, I want to just thank you for being on here, sharing your story, your insights. This has been refreshing.

I think people haven’t we talked about it in this way and just recognizing these these digital assets aren’t just you know, technical details or really strategic levers that help build your business value. And so I’m so grateful that you came on the podcast with us today. Yeah. Absolutely, thank you so much for having me.

I enjoyed it absolutely. We appreciate you always joining us on the podcast. Everybody liking and subscribing, whether you find us on YouTube, LinkedIn, whatever your favorite podcast platform it is, we hope you will come back and join us. Make sure you protect your digital presence out there, and thank you again Page for joining us.

Thank you.