The Business Behind Your Business
with Paul Sweeney
Digital Asset Disaster: How to Protect Your Brand Before It’s Too Late
Imagine waking up to find your website gone, your email list inaccessible, or your brand’s identity being misused online—and you have no idea how to take it back. That’s the nightmare too many business owners face because they’ve unknowingly handed over control of their digital assets. In this episode of The Business Behind Your Business, host Paul Sweeney sits down with Paige Wiese, founder and CEO of Tree Ring Digital, to help you make sure that never happens to you.
Paige draws on over 15 years of experience helping business owners protect their online presence to share eye-opening stories and a simple, effective strategy for taking back control. Whether you’re a start-up founder or a seasoned business owner, this episode is your wake-up call—and your game plan.
🎯 Listen now to learn how to:
• Identify the full scope of your digital assets (spoiler: there are more than 200!)
• Avoid common mistakes that lead to losing domains, websites, or social media accounts
• Create a reliable system for documenting logins, licenses, and third-party tools
• Reduce risk during employee turnover or vendor transitions
• Set up brand protection policies that safeguard your business now and in the future
• Use Paige’s free Brand Protection Checklist to start assessing your exposure today
This episode is packed with practical advice you can implement right away to keep your brand safe, your systems organized, and your business growing.
Paige Wiese is the founder and CEO of Tree Ring Digital, a top-ranked Denver-based marketing agency that develops high performance websites and digital marketing strategies for businesses nationwide. With 16 years of industry experience, Paige has seen companies and CEOs struggle to manage and maintain their assets through growth or transition. She has recently developed a proprietary digital asset management service to track and protect companies’ over 200 data points. Paige is a dedicated speaker and mentor on the topics of brand protection and business growth.
Transcription
Welcome to The Business Behind Your Business, the podcast where we delve into the financial strategies and insights that drive success for small and medium sized business owners. I’m your host, Paul Sweeney, and in each episode we bring you expert guests who share practical advice, real world experiences, and actionable tips to empower you on your business journey.
Whether you are a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, get ready to uncover the secrets to success and gain valuable insights into the business behind your business.
Welcome back to The Business Behind Your Business Podcast, where we help small business owners like you have the knowledge, the expertise, learn from experts on the things that really matter, to grow your business profitably, efficiently, and to make your business fun. And it’s always some kind of issue.
And we love business owners. We love business. There are times when something happens and you just have to go, oh shit, why has this happened? How did this happen? What does it mean? Am I gonna recover from this? And you might not think it’s gonna happen to you, but generally that’s when it does. And sometimes.
You know, you can recover from it very quickly. Other times, it, it’s, it’s a lot more painful. And in some cases we’ve actually seen those moments actually destroy a business. We wanna avoid that. We wanna avoid that in, in any way, and. Particularly today we’re gonna look at the, the issue of digital assets.
Okay? Now, digital assets is something that’s probably new to our understanding, and we’re not talking here about cryptocurrency and financial assets. We’re talking about digital assets, which actually are a key asset to your business. What happens if something happens to them? What’s the damage that can be done and how can you recover?
Important questions that you need to know the answer to. So we’re gonna dive into that, but I’m not going to give you the answers. I’ve got Paige Weis, the founder of and CEO of Tree Ring, digital Denver based digital marketing agency, specializing in website development, SEO, and brand protection. And particularly brand protection around digital assets.
Paige has got over 15 years experience and has helped countless business owners. Before we hit record, we’ve been talking about a number of the things that Paige has been helping business owners with everyday problems that happen to everyday business, but we’re gonna make sure that we understand what they are and how we’re gonna prepare for them.
And look, Paige is quite passionate. I, I’ve already gathered that from our, our brief introduction. I’m sure you’ll understand how passionate she’s and why she’s so passionate about this topic. So. Page, welcome to the Business Behind Your Business.
Oh, thank you so much, Paul. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m really excited about our conversation today.
Yeah, I, I, I’m excited because I’ve experienced and seen so many of those moments where, how could it happen to me? How did this happen to me? Can I recover? And, you know, it’s easy to laugh at them and say that, well, they’re the Instagram moments that you laugh at when you’re scrolling through. But they’re real people, real businesses, real outcomes and real issues.
We wanna avoid that at all costs. So how do we go about it? But I guess the first thing is, let’s be very clear about what do we mean by digital assets.
I. Yeah. By digital assets, what we mean is it’s like the organizing and the documenting and maintaining control over all of the things that go into the digital presence that you have for your business.
So that can be your domain names and email addresses to your website hosting that can get into your Google Analytics and even email marketing who owns the email lists at times? How do you get into those platforms? It. Your logo design and the files, marketing collateral photos that you paid professionally to have taken, where are all of these things stored?
How are the third party tools being integrated and used into these various platforms all the way into privacy policies, protection, you know, the disclaimers on your websites, terms and conditions and compliance, a, d, a, all of that.
That’s a, that’s a lot of different assets and a lot of different things to consider.
So I. Where, where do we start with this? Because there seems so many, I guess, so many different ends to the, to the ball of string that’s in a mess. How do we, how do we know where to start?
You know, typically it’s like, what do we already have in place? And you know, what was set up over time? Do you know how to access the basic things that you’re aware that your business is managing and you know, whether it’s the third party tools, your domain name hosting.
And then from there it’s starting to dive even deeper into. Who set up the other things or do you, what other tools are being used to make this happen? Sometimes it’s plugins on a website. Did the developer purchase that? Did you purchase it? Who has to pay for the renewal? When does that come up? So it sometimes it’s not even things that you thought that you set up, right?
So we really have to start taking that into account of what are all of the things that are encompassed making this happen.
Setting up a whole bunch of things on your behalf that you didn’t really realize they were doing. And it’s like, oh, how did those get out there? You know, who manages those now? And how do we take them back down if we don’t want them? And so there is that like protecting your brand side of it too, so that the messaging is falling in line with what you’re wanting it to be for your company.
Hmm. And, and there, there’s so many things that I’m thinking of my, my head’s racing through some of the issues. Like we, you know, we talked about somebody, you engage a professional to do some work for you, and they go and, and do a whole bunch of other things. They, you know, create listings, they create websites, they create assets, they sign you up for things, or they put out a presence, which may not be what you want.
And then. When you stop working with that professional, who owns that asset? How do you control it? How do you take it down? We’ve had issues where. And this is not uncommon where you’ve engaged somebody to do a piece of work for you and they’ve taken a shortcut or they’ve used a license that belonged to another client, and all of a sudden you’ve got a claim against you because you’ve breached copyright, which means that whatever you’ve created is, is at risk.
And how, how have you been using it? How central is it to your business? There’s so many areas that I’ve, I’ve seen. What are some of the, the, the common things that, that you are coming across?
Yeah, we see it in a variety of ways. Sometimes it’s gonna be, you know, virtual assistants setting stuff up on behalf of, we see it often in nonprofits where they’ve got interns coming in, setting up, say social profiles, and then their internship is done.
They leave and no one remembered to ask them how to access the social profile. They set up, and typically then they defer to. Let’s set up another account and it’s like, no, no, no, we need, we can’t have three dormant social media accounts just ’cause you keep losing the logins. We need to figure out how do we go back and recover the one that you did have set up and what does that look like?
But sometimes it can be a lengthy, lengthy process. Sometimes, you know, we’ve seen it where they didn’t renew the domain name in time and it expired. It’s expensive. It’s very, very expensive to recover a domain name. They understand the value of a domain that’s been sitting there for, you know, used for five, 10 years, whatever that looks like.
And they’re not just gonna hand it back over to you. And so you gotta work through that whole process. Sometimes there’s a waiting period before you can do that. So it’s not just the cost of, Hey, how do I, you know, pay the domain and get it back up and running. How long is your domain and your website actually gonna be down during that time?
We’ve also seen some of the like horror stories of getting the phone call where the client calls and says, my employee just deleted the whole site. It was on their server. I don’t know why we moved it off of you. It’s on their server, they deleted the site. How do we get it back? And we have to figure out, you know, what, what does that recovery look like?
Do we have any sort of backup or are we starting from scratch? And if it’s starting from scratch again, it’s a really expensive one. And to your, what we talked about at the beginning of the show, you might not think it’s gonna happen to you. But it, it, it will, at some point, one of them will happen. And so how do we be protective of.
Hmm. And, and look, these are all things, uh, a lot of business owners still don’t have these, the, or anything in place. They don’t even have a structure. It’s sort of like, oh, I need a website. I’ll go get it. So there’s no plan around it or, or I need social media, so let’s just set it up. There’s no plan around how we’re going to use that, how we’re gonna manage it, how we’re gonna control how we, how we gonna back it up?
Because you mentioned backups. I know. So, mm-hmm. Think they’ve got backups of their data. But they, they don’t, they’ve posted directly into a social media account, but they don’t have any backup of the actual, I guess, original content that they can reuse if something goes wrong.
Oh, it’s true. Yeah. They’ll usually just throw it into a scheduling platform and move on with their day or post it directly to, and there’s no record anywhere of, wait, what photo did we use?
Where’s the original photo of that? Like, you know, how do we get some of that back and. Yeah, sometimes it’s reposting all of that content to rebuild up the social platform, which just obviously isn’t gonna get quite as much traction. And I always, you know, use the word like juice out of it, just because if you’re trying to just consistently post all of this stuff to get caught back up, it’s not gonna be there.
It’s not gonna get that traction you were looking for originally.
So I guess you, you need, you need to have a plan. We’ve, we’ve talked about this, you need to have a plan, but where do you start? Because I think. You know, it’d be great to have a way of actually taking stock of everything that is out there or that you potentially have, because if I went through and thought about all the digital assets that our business has, I’m probably gonna miss.
60, 70% of it, because I’m just not thinking about it. I’m only thinking about what I use, but I’m not thinking about, oh, we used that audio file. Where did we purchase that from? Where did we get the license from? Where is all that coming from? So I think you’ve got a really good process. How can you help people get started with this?
Yeah, so one of ’em was to kind of run them through like a checklist or digital or a brand protection checklist of just, Hey, start thinking about these things. Mostly because we’ve identified that there’s over 200 data points that go into having one business online. And so to your point in our like, yeah, you might know, you know, 30% of what those things look like and you’re just not tracking and putting anything else into place there.
Once we kind of run through that and understand what all is involved. Then I start talking with the companies of what are the process and procedures, what are the follow-ups? What should be done like when this is what is the company policy so that we can also start putting all of that into place that it’s just part of the job.
Hey, when you hand this, you know, task off to go set up this platform. It’s just one of the things that gets done is documenting it someplace of what those logins are. And I think, you know, harder and harder is teams are growing. How do we, you know, where is that central location? What does that look like?
Are you using a tool internally or not? Or is that something we need to set up so that everyone has access to it? After that, the next thing is looking into what are we doing and like who has access to these various accounts. When I log into websites for clients, I often see four other names of past vendors.
Maybe a vendor from four years ago, seven years ago, whatever, that has just never gotten removed. And it’s not necessarily the client’s fault. They just didn’t know. They didn’t even know that they had the access or they didn’t know how to change that access. And so, you know, thankfully nothing had been done with that access.
However, let’s get these things cleaned up so that the right people have access to the right things. And then second is I always just say like, how do we put a. Security net in place of two to three points of contact on the accounts. So you know, you have to make sure you have the ownership of it. But then after that, how do we dive a little bit deeper yet to say, okay, who are two other people?
So if something happened, someone else still has access to that. A lot of times I’ll tell clients, like, we put ourselves on there when we might not ever touch it. It’s just a backup. It’s just so that we know if. Your email got hacked tomorrow and something happened and you know, whatever. Or you, you just didn’t get the renewal emails.
There’s one more place to go to.
Yeah, those backups plans, backup emails are crucial, particularly if, yeah, you mentioned if something happens to your primary email, and we’ve seen that happen. I’ve seen that happen with some businesses recently where their primary email got hacked. So much was tied up in it.
When they went to get all their backups and restore, there was no secondary contact. So the time, the effort that I went through to try and recover. That asset was very lengthy, which meant they weren’t actually working on their business. They weren’t actually producing any income at that time. And unfortunately for this client, in some cases, they weren’t able to recover it because they didn’t, weren’t able to prove, because all of the security features were linked to that one one point of compromised security.
Yeah. And the, and the lost leads that were probably going to that email, you know, like depending on who it is. So it’s not, again, as we were saying, it’s not just how much. Lost time or how much lost money, whatever it, there’s a lot of ways that it really does start impacting your business with just the smallest little thing going down.
Yeah. Yeah. I’m just, just thinking through, there are just so many ways that things can go wrong here because we’ve got so many. If we just started listing all the digital assets we thought we had, and then we actually had a list of all the assets we did have, our list would be very incomplete. And there’s so many areas.
I, the, the more, I guess as I say to a lot of people, the more points of contact you’ve got, the more points that things can break down. So you need to have a consistent plan. One of the things you mentioned, just as we were talking about that last point, was having a policy in place about what’s used and who, who uses and who gets access.
So can you just expand a bit more about what should be part of that policy?
Yeah, I think part of the policy as far as who has access and who should have control of these things is one, is it part of their daily task and routine? Like should they have access to it because of it? If you are setting it up, where does it need to be set and stored?
And you know, how is the naming structure so that everyone can find it? Or the people who should, you know, have access to that can find that. So again, even identifying that part of it. Other times, just more documentation. Okay. If you set it up, who’s the two-factor authentication going to? So that in, you know, the times of recovery, we can identify right away what email address, what phone number, who’s gonna get that text message, whatever that looks like.
And then on the other side of that is gonna be okay. Now that that’s done. Also add the owner of the company. You know, like let’s make sure that the owner of the company does in fact have ownership to whatever asset you just set up and put into place. And, and also lining what is the email address you want to be used for.
A lot of these things, you know, we might say everything that’s website related for our clients goes to webmaster at. Just so that there’s one central location, most everything else is gonna go to a different email address so that we know where to look when those things come up. Or if it’s like coming up for renewal for some reason, we can.
Who’s using it? Why do we have it? What’s going on? Do we need to renew it? You know, is it something we can let go? But when you can start to use the same email addresses for the same things, then it starts to make a little of that recovery processes easier. ’cause then you can go, well, let’s go check that email, because that’s where it should be.
But what we’ve noticed is oftentimes the employee will just set it up with their employee email. They keep moving and then down the road you are not getting any notifications for something. There can be a lot of expenses for a business that they’re paying for of renewals that they just don’t even know they’re paying for.
It just keeps coming out of a credit card until the credit card isn’t working anymore, and it’s like. How many years are we paying for the Zoom license key for this employee that they set up that we didn’t know about? You know? And so that’s another place of how do we find that revenue and take back control and make sure it’s all centralized so that no matter what’s happening with turnover internally, with vendors, even, whatever that looks like that you do, in fact have all of that information in front of you.
Mm. Yeah. Yeah. So you mentioned employee turnover and, and I know that we’ve often had this situation where it’s been quicker for an employee to set up using their own email address or that there’s been a requirement to use that, but that employee’s left. So how do we make sure we, we monitor that?
Unfortunately, we, we work with a really good IT provider who, who helps make sure that we’ve got continued access to that email until we’ve, we’re certain that we’ve got. All the notifications, all the subscriptions transferred across. I guess one, one other thing there, or two other things that come to mind is you mentioned using the same email address.
I’m guessing that you are going to recommend against using the same password.
I would definitely recommend against using the same password. Some of it’s just protection and privacy. Obviously it’s easier to get hacked too if it’s the same one over and over and over again. But the other side of it is just that like if you need to have quick turnover.
It’s not like someone can come in and be like, let’s see if they changed that password too. Right. It’s, no, they’re, and I mean, I really wanna be able to log into all of my things and, you know, when the team would set it up. Yes. We had a standard password all the time too. And then we, you know, are forced now to set up more or stronger passwords.
And at first I was against it. And now that we have tools that remember us, I’m also just like, oh, that’s, should something happen. No one’s gonna remember that password. Like it’s not one where they can just bounce back and be like, we know how the naming structure, you know, works for such and such company.
And so, you know, I do think the more that you can lean into the more strict or strong passwords, it is better, even though probably more of a nuisance in most situations. And yeah, even same thing, keeping like, hey, if this is the owner of the company and these are the passwords I’m always using. Do something different with the company.
Keep everything so separate so that Yeah, the team is not getting randomly by, just let me go try. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve recovered accounts of like, well use this password over here. Might as well give it a try over here and see if it works. And sure enough we get logged in and you know, but the client never really thought to try that password again.
So, you know, yes, sometimes it saved us, but I highly, highly recommend against using the same password over and over again.
And I’m just wondering, we talking about policies in the business and we’ve talked about. Employees, and you mentioned employees trying different passwords on different sites and, and what sort of prompted me is an employee will go off and try or get demos of six versions of a particular tool, and they’ve signed up to those six versions, but what have they actually provided to those tools?
Right. That’s true too. Yeah. Like one, what access do they have of some of your internal systems as far as like, hey, we did decide to connect an API. Well now the software still has access to that, right? Or did they do the whole It’s a seven day free trial and it bumps them right into a paid subscription model.
But they didn’t know that. Right. And so they Yeah, have free running that they didn’t need, ’cause they only chose to go with one. And you know, so are we taking the right steps to like set a task on a calendar that says. Make sure you stop this subscription if you’re not gonna use this, instead of letting it auto run on the company card.
Uh, because I’m, you know, that starts to get really hard from an accounting perspective of keeping track of all of the tools. And typically the accountant’s just gonna go, okay, like, it’s probably been approved someplace, you know, it’s on the company card. Instead of doing the question and asking of like, what was this for?
Why do we need it? Where is it at? And so. That you’ve got extra expenses going out as well. But then to your point, yeah, now you’ve got all these, this information on a variety of sites and.
Mm. Yeah, absolutely. Look, the accountant in me is just, could, could latch onto those last bits of conversation and, and, and go on a tangent here, because I’ve done that before.
But look, if, if you want to hear my, hear my thoughts on this, check out our episode on zombie spending, where I’ve talked about some of the risks of these subscriptions and, and subscription creep and what it costs your business. But let’s get back to page and talk about digital asset management and protection.
If we just summarize, what are the, I guess the, the. The biggest warning signs that a business owner needs to take heat off with respect to digital assets. And then I might ask you to say, well, how, where are the, the, the critical steps that you must take as a business owner?
Yeah. So the first part, you know, what are the, the warning signs?
I think when you just start to delegate everything out, when you just start to say someone else is handling it, someone else is handling it, someone else is handling it right? You need to be at least in control of your business to some extent, and understand and ask the right questions of just, again, why are we setting this up?
What is it doing and how can I access this in the future? And, and it’s good for all sorts of reasons. Growth. It’s good for, you know, exit planning. It’s good for just different ways of, okay, I know everything is here, tidied up and I know what’s out there and about my business and what’s being talked about and how we’re presenting, you know, just.
Can you, you know, if you sit there and I say, Hey, how, you know, how do we access your website? And you’re like, I dunno, that’s a warning sign. That’s a flag for sure. You know, when does your domain expire? I don’t know. That’s a warning sign. It might be set to Autorenew, but if that credit card expires, you still, you know, need to know when that renewal is.
So there’s those different pieces, right? That when you start going through, and I’m not positive, you know, is your site compliant with such and such? I’m not sure. Those are warning signs. We need to slow back down and get all of it lined up so that we’re in control and know what’s going on.
So where, where are the, the critical things that we should get started with as a business owner in, in managing this process?
I.
Critical things to get started with, I would say are gonna be like, make sure your domain and hosting and social profiles are accounted for. Those are the three like biggest first impressions of your brand and how you show up online and what they’re gonna see first. I would also say gather your logos.
I think a lot of people don’t actually know where their logo files are, and that’s your brand presence, right? You need to know what that looks like and how you can access those quickly. And so while not as critical. Still very, very important to have that ownership. And then from there, it’s starting to work through the rest of the process as far as like, do we have email marketing set up?
What are we doing for, you know, Google Analytics? What are we doing with third party vendors and tools and integration and, you know, compliance, whether it be, like I said, the privacy policies, terms and conditions, compliance, all of that. Working through it. It’s definitely a phased approach. There’s a lot to go into it and, um, and how do you log in and check it out and see, you know, and if you can’t log in and that’s another warning sign for you.
Great. Look, I’m seeing there’s a lot to do here. A lot of different parts, a lot of the different moving parts and you know, I was thinking 60, 70 pages said 200 different assets or different aspects at least. Fortunately you don’t have to go it alone. As a business owner, there are some great resources and great.
Help out there and the, the first place to start is at Tree Ring Digital and Paige, you’ve got a checklist audit available for people to check out.
Yeah, absolutely. We’ve got a brand protection checklist that will kind of just outline what those various assets are. You know, again, kind of giving you that peace of mind of.
Do I at least have this under control? Do I have that? Do I know where this is? So it’s totally interactive. You can work your way through it. It explains a little more too of what the different digital assets are, and you can get [email protected] slash ps.
Fantastic. Look, I’m always of the view that as a business owner you wear a lot of hats and you are not necessarily the right person to be doing this, to be doing everything and take advantage of using the skills and expertise of somebody else who is a specialist in that field.
So reach out to, to Paige and her team at Tree Ring Digital. Where else can they get in contact with your page if they wanna find out more?
Yeah, they can find out more on LinkedIn, and you can follow me on LinkedIn. We talk about digital assets all of the time and what that looks like and how to protect, as well as just other digital marketing and website tips, tricks, and resources, and then also on our [email protected].
Fantastic. As always, we’ll put links to those references and resources in the show notes and also on the business behind your business.com website where you can check out not just the resources and summary of today’s episode, but all, all of our past episodes. So if you haven’t already been listening to the business behind your business, I encourage you to check out some of the past episodes.
Content. Still very useful for you today and if you’ve found this episode useful and you know another small business owner that. Would benefit as well. Please share this resource with them and help them take control of their digital assets, protect them, and also look after their business. Paige, it is been an absolute pleasure to have you on the business behind your business and really appreciate what you’ve shared with us today and your time.
Absolutely. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed my time.
That’s a wrap for this episode of The Business Behind Your Business. We hope you found today’s discussion insightful and valuable for your business journey. Before we go, don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite platform. Share it with fellow business owners who could benefit and send in your burning questions because we love hearing from you.
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