Protecting Your Digital Assets: Paige Wiese on Scaling the Right Way

Digital marketing isn’t just about pretty websites or SEO campaigns. It’s about protecting the foundation of your business—your domains, logins, hosting, brand files, and the digital assets most entrepreneurs never think about until it’s too late.

In this episode, I talk with Paige Wiese of Tree Ring Digital about how to build digital systems that protect your business as you grow, scale, or prepare for exit. She shares stories of what goes wrong when businesses neglect these basics, and explains why digital asset management is one of the most important (and overlooked) parts of your company’s value.

Key Takeaways:

• Why outsourcing overseas can put your brand at risk
• The importance of keeping all logins, domains, and assets under your control
• How digital asset management impacts valuations and deal timelines
• The seven pillars of digital asset protection every business owner should know
• Why smaller businesses can and should think about digital due diligence early

Time Stamps:

00:00 Introduction and Host's Background

00:34 Meet Paige Wiese from Tree Ring Digital Marketing

01:15 Paige's Journey: From Architecture to Digital Marketing

02:35 Challenges and Learning in Digital Marketing

03:28 The Importance of Keeping Up with Technology

05:44 Choosing to Keep Operations US-Based

08:49 Protecting Digital Assets

12:25 Digital Asset Management Services

17:25 Preparing for Business Exits and Due Diligence

20:03 Tree Ring Digital's Clientele and Services

22:38 Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs

24:22 Conclusion and Contact Information

If you’ve been treating your website, logins, and digital tools as “set it and forget it,” it’s time to rethink. Paige and her team at Tree Ring Digital make sure your digital assets are secure, organized, and protected—so you can scale with confidence and exit with maximum value.

#DigitalAssets #BusinessGrowth #FranchiseMarketing #WebsiteSecurity #ScalingBusiness #Entrepreneurship #MergersAndAcquisitions #BusinessValue #SmallBusinessOwners #MarketingStrategy

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Transcript

0:04

Welcome to Conversations With Coffee With Me. Gee, coffee. I've owned independent businesses. I've been a franchisee of a global brand for over 17 years, and I co-founded and successfully exited our own franchise brand. This podcast is dedicated to growing the lives and businesses of entrepreneurs everywhere by sharing conversations with successful owners and some of my own experiences and insights. So please grab a cup of coffee and let's just dive right into today's episode. Hello and welcome back to the show today. Uh, we have a special guest, Paige Weis from Tree Ring Digital Marketing based here in Denver, Colorado. And we're really excited to talk to Paige about, uh, what her agency does, particularly in regards to. Younger brands, what they can do for brands, making sure that they're doing things the right way, right from the start and building that strong foundation and really appreciate the time you're taking to to talk with us today. Paige, thanks so much. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited. Yeah. My pleasure. Tell me a little bit, first thing is, uh, about yourself, if you could, and then I'm really curious. I'm sure most people are. Where does Tree Ring digital? Where did the name come from? Yeah, absolutely. A little about myself. Born and raised in Iowa. Moved out to Colorado in 2007, and then, um. Pretty quickly after that 2010 started my own business, uh, not what my background was. In my background was architecture, um, was doing land surveying when I moved to Colorado. And so very quickly, um, pivoted altogether into website design development, teaching myself that, and then moving into just a full blown agency of all aspects of website marketing, digital presence and what goes along with it. So that's a bit of it. And then just. Fell in love with Colorado, don't really plan on going anywhere between rock climbing and trail running. Have just really been enjoying the, uh, mountain lifes and the rock, the cliff sides. Yeah. Well, I, I, I can't join you on the, the, the cliff sides a fear of heights. You're on the trails a lot though. Yeah, I am on the trails a lot, but yeah, I mean, it's, I was bragging about Colorado and someone said, don't you get sick about bragging about where you live? And I'm like, well, it's not like I made it. I'm, I'm just enjoying it. So, um, we're just in a great place. As long as you can go somewhere for the water, that's the only thing we're missing. Right. And depending on what you're wanting for water, you know, you can still get on a boat and do certain things, but not necessarily the ocean or, you know, the beaches aren't as great if you're gonna find a little sand out here. Right, right, right. So, my gosh, from 2010 until 2025 had to be on a constant learning curve in marketing and digital marketing. And now with ai, don't even go, wanna go into that. It's just must have been a constant learning curve for you, kind of highlighted in the, in the marketing area. But I think that's a part of everybody's journey. And so my, my curiosity would be, and maybe for the audience, is like, how do you keep up with not just doing the business but also learning all this stuff that's coming down the pipe at you so that you can stay ahead of the curve and stay relevant and provide these great services?'cause the technology is getting better all the time and the algorithms are changing and all that kind of stuff. So how do you balance? Operating the agency, which I also have another question on with this constant need for learning in your industry, which makes it be exciting, but it's, it's like a whole nother job of staying on trend. Yeah, it really is. I think, you know, one understanding self-taught to begin with. So if you, you know, are looking at how much of having to learn over the years, you know, from the business side to the website, to, you know, running an agency, to having employees and everything, like just a huge learning curve. And then to your point. Just throwing in how tech changes. I mean, when I started designing sites and WordPress, it was the bare minimum blog platform you could come up with. So, but it taught me how to code really quickly and how to handle design and handle development, where I think there's a lot of designers or developers right now that lean one way or another, and so. To be able to have that mindset and background to it really allows me to have, you know, better conversations with the team on what our outputs look like. And then from a marketing side, it's constantly changing. I mean, just you, you know right as you get one thing correct and right as you get your processes and procedures behind it. Now the platform and the user interface changes and you gotta do it all over again. I think the biggest though is just trying to keep out of all the clutter. So, you know, like as even just getting into COVID and then getting into political landscapes of like, we wanna get off this platform, we wanna change into this platform. Oh, there's a new, you know, platform out, whatever that looks like. How do you really just stay focused on what is the, you know, what, what should we be doing? What is the core right now? And let. Some of it just shake out on its own instead of, I feel too many businesses just jump from one to the next, to the next, to the next.'cause they're trying to stay so current instead of like, let's give a little bit. I mean, we're, I don't wanna say late adapters are pretty, you know, good on AI right now, but I, it took me a little bit before I was like. All right, let's start talking about this. And even within the company, I'm still a little hesitant of like, we still pride ourselves on the customer support, the turnaround, the, you know, these different things. And that humans are doing it not just an, you know, an output that doesn't make sense, but we still need to make sure we're at least aware. So finding a balance can be hard at times, but definitely letting some of it shake out before jet diving straight in. Yeah. It's combination of maybe a wait and see attitude on some of the things as well as like once, once you decide like, no, this is, this is the path we're going down is like diving head first and a lot of self-learning and self-teaching. I noticed that, um, you highlighted on your, your website that you, you have a fairly large shop and they're all US based. People, and that's a choice.'cause there is a lot of stuff that can be offshore by agencies that do that. Was that a, uh, intentional decision and was that based on just keeping things timely and wanting to be with the people that you're working with all the time? Or what was your driver for that? That's a great question because when I first got started, you know, I mean, mentors, advisors, everyone would be like, all the agencies are doing it, just hire overseas and have the work done. Like, why are you even, why are you even touching a website page? You should never do that. And you know, I mean starting off freelance and you're looking for shortcuts, you're looking for ways to make things happen. Definitely dabbled in it, got the code back and was like, this is an absolute disaster. This is so far from correct. Or why would you put code in that location? Like that doesn't make any sense for that to be there. Others could just be, that's poor, you know, English. That's not how we want that on the website. And that reflects. Us as a company and what we're putting out the door. And so as I started seeing that pretty early on in the agency of just like I said, even freelance work, that's when I was like. We're not doing that. We're gonna make sure that this is in the co, like the spot that we want, we're gonna make sure we're designing and also putting marketing efforts together with like best practices, core practices, so that no matter who's touching the site can get in and do it, whether it's the client, whether it's us, whether it's a new employee on the team. Let's keep those things consistent. And then the other is turnaround. The other piece is that if a client calls me right now and says, what's going on with my site? I don't have to go, let me lemme get back to you. It might be tomorrow. It might be the next day. I mean, we did that early on with hosting and now it's like, no, my hosting team's on this. I don't want to have to go back to a client and say, we don't know. Instead, we're like, we got this. Let's get this handled for you. That's fantastic. I think in the long run, obviously 15 years in business, it's kind of working. It's working, working. You know, our costs can be, you know, I mean like we're super, super competitive for not doing it, but I also think it's hard hearing. There's a lot of other agencies charging a lot more and outsourcing it, so that profit margin that the company is taking in those situations, you know, it is really hard to hear sometimes, but at the same time, like the decision that is right for us is to make sure that we are getting the right output to the client. For sure. It makes a difference too. I, I am just thinking about it from a franchising perspective. From a franchisor perspective, if you're, you're doing something on the main webpage. It goes down to hundreds or without, depending on how big the system is of other websites. There's way too many people seeing that mistake. You don't want someone coming back and pointing it out to you. No. I mean, yeah, when you got that many eyes on it, when we've worked with larger franchises for sure, it's just like, oh no. We know that this has to be perfect. This can't be down, and I can't go to a company and say. I know you've got, you know, 200 locations riding on this one website right now, but I'll get back to you as soon as I have some answers from a hosting company or from a web developer. It's like, no, my team's all, all hands on deck. We got this. Um, I've also noticed that you have a, a particular emphasis on, um. Protecting digital assets, you know, what do you see as like the, any like big trends besides ai? Um, I have to know if they're phishing or if they're not phishing and, and, um, do I really want that domain anymore? Um, and I'm sure that's like scratching the surface of what you're talking about. So could you explain what you mean by that? For us, lower people. Yeah, no, it's a great segue, actually. One from outsourcing and two, just, you know, as you're saying that a lot of it just kind of goes over your head on the marketing side. It's true, and that's what it is for so many business owners or if you are working with vendors, agencies, virtual assistants, whatever that looks like, and outsourcing that work, who owns what you're working on? Who has the login details? Who's the two factor authentication attached to. You know, one ex, yeah. We get clients all the time that'll send us emails and just, is this legitimate? And we have to tell 'em if it is or not, the actual domain renewal and what needs to happen. And you know, people are like, it's on Autorenew. I don't need to worry about my domain name. Like it's set up and fine. Until the credit card is set to expire and next thing you know, you can't figure out why you don't have access to a domain name. And you know, one of 'em was, we were working with, well, we had had a client contact us to get started and their initial concern was like, the site's not working. And we're like. Okay, like, what do you mean? Tell us more about why the site's not working and they're just like, we're not getting any payments and no one seems to be like using the site and checking out. So we dived in and found out that they had hired an overseas developer, and the overseas developer left their PayPal account on the website when it went live. So all of the payments were actually going over there instead of to the client. And that's just a piece of how much money, how much revenue is lost. The client isn't knowing that they're supposed to be paying attention to these things because it's just, you know, like over their head as far as, and so they're looking at it as the site's not working and really it is the payments just aren't going to the right location. And that was probably happening for the better part of like four to six months. That's really where we start to try and get into more and more of, not just, Hey, we're here to, you know, make a pretty website, not just. Hey, let's try to make your marketing efforts work, but let's get into your entire digital assets from domain to marketing and analytics into Google My business ownership into your logo and brand files into compliance and regulations. You know, are you a DA compliant? Is your hosting secure? Are you maintaining your site? What happens if an employee leaves tomorrow? These are all things that. A business owner usually goes and is like, oh, cool, we've got marketing handled, but no one's actually taking ownership of these pieces to even be aware that they should be asking those questions. And that's what we come in and do as well. What you described is exactly me. So that's a service that you guys provide. Keeping the container closed from, from other, from other people, other organizations, things like that. Making sure everything is working properly, pointed in the right direction, and. Controlling who has access to it. Yep, absolutely. You know, I mean, we've got it where times where, you know, we get the phone call of the website's down and we have to ask a couple questions, and all of a sudden it's like, well, it's 'cause we let an employee go and the site was on their server. Mm. Cool. How do we recover this? Right? Like you trusted the employee and. Sure, absolutely you should. But when they left, you didn't realize that they had actually moved it from the previous hosting company to their server, and you just were like, that's fine. So you know, it really is like, what's the backup and recovery? And our digital asset management services are really focused on, let's go through all of these. They are all assets to your company. Everyone's focused on the tangibles. What trucks do you have? What building do you have? You know, all of that stuff. But no one's really coming in and looking at the digital side of it and what impact that has if something is down, and not just the impact of like a financial, but even just brand perception from a consumer side. If you know, the other day an email went out from one of our vendors of like, Hey, just wanna let you know your email address did get sucked into such and such because we got hacked and compromised. It's not a good look. It's just not what you wanna be dealing with. But especially as a small business, it's one more thing on your plate to now go and fix. But then in addition to, you also now have to like, how do we fight the back, the trust of our consumers, because we all just had to email every single one of 'em. This so. You know, we're working with vendors and, um, you know, partners to make sure certain parts of those, like some of the legal sides of it and some of the it sides are really, you know, falling into places as they should, as they kind of step outside of ours. But I mean, getting into everything else as to who is the two factor. If something went down tomorrow, how quickly can you get back into that account and get it recovered? And as someone who's built the system and like you're trying to. Put out a fire and make things happen, and you give someone temporary access to it so you can get that done. And then in my case, like when we were going through due diligence, when the, the private equity company was going through due diligence, they had a lot of questions in regards to digital assets, and those were some of the harder ones to answer. Who has access to this? Like, who has access to it? I'm like. Well, my hands, that's all we get every time. Just even trying to start a website, right? They'll be like, yeah, I've got hosting to our existing sites someplace. I'm gonna have to go find it. And we're just like, that shouldn't be a, I'm not sure. That should be, yes, we have it. Here's where it's stored. Here's who has access to it. You know, we are no longer working with that vendor. I can't tell you how many websites we've logged into and four different vendors are still all have admin access to the website and it's like. Perfect world. Nobody does anything and everything's fine, but there's still a huge risk there. And so what do we need to be doing to get that stuff cleaned up during, you know, those types of transfers. Yeah, that's, yeah, it's really interesting. I, and I think that's one of the services you provide is like a quick questionnaire. You have something like that, right? Yeah. So we've got a digital asset checklist that you can download. Um, they can access that@chewingdigital.com slash coffee, and they can download that and that'll just get them set, like get you set up with like, here are the seven pillars. Here are some basic overview things of do you have this in line or not, and then that starts to show you where some gaps are. From there, you can schedule the digital asset assessment with us and we'll go through or more of an audit, and we'll go through all the various aspects. We'll figure out what's needed, what's not. We'll gather everything you don't have, and then we're pretty much like, here you go. Then after that, here's, you know, what a monthly would look like for us to really take that ownership. What's the transition of your team look like? Let's quarterly check in and see, you know, has the, are all the credit cards good? But all of that information now is more front and center and easy to access instead of. You know, like it's hard too. You were talking about tech, right? And it's like, I feel like companies have, some of it's in Google work, like cloud and workspace. Some of it's over here in a Dropbox folder. Some of it's over here in Slack.'cause they were messaging each other and it just got dropped into that location. And then others are in the CRM and so. It's all, there's someplace, but not really, even like from a company as one company coming in and taking that ownership and putting it into a spot, and that's what we're coming in and doing. That's incredible. As we're having this conversation, going back to my recollection of our process and, um, you know, the, the company that eventually purchased IES was, you know, impressed by our organization and liked how we had our agreements and all that kind of stuff. That was the one area.'cause you're right, it was in my Evernote account. It was in Google Sheet. It someone else's Outlook, someone else's notes in, in Slack on emails. Like, go back to that email from last November. I think we were talking about a ven, it's like, I think vendor sent it to me in an email someplace. Let me find which email from that vendor out of, you know, 200. It was in, yeah, so. I am gonna, I mean, obviously we're gonna link to everything with tree ring digital and, and ways to get in contact with you and your, your organization. I'm gonna share that checklist separately though, because I think that's when people are first starting out. That's when you wanna put all these things in place and get buckets for'em, and that's hugely important. And then, um, people that are further down the line is like. If you're ever gonna exit, um, you're gonna have to deal with this monster later, so you might as well do it on your own timeline, maybe take off little chunks as you go along. Yeah, and that's a good point.'cause we've got like an exit ready due diligence side of it all where we come in and start putting all of it together where we're saying, because we have, we've seen it impact deals when we've been working with organizations. We do a lot on both the m and a like, um, buy sell side of it all. And yeah, it just slows things down and there's just uncertainties or. We've had it where after the deal happened, six months later, we've gotten a phone call of why is the site down? And that means my emails are down. And it's because the person that sold it never transferred the ownership of the domain to the new people, and it just got overlooked during the process. And so how do we make that, you know, increase your valuation if, if you will, is how we're presenting it is. When you can go to the table and say, all of this is ready and it is a handover to you, the businesses are gonna go great, let's go. This is way more of a better value for us than to your point, it's over here someplace. It could be another six months before we're ready. Well, now the deal's stalled and we're looking for all of that. So for us it's how do we make this efficient so that yeah, you're not seeing a deal stall and keeping everything moving too. And I know we're kind of going down this path with the digital assets, but just one more question on it. Yeah. If you don't mind. I was just wondering if tree ring is ever hired by investment banks, you know, like to do this aspect of the due diligence.'cause what they're doing is putting this whole package together. So I'm just wondering if, if you've ever worked for just investment banks on just, hey, like we're, we're looking at this company, we're taking 'em to market. We need this, this buttoned up super tight because that is where people make a lot more money. Uh, you know, when they take their companies to market, if they have a full, you know, sim that's all dialed in, there's no questions to ask. I mean, it can take literally 12 months off a deal timeline, um, investment bankers, and then also on the private equity side when they are acquiring and you know, usually they've got some sort of integration team or they've got a in-house marketing team. But to pull. A marketing team or to your point on the investment banker side where it's a smaller team coming in to pull one person off to go just hunt all this information down where they don't actually know anything about the systems or you know how to recover, what maybe isn't being able to be found all of that. That's where, same thing, if we can keep a PEs company like team ready to go right there with and keeping all of the brands moving and we're already handling that integration. That's just a smoother transaction for both parties. And so that's, yeah, we see it on private equity, exit valuation, just businesses looking to get, uh, grow and scale. And then also those with, um, the PE side. Maybe some people are listening and they're like, well, I'm not quite there yet, but like, these are things that you can avoid having to do later if you do it upfront, so that's great. Can you just tell us a little bit more about Tree Ring Digital and. Not the service, like I have an idea of what the services are, but like who is, who is your clientele and, and um, you know, do you have a specialization that you, that you already do or of something of interest to go further down the path? Yeah, that's a great question. With true Ringing digital, we are really looking at those that are looking to grow and scale. And that could be either multiple location, multiple brands or getting ready for exit type of businesses. So typically it's, you know, hey, we've. Currently have one or two locations, we're looking to expand into a new region. What are some ways that you can help us with that? You know, how do we increase our valuation prior to exit? And is that getting out of a referral based business and into a consistent lead generated business to make that all happen? And then, you know, and that's, we take a much more holistic approach with it at our agency is. We're gonna really focus on what do you need to get to that goal. It doesn't mean, hey, because you called me, I'm gonna sell you on a whole new website. If you don't need a whole new website, we're just gonna fix what's not working and let's just fine tune and tweak those pieces and then get you into, you know, what's the next step now to hit that goal. And other clients might call and say, oh, I just wanna SEO. That's what my buddy told me when I was talking to him playing golf the other day. And you're like. SEO is not the route you're trying to go. You know, we really, if this is what your goal is, then we need to be focused on maybe a stronger social presence or maybe a stronger, you know, Google ad side, whatever that might be. So we're really gonna look at all of the tools and resources that we have and figure out how do we then now achieve that goal instead of. Yeah. Here's a cookie cutter package. We're guaranteeing you, it's gonna work every single time.'cause we're aware every business is not the same. Right, right. Yeah, I, I saw your client list and it's. It's all over B, B2B, B2C, um, you know, just, uh, services, products, everything. So you, you've, you've worked with a lot of companies that I recognize and congratulations on starting this from scratch. As a former architect or land planner, whatever, and just being like, I'm taking this on, it must. It must be really fulfilling for you. And one of the, one of the reasons you know that we do this podcast is to inspire others to like take the leap. There is always a leap into. Entrepreneurship and ownership, and we're trying to get more people to do that just because I think it leads to a better world overall, you know? Yeah. Um, interdependence, really connecting with people, um, smaller businesses and communities, things like that. But you can, you can focus on the community that you wanna support the most, you know what I mean? So, uh, can, you know, thanks for being an inspiration to others and, um, if you had like one piece of advice on if someone's. In a corporate job or something that they don't like doing that much, it doesn't really light their fire or anything like that. Would you have, um, you know, like one piece of advice or something that you've, you know, said to, you know, younger entrepreneurs that are coming up behind you on the, the same path or different path? That has really helped and kind of rang True. Yeah. I think, you know, my biggest belief is if you have passion in it, do it. You can absolutely make it work. I mean, I didn't have any money to put towards marketing. I didn't have any network.'cause it wasn't, you know, where I was at. I don't have, you know, oh, I've got all my, um. People that I went to school with, let me go, you know, pull a couple calls there and see what I can do. I mean, it's a self, everything, you know, I've just, I've enjoyed it that I, I don't feel that I'm working any days. Even though you look at my calendar, it's probably mostly working. Like, I just enjoy it so much. And I think if you talk to any business owner that's in that area of expertise that they really just are passionate about. One, you see it, but two. You can make it work. You just have to believe in yourself too and be willing to take those risks and in yourself and invest in yourself to make that happen. Well put. Thank you. That that's great. Yeah, like we need to get that message out more and more like, and conditions will never be perfect. We'll never be, there's never a right time. If I always say, if I wasn't on unemployment at the time, I wouldn't have started my like. I would've just kept trying, you know, balancing from a job to a job, to a job. After, you know, being on unemployment, I was like, okay, what are my options? I have literally nothing to lose at this point. Let me just get into something else then. That's awesome. What a great story. Thank you so much for sharing your story. Congratulations on your success. Um, we're gonna have everything so that people can contact you in tree Ring Digital. So many great things about the company and, and you obviously, you know, just walking the walk and talking the talk too. So thank you so much for being a leader and, uh, wishing you all the best and we'll have links for everybody to reach out to you as well. Perfect. Thank you so much. It's always fun talking with you. You too. Happy Friday. Take care. You as well. Bye bye.