The M&A Mastermind Podcast

Navigating Digital Asset Ownership

In this episode, Nick Olsen and Paige from Tree Ring Digital dig into how digital infrastructure and access now play a meaningful role in mergers and acquisitions. The discussion focuses on where deals commonly run into trouble, how digital ownership affects both buyers and sellers, and why digital readiness should be treated as part of standard deal preparation.

Paige explains how companies can reduce risk by organizing and documenting their digital systems, accounts, and access before a transaction begins. She also outlines how a structured approach to digital continuity can prevent delays, post close disruptions, and unexpected costs. The conversation closes with guidance for M&A professionals on helping their clients better understand the value and risk tied to their digital environment.

Key Points

• Digital systems and accounts are now a material part of M&A transactions

• Lack of clarity around ownership and access can weaken deal terms

• Many owners do not have a complete picture of their digital footprint

• Digital assets should be reviewed during diligence, not after closing

• Delaying cleanup of digital access and documentation often increases cost and risk

• A digital continuity framework helps protect operations after a transaction

• Sellers should take an active role in organizing and securing their digital assets

• Exit planning should include digital readiness well before a deal process begins

• A well structured digital environment can strengthen market positioning and valuation

• Advisors can add value by guiding clients through digital risk and asset awareness

Transcript

About the Show

The M&A Mastermind Podcast provides practical guidance and real world insight for lower middle market deal professionals. Host Nick Olsen and industry leaders share experience, strategies, and tools to help advisors, investors, and operators navigate transactions more effectively and support business owners through the deal process.

00:00
Hey there, this is Casey with the M &A Launchpad podcast. Want to let you know about October 25th. Put it on your calendar. This is a do not miss one day event. There’s going to be incredible headliners, but really at the end of the day, you’re going to get a chance to talk to people that have made acquisitions, learn from some of the challenges that they’ve made, because this is definitely a challenging process. But more importantly, there’s going to be people there that can help and support you along the way from great vendors, quality of earnings.

00:29
how to run the due diligence process. And how do I get financed? How do I raise capital? How do I structure all of these things? October 25th in Chicago, we’re to be gathering. It’s going to be hundreds of people that are all focused, like-minded people. And man, everyone that’s come has given us incredible feedback. So mark your calendar, October 25th in Chicago. We look forward to seeing you.

00:51
All right. On today’s episode, we interviewed Paige Weiss where we talked about what does it look like to evaluate and have a digital marketing strategy on a business that you’re buying. Right. Buying a business has many parts to it from the operations to the sales to the marketing and usually technology is the backbone of all that. And so what are some of the considerations that you as a business buyer need to think about whenever you’re buying a business and who can help you identify the gaps, the weaknesses and the strengths to help you make a successful acquisition?

01:21
So Casey, what were some of your takeaways? Well, you’re the software guy and you know that this checklist is pretty valuable, man. I mean, like I have been through multiple due diligence and I just have not thought about the digital footprint, any of that stuff. So she put a total light bulb onto me and getting that information because, you know, once you get to the close and if that business has some type of marketing expense or advertising expenses and you don’t know where all that’s coming from or who controls that or who owns the website or all that.

01:51
man, that could be a loss right there just of time, energy and effort. I’m not saying it’s going to cost you $50,000, but what I am saying is that time is money and this is one of those things you could just alleviate right up front and know what you’re getting when you close. So I was super impressed with this podcast and Paige. So she’ll definitely be someone we talk to. No, I could pull the inquiry, right? I mean, you know, it’s easy to get hyper fixated on buying the business, but not really think about the transition and the mechanics of that. And you know, that’s what they’re there to help solve. And so we should have gone into horror stories on this one.

02:21
getting, but again, lots of valuable things. There’s plenty of them. Help get a successful transition. that’s this.

02:30
Welcome to the M &A Launchpad podcast with your host Casey and Ferris with Equity Launchpad. On this podcast, you will gain insights on acquiring, investing in, and selling profitable businesses in the lower to middle market. Whether you’re a business owner, investor, or spying entrepreneur, at Equity Launchpad, will provide you with the knowledge, guidance, and capital to navigate the world of mergers and acquisitions. Hey guys, go ahead and just pause the podcast for a second. When you’re buying a business, you need to ensure the financial health of the company. The quality of earnings is mission critical. It doesn’t matter what size business you’re buying.

02:59
Patrick O’Connell Advisory Group, they’re dynamic, they do a great job, they’re look over your shoulder, they’re gonna make sure that you’re doing the right thing. And this guy’s done over 200 buyers successfully, just like you. So reach out to him. And it’s oconnelladvisorygroup.com. Click the link in our show notes. Can’t live without you. Paige, welcome to the show. How are you today? Doing well, thank you. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here. Yeah, it’s great. Well, why don’t you just kick it off and talk to us a little bit about what you do, your background, how you’re involved in the ETA, all that great stuff.

03:28
So I own Turing Digital. We’re a full service digital marketing agency. Really tailored more though as your digital partner. So while we do the traditional website development, we do the digital marketing and all of that. We like to dive a lot deeper into the digital assets that go along with the business and really looking at the full digital footprint from your domain and your hosting and your emails all the way into your Google Analytics, your social profiles, your compliance, ADA compliance.

03:57
you know, how are we storing and managing brand files? So that’s where I say we really come alongside and work with our clients to meet them where they’re at, to make sure that we’re looking at the big picture of everything as well. I really love it because it’s just not part of my checklist. I’ll be honest. Like it’s not on my checklist. It’s going to be, I’m going to go to your website and download it because that’s just great stuff. You you assume it’s just going to come or it’s going to be there, right? But that’s, that’s a great angle. love that. oh

04:25
I mean, it’s kind of the lifeline of a business is really that sales and marketing strategy. And even at our company, that’s kind of the one where you kind of have to get the right people with the right alignment because it’s kind of, you know, it’s a blurriness between operations, sales and marketing. Right. And so you kind of have to get a real strategy of place that’s effective. Well, what we see too on the M &A side is, you know, like they’re stoked and they’re looking at all the things when it goes to a transaction, but no one’s really putting their pulse on.

04:52
But what does that look like for these assets? How are they getting transferred of ownership? How are they getting handed off? How are we making sure nothing is lost with all of those? We’ve identified 300 digital data points that go into having a business online. And yeah, you’re deep in the weeds looking at finances. You’re deep in the weeds looking at the tangibles and operations. People slow down and forget to focus on the digital side of that all.

05:19
Yeah, and think anytime you’ve got multiple brands, know you guys are, you know, got a different, a couple different ventures going on as well. And, you know, they forget that each of those continue to have their own set of assets and what are we doing to keep that all aligned? And I feel a lot of agencies or a lot of business owners are focused on just that one little section of it, not looking at the big picture. And so that’s where we really started to see that there’s some issues out there in that M &A space that need to get cleaned up and addressed.

05:46
Yeah, so who’s your typical customer? Maybe walk us through, you know, typical customer, right? At what point did they bring you in? What’s the problem you’re helping them solve and what are they typically overlooking? We have like two typical customers for us are on both sides, right? So typical is going to be your buy side. Typical is going to be your sell side. There’s two ways that we can really put that into place. When you’re looking at the sell side, we like to see them about a year out so that we can start looking at how do we increase that valuation?

06:13
through your digital presence? Is that increasing your website automation? Is it getting a new website, because you haven’t had one done in the last 10 years? Is it making sure that you do have ownership of these pieces? Is it reducing costs because you’re overpaying for some of your third party tools or license keys and different things that you don’t need? So how do we come in and really gather all of that and put it together so that when you do go to market, you have a very, very strong section there on that line item, if you will.

06:43
And so when you get to do diligence, you’re not going to get slowed down in your deal and you’re not going to have your deal and your valuation impacted because they start asking questions at that point. So that’s a really good side for us on the sell side and increasing valuation there. So a bit of a jumpstart on that is always good on the equity. really quick, and what’s the deliverable actually on that before you hop to the buy? Yeah, deliverable. we’re going to go through and we’re going to put together a whole like packet basically where it’s like, here is everything that we’re looking at and asking for. we’ve

07:12
Identified ownership, we’ve identified when things expire, we identify, you know, do we have the right logins? What happens if an employee turns over and put all of that into place? A lot of times we hear, I can’t get a hold of my marketing team. I don’t, can’t get you the numbers that you’re asking for, for me to prove that the ROI is there on the marketing expenses that we’re having. So while they’re looking at financials, they’re not able to get the documents to support it. So we’re going to see what we can do to either recover that or.

07:40
Let’s start getting some data in place now before we, like I said, get to that like two month mark prior to exiting and don’t have anything to show for it. Yeah. Cause most of the companies, if it’s online business or even a traditional business, whatever, most people are doing some type of online advertising keywords. They’re doing something. And so if I’m going through and I’m doing all my due diligence and I’m like, all right, look, there’s 10 K a month. That’s going to advertising. Great. Most of the time it’s like, yeah, it’s advertising. Great.

08:09
But in your checklist and what you’re saying is this, Hey Casey, listen, let’s dial into that 10,000, right? Or let’s do an analysis and say, Hey, what is the ROI on this? Or, you know, all of that other stuff where I’m sitting there busy doing the QV or looking at the P &Ls and doing all that even to great stuff. There’s just that extra little notch, right? You go into that part or, and let me ask you if this is also something you deliver, which is to then come back to me and say, Hey, listen, there are some things we can do.

08:38
off the bat, right? I’ve looked at the keywords, I’ve looked at the market and you know, that 10K could be completely given here and you should be able to get so much more out of it. Yeah, low hanging fruit address now that you see that. And that’s been helpful on both sides, right? We could also come in on the acquisition side and go, hey, look, we’ve looked at the numbers and we see what they’re doing and there’s actually a lot of opportunity if you just reposition yourselves a little bit. And now we, you know, go ahead and acquire because we know we can already jump that.

09:06
revenue pretty quickly if we’re doing the right things compared to what they were doing. And then, same thing on the um exit side of, hey, why, or another way we see it is a lot of companies will come in as referral based, especially if you’re doing like home services or some of those more traditional kinds, accounting, oh business services, whatever. And that’s not really going to look great when you go to the valuation side and due diligence. So if we can come in and yeah, start to get ahead of it and say,

09:35
why don’t we focus on two to three really core lead generation tools? Here’s what we’re recommending for a budget. Let’s run that for one to two years so that when you go and are asking for this valuation, we can show them that that revenue is coming with you and it’s not just gonna get lost because all the referrals decided to go to a different company or the referral network and everything.

09:58
You know, Paige, you bring up a great point here. And I think for our listeners that are thinking about buying their first business or somebody that has a business wanting to exit, they always say that you got to start with the end in mind, right? So if you’re buying a company, you’re not, I love that people say, Hey, I’m going to own this forever. Right. But the truth is, is if you do it right, someone’s going to tap you on the shoulder and buy it from you. Okay. So what we’re always doing at equity launch pad on our deals is we have a data room. We’re always looking for, as we add value, we create a data room.

10:27
build out that piece. And so it’s also nice to be able to say to a seller is, Hey, this is the, this is, know, cause one I’ve got sales people, people do traditional sales, but look at the lead gen ROI that we get here. That is, so I’ve never really thought about that as a, as a selling point in regards to, Hey, when I go to exit this business, I need to have a digital marketing kind of stamp. Like this is ROI. This is our plan. And

10:55
want that scalability there so I can grow the business, correct? I mean, that’s really a key. So instead of thinking, hey, I’m going to try to sell my business in the next six months, someone’s got to put that plan together, that exit strategy. And one of them can be is, if we added more digital marketing or if we proved up a certain amount and look at the sales that are coming in, if you spent more, look at what you could get. It’s pretty powerful. Well, mean, yeah, people are looking at how do we, know, 2X, 3X, 4X the company.

11:23
And a lot of times it is you’re going to have to modify your marketing budget, know, like bottom line there. Yes, there’s a few other ways you can do that. And maybe you can cut some corners someplace to like shore up your profit margins and whatnot. But at the end of the day, if you want to really show and like grow and scale, it’s going to be to your point. How do we get more qualified leads in the door then? How do we make sure our sales team can close those deals? But we don’t want the sales team chasing.

11:49
unqualified leads. So that comes back to what are we doing to generate those to begin with. And sometimes it is the cold calls and different ways of going about it. But are there other ways we can maximize that time too and have those kind of fall more in their lap and a little more warm so that we can get them to the deal a lot faster? Yeah, I can see. And we’ll talk offline because definitely want to talk to you about what. So we made an acquisition in May on a service business uh has zero zero marketing.

12:17
We’re not at the marketing growth phase. We’re at solve foundation play, but we know we don’t, we already know that once we get into the digital marketing or we start advertising and doing that stuff, but we’ve got to build out a CRM. We’ve got to build out all these things. So is that some of the sides that you come into when you talk about digital? Is it more about traffic or do you actually help say, Hey, I’m going to help you guys get a funnel here and how to market to that funnel and build out those triggers and all that great stuff. Is that kind of in the package that you offer?

12:47
We can go into that for sure. You know, obviously there’s going to be other professionals that are much more experienced in like the set CRM integration, but we do look at it and the pace, the place that we really like to come in is too many businesses have a website and they have a CRM, but they’re not connected. They’re not talking whatsoever. Or if you’re to your point, right, they have a sales team, but like, are we really tracking how those leads are getting in there? Or did you just say,

13:14
Hey sales team, here’s your CRM. Go ahead, we’ve set up some things for you, but it’s there. We don’t have everything in place, right? So we do like to have those conversations with our clients to say, how can we automate more? How can we integrate your existing tools so that you are a well-oiled, smooth rolling machine over there instead of, well then once we get the lead in, someone has to manually add it to the CRM and then from there it gets triggered to the next person.

13:42
And like, no, we’re not in that age anymore. We need to get into how do we automate and that, yeah, that’s another area that if you’re looking to acquire, dive deeper, ask the questions of the company. And if those are things that they still haven’t automated, you can, yeah, jump in there right away, clean those up. And I guarantee you’ll start to see more revenue right off the bat because you’re going to be able to get things done a lot faster and be able to handle higher volume. And so maybe shifting gears to the sales side, right? What does that look like?

14:11
and kind of what are the clients doing there? What are you helping with and how are you solving them? Let me go back though on this. I’m gonna say the buy side, sorry, I apologize. I meant to the buy side. No worries, I just wanted to make sure. Yeah, so on the buy side, we like to come in, one as we mentioned, just kind of, let’s just take a quick look. What’s going on? What questions did you ask? What quick things can we identify as you’re exploring? Is this a good purchase for you or not? Obviously we can’t get into everything until we get deeper into consulting.

14:40
But then what we really like to one talk about is, are you gonna get all of these things and does the current owner know where those assets are? So one thing I encourage is, on our website, we’ve got a checklist for the digital asset tools and you can go on there and download it and it’ll start telling you as far as domain and hosting, what does that ownership look like? As far as social, what does that look like? As far as marketing tools, what does that look like? Who has owners? So it starts to give you as a buyer,

15:09
questions to start asking instead of waiting until the deal has closed and starting to ask. That’s what we see too many clients doing is that they acquire and then they engage us. And then they start saying, hey, why is this happening? And we have to, did you ask for this? Did you do that? Did you, no, no, great. Let’s go back through our checklist and do it. So.

15:31
That’s one thing I would definitely encourage is start understanding what questions to ask on a digital side before you acquire. And then the second place that we help clients is the post transaction integration, whether that’s into an existing system that you have, because you’ve acquired multiple brands like that, or just how do we get them over to you so that you can get off the ground and running? What we’ve seen is, some people don’t know to be asking for A, B, and C.

15:57
email login details to the actual admin account, not just logins to an email. You know, it could be, do they have privacy policy and you know, what not in place and the right disclaimers or do we got to jump in and do that right away? So certain ways that we want to make sure that you’re protected from the get and really just trying to speed up the integration process too often. Like you said, they’re focused on all of the different phases. And if you’re a new buyer, that’s a lot to take on in that like ETA space, right? You come in and

16:27
You don’t really know. You maybe know how to run the sum of the business. You’re hoping that your key employees are coming with you, but we need to make sure that that digital side really does. You can have control of that. No question. Yeah. Yeah. That’s it. That is a good piece. I mean, and most people don’t realize all of the nooks and crannies. Like, you know, for example, the company may be using a third party service to schedule postings for social media. Yeah. And the owner thinks, let me ask for just a Facebook account. Well, you kind of missed the fact that how the schedule, yes, you need the software scheduling also.

16:56
right? Or, you know, if I’m getting the domain name, you need to really understand all of the DNS entries and what’s happening there. You’re not going to just flip the switch to go from Outlook to Gmail if that’s your preferred thing. There’s a lot of mechanics big time. My background is software. So at least for our businesses, know that most people don’t. I mean, have 20 years of experience for it. ETA too, if they’re coming in to own a business for their first time, if you will, or like, you no, they don’t know what all these little technical things are. Startups start to understand because

17:26
They’ve gone through that headache slowly but surely, right? I set up a domain, something stopped working, now I know that word. But yeah, if you’re acquiring a business that’s so well-rounded and ready to go, you’re not gonna know that stuff till it comes up. And when it comes up, it hits a bit harder because you don’t know who’s in place to solve that issue for you. You don’t even know how to say what the actual issue is. It’s just my site’s down, my emails are down, or whatever that looks like, but they don’t know how to say what the root cause of it is or.

17:56
Do I call an IT company? Do I call the lawyer who said that this was all my ownership and something happened? Or do I go call a marketing company or a web company? And so now they’re already just wasting time in weeks and circles trying to figure out who’s the right contact. It’s clean. So is your business more of kind of doing a viscous low cost audit? And then obviously the things you identify are things that you can help them solve, right? And that’s where, you know, you’re, that’s the real core of the business for you, right? Yeah, no, it’s a great way to say it. We’re going to come in, we’re going to audit everything, make sure we, you know, we know where things are, who’s in charge of what.

18:25
Just makes it easier to, if you’ve got key employee turnover, we can quickly recover, you know, not recover, but like make that transition, if you will, so that it doesn’t get to a recovery phase. And then also, you know, yeah, as we start to identify gaps, if it’s like, yes, you have legal issues, then obviously we’re going to refer it out to a lawyer. If it’s like, yeah, your cybersecurity is not great, we’ll refer it to a networking person. But if it falls into that digital side, then we’ll say, hey, these are things that we can help you with too.

18:55
So you don’t have to go and find a whole bunch of vendors or have seven different vendors trying to handle different things that aren’t talking. So, kind of just let’s understand the business, but how did you stumble across this niche? Because you’re one of the first people I’ve talked to that’s focusing in this area. So how did you, what’s your background? How did you run into this? Yeah, my background is actually just self-taught web design. I was doing architecture originally and trying to find some money and decided to start teaching myself website design.

19:25
That was about 16 years ago. And then from there, we just started seeing clients roll up. You know, we were providing amazing services, we were getting the results they needed, and they would get rolled up into an investment company, or they would decide, hey, actually, I’ve just been doing this for far too long. You got me where I needed to go. I’m ready to exit. What does that look like? And so our clients just kind of naturally started falling into that arena. And I think it just kind of was speaking volumes to us though of like,

19:52
We’re onto something here as far as how do we get them ready to hit that exiting phase and what are the things that are coming up during that deal process that are pain points that we could resolve. And then, yeah, as we got more and more into some of the investment side and the acquisition side, sure, they have processes in place. Yes, they’ll say there’s a team that’s handling the integration. We’ve seen, though, that when we get in there, no one’s done any of the things that we’re asking about. And so that’s where we were like.

20:20
You’re right, you have an integration team. You’re right, you have due diligence, but an IT company who you think is in charge does not really want to go hunt all these logins down. They don’t want to identify where these gaps are and how to transfer it over. They want to focus on your IT. So that’s where we started seeing that. Yeah, an IT company is just keeping things running. That’s very different than understanding, you know, how a business fully operates and what are the nooks and crannies to be aware of.

20:46
Yeah, I we just went through this. mean, the company that we bought, small business, it’s in the service side, it’s in a specialty niche, and they’ve been running the business the way they’ve done since really 75, 76. And so they’re using YK Mail. Not every employee had an email. People were using their personals. so the IT group we’ve used prior, they came in, set us up on Microsoft. They got everybody linked in on the teams and all that.

21:16
but that doesn’t get into the other stuff, right? That doesn’t get into the other stuff that you don’t even think about until after you close. And then you’re like, man, now I’ve got to go search all this down. And you find out that the guy in charge has no clue about any of it, right? They’re not tracking anything, especially from 1975 or something. No, I always say it’s in an email sent to the client at some point that’s like, here’s the login details.

21:43
And they’re like, cool, I’m not going to put it anywhere. Cause if I need it in the future, I’ll just find that email. But oftentimes in a transition, those emails are all deleted when the ownership is transferred. So if that was the secure storing of it all right down the drain, went right. So yeah, like how do we make sure. Even knowing to say, Hey, as part of this transition, you are not allowed to delete the emails. You have to give us all, right? I mean, that’s important too. People don’t realize some of these things.

22:10
matter, right? Yeah. And especially like, you know, let’s say you’re buying a law firm. mean, you know, you really need to have that history and you need to have backups of it, right? And so how do you check all the boxes? Just make sure you have that in place and you know what to ask for as part of the agreement to buy the business. There’s so many questions, right? And you’re right. It’s everything is running fine and okay. Like we acquired and we’re doing great. It inevitably will absolutely something will come up. At some point, a digital piece is going to

22:39
throw a wrench in your operations and it will bring your business to a halt. It’s just a matter of when and that is what we have seen for pretty much every business that is acquired. And so that’s where we too, we’re like, how do we get ahead of this? How do we prevent that so that we don’t keep getting calls of why did everything halt? Why did I have to turn off my marketing because my website’s down? Why are my emails not sending? Why did the contact form stop sending me leads three months ago and I’m just now finding out.

23:06
All of that at some point it’s going to happen. And so how do we be more prepared for it? Now, just kind of diving into another question here for me, this is more for me and I hope the listeners are benefit, you know, so what are you seeing change right now in the digital landscape from what you guys do on advertising, marketing and things like that? Right. We’ve got chat GPT, we’ve got all these things hitting the market. So I’m sure you’re on the cutting edge of figuring out like, Hey, here are the things that are, that are

23:34
What do you see? What do you see in that digital landscape that’s changing from the way keywords used to be done to Facebook, all that good stuff? What are you seeing? Yeah, I mean, you’re right. The biggest change that we’re seeing right now is just how do we adapt for AI? Obviously, you know, Google search is much lower on the totem pole than it used to be. Chat or just, you know, AI becoming more and more of the responses that people are looking for and trust, trusting blindly. Like, absolutely. you know the first result in the AI is.

24:02
this company, they’re going to go and call them right away. They’re really not going to do a whole lot more research. you know, what do we do then from an uh SEO side, AIO side, all of that to stay more in front of it? And what we’re seeing too is a lot of clients calling and saying, what do we need to be doing differently to incorporate? And I’m like, you haven’t been running SEO at all. Why would we think now all of sudden we can not only catch up, but get ahead of?

24:28
And so any of those that, you know, we’re just like, no, we don’t need SEO. We’re not going to focus on it. And now want to quickly shift gears to optimizing for AI. You’ve got a long, long road ahead of you, you know, or it’s a costly, expensive road to try to get to that catch up. And so one is it’s always better though, to start as soon as possible than necessarily waiting another six months or another two years to try to get ahead of it. So that’s one thing that we’re seeing change. And then another is just.

24:55
You were saying it with personal email accounts. We’ve got so many people that are just signing up for AI on their personal accounts, training it for the company, and then they leave. All of that information that was trained now is going away with the employee. And so how do we start having the conversations with business owners of, need to be setting those up, you need to be supplying the team with the logins, and that way, if they leave, that comes with you.

25:23
And then there’s still stuff on marketing, know, with Facebook and whatnot. It’s right on the cusp. I mean, yes, AI is great for should I set this up myself, but you’re still not an expert. You really do need a digital marketing company to come in and set those Google ad campaigns up to set social up. So, I mean, yeah, social media marketing up and stuff. So, you know, it’s understanding where is AI good for running the business and where do you still want to uh lean on the professionals for it?

25:51
No, that’s a great answer. And that helps because those are a lot of things because we buy these old businesses, right? So like, I’m just going to talk about what Ferris and I do. You know, they’re not, you’re not looking at a digital marketing engine, right? That’s it’s not even really being thought of, you know, one of the companies that we’re in due diligence on right now doesn’t even have a website. They don’t need that stuff. It is what they think, right? We know that it’s valuable. We know that’s the value.

26:17
Right. Those are those pieces. so I would imagine that a lot of our listeners that are looking for a lot of these blue collar ran businesses, you know, they’re like, eh, you know, that’s maybe not as important today as it is tomorrow. So what is your advice? Right. You know, look at me as like I’m asking you right now. You know, what is your advice for those that are buying the blue collar businesses that maybe doesn’t have a lot of these digital assets? But what should they be thinking about in their integration timeline?

26:45
of, the first 90 days, I’m really just trying to get payroll right. I’m trying to get this right. I’m trying to get this. When should you start, you know, then really focusing on this digital side of building that brand and starting to build out the SEO and getting the website where you need it to be? How do you see that in that phase? Yeah, I think that it’s great to like be considering it. And one of the biggest pieces is like, you don’t want to be driving so much marketing if you’re still trying to get your operations in line.

27:14
So I do think get the presence at least to build the website and get like the directory listings and whatnot claimed so that you’re at least getting a presence if people are looking for you. And also sometimes just announcing that the changed hands are ownership and management, right? So that they are aware that it’s still around, but so if they’re going and doing any research and like, I heard Johnny sold the business finally. If someone still goes to look.

27:39
the business still exists, right? So that’s where I would say at least getting the foundation in place is best. Then go in and focus on how do we get the operation, the books, the numbers and everything in line, and then move into what are we doing now for a very strategic strategy on marketing to now get this going even more. Because like I said, you can do all the marketing, but if the website’s not there, there’s no point. And if the website’s not gonna convert, there’s no point. And at the same time,

28:09
you can only handle so much traffic and leads if you don’t have the operations in place. So I think really understanding, leveraging what was built and came with the company the best that you can, but don’t let it run dry. What I’ve also seen is people are like, it’s so established, we’re not going to do marketing. just going to let these, like, especially in blue collar, we see a lot of, we got these contracts and they just keep coming back. All these construction companies just keep coming back, right? So why would we go look for new work? Why would we look for more work?

28:39
it will dry up just like let’s say Johnny just sold, so is Bob. And so then what happened, they’re gonna have someone new come in and start looking for a different contractor, vendor and provider. So you don’t want to be just sitting and writing it out. You do wanna start getting proactive. You wanna be in front of your customers, the potential customers all the time. Yep, exactly. finding them of the who, the what, stopping in, seeing you, your brand. mean, with a company we’re looking at buying didn’t even have signs on their trucks until, you know.

29:08
But simple things. mean, it’s kind of a sleeper, but big in this industry, but nobody really knew it was them. Awesome. Well, I think we can go ahead and move on to our rocket round where we ask the list, the the guests the same three questions. So first question, what do you like to do in your free time? In my free time, I’m an avid showrunner. I love I’m in Denver, so I love getting up into the mountains about 12000 feet and just.

29:35
enjoying the day running and checking out the trails and the views. See, I got to say Casey is more of a 14000 footer. All right. You did. We’re near two months ago or two weeks ago. Yeah. So you got that done. So yeah, my daughter lives in Boulder. know, my wife just got back and she’s like, oh, it’s just so beautiful. And they went for hikes. And I mean, it’s just it’s really nice. It’s so quiet and peaceful. Yeah. Like you to just get away from it all. You start to get to the right elevation. There’s a lot less people to than some of the easier, smaller trails. So

30:04
A little more solitude. I agree. It’s big stuff. It’s needed. All right. Next question. What’s your most memorable moment in your business journey? Memorable moment in my business journey? You know, I think there’s been so many ups and downs. just sometimes it’s just getting here where we’re at, what we’re doing. You know, it’s, I started just freelance with no experience in it. And so I just take every day as I’m very, very fortunate to be.

30:29
doing exactly what I love. didn’t know I enjoyed business. You guys had asked earlier about, how do we get into, how do I get into M &A? I’m just, I didn’t even know these things were around, you know, when I started my business. And so just, I felt like doors just like kept opening of, wow, there’s so much more out there than just even owning a business, you know, and how do I grow through acquisition? How do I acquire and invest in other businesses? And so for me, just finding this is like my passion. This is what I love and being able to not just

30:59
follow that myself, but help other businesses go through that same journey is really, really exciting. So it’s more rewarding than like a moment. All right. I love that. And then the last question, which I think is actually even more applicable for you, know, favorite tool or resource since you probably know many of them. Yeah. Favorite tool. I’m going to say a CRM. We use Insightly. Not a lot of companies use it, but I mean, we’ve been on it since probably 2014. So it’s pretty hard to get off, but I don’t know where I’d be without a CRM, whether it be clients, opportunities, just

31:28
What am I supposed to do today? So I’ve never heard of Insightly. So what’s the plug? does it do that’s different? you give Casey some insight? Yeah, my biggest reason that we chose it is that we get to have project management and CRM in the same system. So if we update a contact, it updates in the project as well. And then the other reason is the way that we can do our own customized pipelines and tasks. We don’t run in a Kanban type of style.

31:57
any of the traditional kind of tools, if you will. it’s very, especially web design and marketing, it’s different and every service that we offer has a different flow. So we’re able to go in and create that exact flow, what tasks need to be happening, what tasks can happen 30 days from moving into that phase where a lot of them are like sprint style. it, good luck, you guys have seen sites get built, because sprint is not the way that that’s gonna happen.

32:23
So yeah, for us, just the customization of it all has been stellar. And then on top of it, the tasks, yeah, it just moves us to a much more task-based, so nothing gets falling through the cracks. It’s a lot of what allowed us to stay, you know, even ready for digital assets as we got into this is we’re already collecting these things as we go, because we have tasks reminding us to do things. I can tell people going from zero CRM to one CRM is one of the biggest leaps you can make to have a CRM, right? Yes.

32:51
People obsess about which is the right one. then later, once you’re on any CRM, even if it’s Excel, right, you can treat Excel like a CRM if you’re methodical about it. Right. But just making that first leap is a huge impact on the business. Then later, once you’ve used something for a little bit, you can start to know what you like, what you don’t like, what are you looking for, and then make the leap from one to two. But it’s really getting from zero to one is that first and most critical piece of it all. Critical.

33:15
Well, I think that’s a good point because a lot of companies will ask or starting to specialize in HubSpot, go high level, different tools that are out there. And with TreeRing, I don’t care what CRM you’re using. I am not going to ask you to change off of it. We’re going to figure out how do we use that into what we’re trying to do instead so that it is that efficient tool. But you’re right. mean, what we keep trying like we should get off of it. There’s probably some ways we could automate a little bit better some of our processes and whatnot. And then I just look at it and I’m like, how how

33:45
after 10 years on this tool, are we literally just going to overhaul and jump to a whole new program? So you’re right. It is a huge jump, but something to really, really think about. What is it that’s working and do you need it? I know a company that helps businesses basically put together a strategy. They can help you put that strategy together of how do you switch to a different CRM, all right? That’s good to know because I know I even keep talking to my project manager about I’m talking about you. That’s what I’m saying. No, like internally.

34:14
And plus like it’s going to be my time. Let’s be honest. I don’t have the time to revamp a CRM this moment. So I’m, I’m actually really stoked about it. That’s pretty awesome. Great. Well, Paige, thank you for hanging out with us today. Great stuff. I learned a lot. I’m going to get that download, but tell us what website and how people can get ahold of you um from this call from this podcast. So

34:38
On LinkedIn is one of the best ways just kind of see what we’re doing, stay in touch, stay up to date on certain things. And then on our website, treeringdigital.com, that’s T-R-E-E-R-I-N-G-D-I-G-I-T-A-L.com. And if you visit treeringdigital.com slash M-A Launchpad, that’s where you can get the free download and the checklist. And like I said, really, if anything, just a great place to start, especially in that acquisition side of.

35:04
Am I asking the right questions? What should I be looking for before starting that journey on the digital front? And then from there deciding, you know, what direction do you want to go? Awesome. Outstanding. Paige, thank you very much. Yeah, was outstanding. Thank you so much. Thank you. No, had a good time. Thank you so much. Likewise. Appreciate it. Thank you for listening to the M &A Launchpad podcast. If you’ve enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to support us, please leave us a rating and a review after you listen. If you’re looking for guidance on your next business acquisition or sale,

35:33
Capital to support your next business transaction or to invest in a private equity opportunity? Visit equitylaunchpad.com to learn more and to connect with our team. If you know of an individual who would be a great guest for the show, head over to equitylaunchpad.com forward slash nominate, where you’ll have the chance to refer yourself or someone else to be a guest on our show. I’m Casey Menchew and I look forward to talking with you next week.