Martinka Consulting’s Getting the Deal Done Podcast

Paige Wiese on Digital Ownership in M&A: Making Tech Transfers Smooth, Not Scary

Paige Wiese, founder of Tree Ring Digital, shares how her background in architecture led her into digital marketing and shaped the way her agency solves real business problems. She explains how Tree Ring Digital helps organizations navigate website projects, marketing strategy, and the often overlooked issue of who actually owns and controls their digital systems and data. Paige highlights how unclear access, logins, and vendor relationships can create serious limitations for businesses.

In the context of mergers and acquisitions, Paige outlines her firm’s approach to strengthening company value by aligning go to market strategy with measurable results and clear ROI. She also discusses the operational challenges that frequently arise when digital tools, platforms, and data need to be transferred during a transaction.

The conversation covers how SEO, paid search, and social media marketing contribute directly to business performance and valuation, and why sellers who prepare their digital infrastructure in advance can avoid costly delays and complications after a deal closes.

“I never wanted to box clients into a platform that limits their growth.”

 

 

Full Transcript:

00:02

Paige, with  Tree Ring Digital, is my special guest today  on the Getting the Deal Done podcast. And we are going to talk about all things digital. Her agency helps clients through whatever you call it, digital marketing, transformation.  And she does some things tied to M &A and makes the M &A process smoother and easier for both sides. So welcome, Paige. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, let’s start by telling

00:32

the audience a little bit about you and how you got to where you are as a digital marketing agency owner. Absolutely. I started more with architecture back in around 2008 and found out very quickly that that was a poor time to be getting into the uh housing market and getting into architecture. So  quickly transferred into just teaching myself website design and development. uh Really no experience in it. Just more of a understanding of computers than anything.  And

01:02

From there then, you know, kind of just started listening to clients and hearing what are the pain points, what’s working, what’s not,  and moved it into more of a full service digital agency that it is today with a team of 16. And so we really are spanning that entire spectrum of digital continuity, if you will. So everything from hosting and maintenance on websites to website builds and integration, all the way into how do we increase that online presence through a digital marketing sense?

01:29

So you used an interesting phrase there, pain points. What are the pain points people are seeing now, especially the ones you’re helping uh with  all things digital, we’ll call it? Pain points, a lot of them trying to do it on their own, only to realize they’re getting stuck someplace in the forums and everything they’re using isn’t really getting them the answer to get them unstuck.  So that’s one place that we see a lot of it coming in, typically.

01:55

we see like a marketing manager working on something and then getting tasked to do like the website. And they’re like, that’s not what my background’s in. I’m a marketing person. I am not a website builder. And so, you those are some of the pain points. Others are just, we’re not getting the conversion of the success that we want from the marketing.  And when we start diving in deeper and asking clients like, well, what reports are you getting? What information is this? It’s not much. It’s basically marketing agencies typically coming in and saying, we got X amount of people to your site.

02:24

But those companies aren’t website experts. So they don’t understand the UX, UI that goes into  how do we make a website actually convert? We know our ads can convert. What about the website though? So they really kind of leave the client hanging to go figure that out on their own. So it’s really easy for us to see why these pain points are starting to come up. But then the other is just not having access or ownership to what they’re thinking they should have access and ownership to, or I forgot to ask about that and now I can’t get ahold of the vendor.

02:54

We don’t know how to access our website anymore. So it really comes up in that ownership piece as well. Yeah, so I see that on your website. Just talk about that ownership of things, ownership of email, ownership of CRM info and everything else. Talk about mistakes people have made in that area and what they should avoid. Yeah, I think, know,  as we’ve grown over time,  tech is obviously advanced quickly  and a lot of business owners are just trying to keep the business moving.

03:23

And so as they should, they’re delegating everything out and saying, hey, you know, go set this up for us. Or they’re hiring vendors to take over where they don’t have the strength as they should. But what they’re forgetting to do long-term is come back and ask for the right ownership and access or reading the contracts and asking questions before signing agreements to who owns what when it’s done. So we’ve seen people that are saying, hey, we’re building the website for you, but we own that. So if you take that someplace, you can’t take it someplace else.

03:53

because that’s ours or we built it on our own proprietary  content management system. They don’t think anything about it as the business owner when they’re opting in. They’re like, okay, great, let’s get moving. But then they come up to a roadblock, they’re frustrated with something or the vendor disappears.  And all of sudden they can’t make changes to their site. They can’t get in there and add the code that we’re asking them to code because the platform wasn’t built that way. And so  then they’re like, well, let me go to a different company. They’re starting from scratch.

04:23

They don’t actually own the website that they invested thousands of dollars into because of how it was. So sometimes it’s not that a vendor saying, you don’t own this. It’s more a vendor misleading in how they’re setting the client up for success. And instead really trying to hold them as a long-term client and not looking out at the client’s interest. So let’s shift to you. I know we talked a while back before we were recording the,

04:51

the work you do in the M &A space. So ah just give us an overview and then we can talk a little more about getting in with sellers and with buyers and diligence and all of that. Absolutely. On the M &A space, we come at it a bit differently than a lot of agencies. So we’re more focused on what does that go-to-market strategy look like? How do we actually prove and show that the marketing spend we’re putting in  is providing this type of  ROI and this result? And so

05:19

as you get ready to  go to market or looking at the valuations, you have strong information and numbers to say, absolutely, I know that our marketing is well spent, this is what it’s doing. Or sometimes it is a flag for a  buyer going, oh, they’re not marketing much. Let’s go after this company. We know if we come in and put some marketing money behind this, we can grow this  3X, 10X, whatever our goals are. So there’s different ways to look at it, but it’s all in how do we want to tell that story?

05:48

is we go to market and if the website hasn’t been touched in five, 10 years, how is that perceived to the buyer when you go? It’s kind of like, oh, is this an asset that I really want to acquire? And so there’s times that we’ll come in and start putting those marketing and website strategies together. And then on the buying side, we’re really looking at how is it transferable? So you’ve got all these digital assets that make that business run and operate, but when you transfer hands post acquisition,

06:18

how are we getting that back up and running as quickly as possible so we can get back to profiting and revenue?  And a lot of times that’s where we start to see the breakdown when it comes to M &A is the transfer is not as smooth as people are expecting it to be. And it’s really because of how much tech is advanced starting to become way more of a pain point than we’ve ever seen before. Yeah, your comment about

06:43

the marketing and are they doing it or you’re not doing marketing, we should buy this company where we are working on a deal now with  a small local company  and selling to a larger company owned by a much larger organization.  And we had a due diligence meeting  and when the buyer started talk, the buyer team started talking about all that they do with digital marketing  and they’re very sophisticated.

07:12

And, you know, my client, we walked out and she said, maybe I should get an earn out on this deal. Meaning I should get a share of the future growth.  And because, I mean, they wowed her with what they are going to do and have done for the other companies they own. Yeah. Marketing in the digital aspect plays such a role in the valuation and people haven’t really fully put that together yet. They’re really looking at valuation from.

07:42

the tangibles, the finances, the different pieces, but they’re kind of forgetting that the brand carries a lot of weight and or putting  effort and money into that can drastically change the performance of that company. And so we are to your point starting to see usually because they’ve been burned at some capacity, the buyers are getting much more savvy as to where can we come in and either provide more value and really increase this company  or

08:10

How do we know, wow, that’s a really well-structured organization. We want to bring that in. Now, besides the  website services and  things like that, you’re doing, I won’t call it outreach, are you doing SEO, social media, things like that?  Absolutely.  Yeah. So that’s where we’re looking more, like I said, at that digital continuity from start to finish. And we’re looking at  what’s the best place to be putting that marketing spend

08:40

to reach those goals. So sometimes it’s SEO, sometimes it’s Google Ads, sometimes it’s social.  So we really dive in with the client to understand  what is the goal and mission, and then from there, what’s the best strategy from a marketing perspective to reach that instead of saying, if you’re gonna work with us, we need to always be doing A, B, and C, every company’s structure different. So we really like to find the best fit for them there. Yeah. Are there industries you found that…

09:09

You know, don’t do as well with all of this digital marketing and. Sometimes the  lenders and finance side can be a little bit more of a struggle because there’s just it needs to be more of a relationship driven approach than let’s just plaster a bunch of Facebook ads up someplace or  obviously that’s a bad example too, because they’d be more on LinkedIn. But you know, like really finding that space and also where are they coming to you from? If you’re doing something in a brand new category,

09:38

That’s education. That has to be more like videos and reels and stuff that’s going to pique their interest to go, huh, I think about that.  Oh, that’s interesting. Maybe I should go learn more compared to  I’m looking for a plumber. They’re going to go to SEO. They’re going to go to Google ads. They’re going to go  right to where can they find this? And so  you also, that’s where you really want to understand the intent. But I think a lot of that lender and finance side, real estate, it really is more about personal relationships than it is marketing.

10:09

So on your website, looking at says search engine marketing, which is different than search engine optimization. So  what is the difference? Search engine marketing is going to be more of the Google and Bing ads.  yeah, so that’s really going to fall more into historically what would be called pay per click. But instead of just saying, you know, Google ads,  especially with AI, we had talked about that briefly with AI that’s being pulled from Bing.

10:39

not so much Google. And so Bing has been forgotten about as far as even SEO and optimization for so long. So it’s really important that we like circle back around and go, we need to be looking at all of the search engines that are out there and how do we be showing up on those? And so that’s where the search engine marketing comes in is a bit more of a blanket there.  Okay. All  right. So, uh, we’ve, we’ve got the, and then we’ve got the social media.

11:09

So do you take over some social media for clients or all or? Yeah, it really varies in how we’re trying to structure that.  it’s kind of our rule of thumb. I don’t think we should be running social media ads unless we have a strong social media footprint to begin with. So we look at that with the clients and explore what they have and haven’t been doing before we get started on an ad side. But then we work with the team or the client to decide if you’ve got somebody in-house that can handle these things.

11:38

then by all means, let’s show them how to post consistently and what they can be doing to get the best traction and then let our team come in and put the ads on top of.  Or if you don’t have that extra help in-house, then let’s go ahead and take that on so you can get that off your plate. So those are ways that we’re much more collaborative in our approach when working with clients to say, where does it make, same thing with a website, right? I don’t want to make every single little site tweak that you need to, I don’t want to say that we’re

12:08

been in business for five years and now it’s six years, like those are edits you should be able to make on your own, team members changing. You should be able to go and make those changes on your own. So we try to come in more as like, how do we teach you or someone at your company how to make the tweaks on the site? And then when the heavy lifting comes up, come back to us and let’s get that part handled for you. And we found that’s just been a lot better of an approach for us with our clients to empower them to keep that control and back to that ownership of it.

12:37

but know that they’ve got that support system to lean on when they’re ready to do a little bit more of a heavy lift, whether it be marketing, their website, whatever. Okay. And I noticed on your website, it says you use the WordPress platform, which does exactly what you’re, is easy to do what you’re talking about. Cause that’s what we do. You have to be able to post your own blogs and articles and everything else. So. And that’s why we stay in it. Like a lot of different platforms.

13:06

obviously have come out over the years or Shopify is a solid e-commerce platform now. They’ve done a really good job over there adapting those pieces.  We’ve just found that with WordPress, we can get into the code side and really do just about anything the client is asking for.  So we’re never having to go back to the client and say, because we decided to take this quicker build, we now have to charge you again to rebuild from scratch just to hit this functionality because you grew.

13:33

I guess something I always thought when I built the company was, I don’t want to restrict the client from growth. I want them to be able to. So if we set them up from the beginning of just a five page website, don’t know where I’m going. And then two years later, they’re like, holy crap, I want to do this whole online learning program and I want to do these things and I want to do this passive income. I don’t have to say, well, we need to start over. I can say, great, let’s talk about it. Let’s build that into the site now too. And so WordPress has been a really strong foundation, but it’s also because

14:03

our team is built with designers, developers, server techs, and everyone wants to know how do we get those integral pieces all working together?  And when do we need to bring the right people in to make that happen?  So let’s go back to the uh M &A side. um From the buyer perspective,  the digital  marketing, the tech, all of that. um And getting into due diligence with it. So talk a little bit about what you’ve

14:32

how you’ve helped on that end. Yeah,  unfortunately right now it’s a lot of recovery. I really wish that our work on the buy side was much more of a proactive piece, whether it be  as they’ve got the LOI in and are starting to ask questions or whether it’s  due diligence and kind of getting everything wrapped up. That’s where I think the best fit for us to come in really is so that we can get ahead of it. We have our own proprietary checklist that’s about 300 data points.

15:01

to really say, we get everything transferred? And it is all of this up-to-date post-transaction integration. And what we’re finding is a lot of teams say they had, yeah, we’ve got a checklist. Oh, we’ve done deals before. So they feel really confident in it. But then what we see is about six months post-deal, we get the phone call. Why is the website down? Why is Slack not working the way it’s supposed to? are my, can’t.

15:27

run Facebook ads, I was getting ready to run those and we can’t even access the account. How do we recover that? And there’s all these pieces that it’s like, well, we should have done that right away as soon as you acquired, you know, and we should have started that process. And now it’s in this recovery phase. And as we mentioned earlier, fortunately, unfortunately, they’re starting to get more savvy about that. Just about anybody I talked to that has acquired has ran into a

15:52

Oh crap, what did we get ourselves into?  How do we get out of this mess?  And ownership of the domain. Nope, no one knows where it’s at. And now we got to go find some legal bills to go  recover that. And now it’s halting us from being live. So that’s really where we come in and would like to come in a lot sooner with clients to say, let’s take this hundred day integration and have it done in 30 days. And at the same time, let’s not find these there six months later.

16:19

Let’s find this stuff immediately so we can get ahead of it and get you back up to an operational as quickly as possible. So you want to get in there on the digital diligence during the overall due diligence process. Absolutely.  Whether we’re just assisting and asking the right questions to get that information, sometimes it’s just, is this a good deal? Are there opportunities for us to do better when we take this company in?

16:46

they don’t know exactly what questions to ask sometimes. And so how can we get in there and say, well, have you thought about this, this and this? These are ways that we could definitely increase, you know, if we were to put those into place. Other times it’s just, yeah, they thought they did the due diligence. There was a hotel that acquired and they thought that they had Expedia set up. Turns out when they started asking questions post transaction already purchased, they’re like, I mean, yeah, there’s a dormant Expedia account, but.

17:15

none of us have access to it. And it’s like, that was part of the marketing plan was to go back to that entire list and say, under new management, we’d love for you to check us out again. But all of that completely a lost marketing effort now that they’re gonna have to rebuild the Expedia, rebuild the reviews, all of these pieces. And so,  you know, that’s one small example, but also where it isn’t just about the website, it isn’t just about your social platforms. There’s so many little pieces that go into that deal.

17:46

And where does AI fit into all of this? AI fits into it one. mean, people are trying to find all sorts of ways to quickly advance what they’re doing, get more efficient with it. And at the same time, I just actually did a poll on LinkedIn the other day of like, how are you handling governance with AI? How are you integrating this into your  team and your processes? And all of them kind of answered little by little  as we go, we have no playbook, we have no route in how we want to integrate this.

18:13

One of the reasons that that’s so important is it gets back to what we’re talking about with ownership. What we’re seeing right now is a lot of employees are setting up all of these different AI tools using their personal account because they don’t necessarily want the company to know they’re trying to find ways for AI to make their job easier, right?  But what they’re also doing is possibly entering private data into platforms that shouldn’t be and also

18:41

they’re training it on the company data. So what happens when they exit, because it’s tied to their personal account, it’s gonna be really, really difficult to prove through like  law and even your contracts that that needs to stay because that’s under their personal account. And so that’s a place where all of the training that they’ve put into it, you’ve lost. So it was time, sure, that you paid them on your, you know, your clock, but it isn’t your ownership.

19:10

And so that’s another place that AI is coming in is how do we make sure that as these tools come out, that they are staying and owned by you, but you also understand what all these monthly fees are and why you have them. And if you still need them, as you’re testing out all these tools, even as a business owner, like, sure, let’s try this. Oh, maybe I don’t need it. But a lot of times they forget to cancel the actual subscription. And then it just goes as an auto pay over and over and over that we’re starting to see that there’s a lot of lost revenue or lost.

19:38

money coming in there when they really just need a closer look at what accounts do they have open. Yeah. Plus  as you alluded to, you have employees putting proprietary information into a public AI site.  And, you know, we’ve recognized that and we put in  our non-disclosure agreements now a paragraph saying any

20:05

a buyer cannot use any to confident put any of the confidential information into a public AI site. Yeah, I think it’s huge. I don’t hear enough people talking about it. I know I’ve been to a handful of M &A events too that are talking about AI and in the back you can hear a lot of like investment bankers and different people like, oh, we just upload it. Oh, we just, know, kind of whispering. mean, obviously not part of the presentation, but

20:31

That’s what’s going on in the background is, yeah, we just upload the data and we get all this stuff back. And  yeah, to me, I’m just cringing going, this is private  data. Like this should not be stuff that is getting into and training these platforms and these LLMs. like, how do we make sure that those are in place to say, no, this doesn’t, or here’s the rules. This is what we’re going to do. If you set up this account, it’s under a company account.

20:58

and all of the settings we know are correct and this is how we’re going to go about it. And that’s the only way we’re going to do it. Yeah. And the that  that makes sense. And  because  if people are uploading all that stuff and then someone goes in and says, tell me what you know about XYZ company and they’ve uploaded all this financial statements and other things. Wow. I didn’t know I could get this on AI.  Right. And they start using it. I mean, it is.

21:27

Amazing what AI can do for some of that analysis and what it can do to expedite. I’m also co-founder with another company called BizForesight and it’s a lot of what we’re doing, but in more of the  secure domain, if you will, where we’re taking the uh investment process of, hey, let’s upload all of this information, financials,  contracts, all of the different pieces. Let’s get it into AI and let’s let that sort through all of the data.

21:56

And then it’s taking the kind of deal process of what does this look like? What is the valuation you want? What is the exit you’re looking for? And from there,  it’s gonna put out this nice dashboard that says, we need to improve A, B, and C if that’s the valuation you want. Or if you wanted to exit through like an ESOP, for example, these are the things we need to have in place that you don’t currently have. So there are ways that you can use AI and it’s crazy.

22:22

what is available and out there for that processing of data and how quickly it’s taking humans from processing all of that data to letting AI process all of that data.  And so, you know, obviously there’s a lot more to that, but at a quick overview, we’re also doing that on secure private servers that we have of our own and locking everything down. So you gotta know how you wanna go about it if that’s the route you wanna do. Yeah, okay. Very interesting. ah

22:51

It is a fairly new and open like the Wild Wild West. uh And  this has been a great discussion. uh You’re in  Colorado, so tell us what you like to do when you’re not doing digital marketing.

23:11

Oh, Juan, I mean, I just love business development. So most of time you are actually going to find me doing something related to marketing. But beyond that, when I get a chance, I love to go trail run mostly up in the mountains. I like to say about 13,000 feet or higher is my sweet spot there.  So I really, really love to just get out, get away from the computer and really start to put into perspective of, oh, there’s a lot more going on in this world than we’re really  used to just sitting in front of a computer all the time. Yeah, that seems to be a popular

23:41

I know the Wall Street Journal about last couple weeks had a big article on all the families that  people are in their house are making digital free rooms and things like that to just, you know, whether it’s playing board games or getting outside, ah getting away from getting the family away from the screens. And you do have to uh disconnect sometimes and not carry the.

24:09

Yeah, it’s definitely one of those Colorado I feel like it’s really good about it like everyone, even a lot of our networking events have been turning into let’s go for a hike and grab some people let’s, you know, go play pickleball and do that for a bit instead of you know how do we make this such a kind of sterile networking event that we’re used to going to day in and day out so I do appreciate that Colorado’s got a little bit different feel for how that all works and then.

24:33

From there, yeah, I think  we are just so absorbed with, especially I think AI is making it harder for people to disconnect. They’re just wanting to be so attached to that device now.  And it’s really hard to watch that, even at the gym, when I go, it’s just the amount of people still on phones in between things. So  I’m with you. It’s not bad to get the uh digital free zone and to really figure out how do you still spend those times to connect. Yeah. Don’t get me going on people in the gym and their phone to…

25:04

Yeah, do a little set and then sit there watching videos and hog the machine for 20 minutes.  to wrap up, anything  you’d like to get out?  Anything I didn’t ask you about that you’d like to cover? Yeah, the only last thing I would add is just as far as digital ownership, I think it’s one of the most important pieces. And like I said, we feel far too many calls in a reactive state. So  I would just encourage your listeners, matter buy side, sell side, whatever that looks like,

25:34

They can go to our website, treeringdigital.com slash GTDD and the download a checklist that’ll help start kind of walking through and identifying gaps of, hey, we are getting ready to exit and  these are things we should be looking at or hey, as we get ready to acquire, these are things that maybe we have not put into our digital due diligence. So I’m definitely encourage them to go over there and download that because it’s just a really good place to start identifying those gaps.

26:01

Pre ring digital dot com slash GTD D. Yep, that’ll do it. OK, I will get that in the show notes and we’ve got it out here a couple times. So  page has been a real pleasure talking to you. This is always interesting stuff. uh You know, not being a techie, but knowing how to use it to what I want to get done. I’m always fascinated by talking to people like you are in it uh up to your eyeballs. So.

26:31

as we wrap up Page Wiese with TreeRing Digital  and a digital transformation and marketing company.  And this has been really insightful. I thank you for being a guest. Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. OK.