The Franchise Scale Up Show

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

Digital marketing encompasses more than just visually appealing websites and SEO strategies. It’s about safeguarding the core of a business—its domains, credentials, hosting, brand files, and other digital assets that many entrepreneurs overlook until a crisis occurs.

In this episode, Paige Wiese of Tree Ring Digital discusses creating robust digital systems to protect a business during growth, expansion, or in preparation for an acquisition. She recounts cautionary tales of businesses that neglected these fundamentals and explains why managing digital assets is a crucial, yet often underestimated, component of a company’s value.

Full Transcript

“Welcome to Conversations with Coffey with me, Guy Coffey. 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 in to today’s episode. Hello and welcome back to the show. Today, 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 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 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 about yourself, if you could.

And then I’m really curious, I’m sure most people are, where does Tree Ring Digital, where does the name come from?

Yeah, absolutely. A little about myself, born and raised in Iowa, moved out to Colorado in 2007, and then pretty quickly after that, 2010, started my own business. Not what my background was in, my background was architecture.

I was doing land surveying when I moved to Colorado, and so very quickly pivoted altogether into website design”

“development, teaching myself that, and then moving into just a full-blown agency of all aspects of website marketing, a 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, I’ve just really been enjoying the mountain life and the rock, the cliff sides.

Yeah. Well, I can’t join you on 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, 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 just enjoying it. So 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 can still get on a boat and do certain things, but not necessarily the ocean or the beaches aren’t as great if you’re going to 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, I don’t even want to go into that. But it just must have been a constant learning curve for you, kind of highlighted in the marketing area.

But I think that’s a part of everybody’s journey. And so 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? Because 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 an only question on, with this constant need for learning in your industry? Which makes it exciting, but it’s like a whole other job of staying on trend.

Yeah, it really is. I think, one, understanding self-taught to begin with. So if you are looking at how much of having to learn over the years, from the business side to the website, to 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 in WordPress, it was the bare minimum blog platform you could come up with. 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, it really allows me to have better conversations with the team on what our outputs look like. And then from a marketing side, it’s constantly changing. I mean, 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 got to do it all over again.

I think the biggest though is just trying to keep out of all the clutter. So as even just getting into COVID and then getting into political landscapes of like we want to get off this platform, we want to change into this platform, so there’s a new platform out, whatever that looks like, how do you really just stay focused on what should we be doing? What is the core right now?”

“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 because they’re trying to stay so current instead of like, let’s give a little bit. I mean, I don’t want to say late adapters are pretty good on AI right now, but 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, these different things, and that humans are doing it, not just 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 a combination of maybe a wait-and-see attitude on some of the things as well as like once you decide like, no, 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 you highlighted on your website that you have a fairly large shop and they’re all US-based people. And that’s a choice because there is a lot of stuff that can be offshored by agencies that do that.”

“Was that an 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 drivers for that?

That’s a great question because when I first got started, mentors, advisors, everyone would be like, all the agencies are doing it, just hire overseas and have the work done. Why are you even touching a website page? You should never do that.

And 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?

That doesn’t make any sense for that to be there. Others could just be, that’s poor 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, I’ve 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 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 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 is 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. I mean, our cost can be, I mean, we’re super, super competitive for not doing it, but I also think it’s hard hearing that 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, it is really hard to hear sometimes, but at the same time, 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’m just thinking about it from a franchising perspective, from a franchisor perspective. If you’re doing something on the main web page that goes down to hundreds or thousands, depends 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. 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 200 locations writing 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 hands on deck.

I’ve also noticed that you have a particular emphasis on protecting digital assets. What do you see as any big trends besides AI? I have to know if they’re phishing or if they’re not phishing, and do I really want that domain anymore?”

“And I’m sure that’s 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 as you’re saying that a lot of it just 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?

We get clients all the time that will send us emails and just, is this legitimate? And we have to tell them if it is or not the actual domain renewal and what needs to happen. And people are like, it’s on auto-renew.”

“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 one of them 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 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 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 and to Google My Business Ownership and to your logo and brand files, into compliance and regulations. You know, are you ADA 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 in 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 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. We’re times where we get the phone call of the websites down and we have to ask a couple of questions.

And all of a sudden. it’s like, well, it’s because we let an employee go and the site was on their server. 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 wanted to let you know, your email address did get sucked into such and such because we got hacked and compromised.”

“And it’s not a good look. It’s just not what you want to 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 them this.

So, you know, we’re working with vendors and, 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 they should as they kind of step outside of ours. But, I mean, getting into everything else is 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, 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, oh, man.

That’s what I get every time. Just even trying to start a website, right? They’ll be like, I’ve got hosting to our existing site someplace.

I’m gonna have to go find it. And we’re just like, that shouldn’t be, 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 those types of transfers?

That’s really interesting. 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. They can access that at treeringdigital.com/coffey.

And they can download that. And that’ll just 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. And then after that, here’s 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, 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, it’s hard to, you were talking about tech, right? And it’s like, I feel like companies have, some of it’s in Google Cloud and Workspace.”

“Some of it’s over here in a Dropbox folder. Some of it’s over here in Slack because 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 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 you know what, the company that eventually purchased Franchise was impressed by our organization and how we had our agreements and all that kind of stuff. And that was the one area, because you’re right, it was in my Evernote account, it was in Google Sheet, someone else’s outlook, someone else’s notes, in Slack, on emails. Go back to that email from last November, I think we were talking about a vend.

I think if someone sent it to me in an email someplace, let me find which email from that vendor out of 200 it was in.

Yeah. So I am going to, I mean, obviously, we’re going to link to everything with Tree Ring Digital and ways to get in contact with you and your organization. I’m going to share that checklist separately though, because I think that’s when people are first starting out, that’s when you want to put all these things in place and get buckets for them.

That’s hugely important. And then people that are further down the line is like, if you’re ever going to exit, you’re going to 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[…]”

“Yeah, that’s a good point, because we’ve got 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&A, 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 the 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 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 hand over to you, the businesses are going to 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 stalled and we’re looking for all of that.

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.

I know we’re going down this path with the digital assets, but just one more question on it, if you don’t mind. I was just wondering if Tree Ring you’ve ever hired by investment banks to do this aspect of the due diligence because what they’re doing is putting this whole package together. I’m just wondering if you’ve ever worked for just investment banks on just, hey, we’re looking at this company, we’re taking them to market.”

“We need this buttoned up super tight because that is where people make a lot more money when they take their companies to market. If they have a full SIM that’s all dialed in, there’s no questions to ask. I mean, it can take literally 12 months off a deal timeline.”

“investment bankers, 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 how to recover what maybe isn’t being able to be found, all of that, that’s where the same thing. If we can keep a P.E.’s company, a team, ready to go right there and keeping all of the brands moving, and we’re already handling that integration, this is just a smoother transaction for both parties.

And so, that’s, yeah, we see it on private equity, exit valuation, just businesses looking to grow and scale. And then also those with the PE side.

Maybe some people are listening and they’re like, well, I’m not quite there yet, but 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 I have an idea of what the services are, but who is your clientele? And do you have a specialization that you already do, or something of interest to go further down the path?”

“Yeah, that’s a great question. With Tree Ring 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, hey, we 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?

How do we increase our valuation prior to exit? And is that getting out of a referral-based business and into a consistently generated business to make that all happen? And then we take a much more holistic approach with it at our agency is, we’re going to really focus on what do you need to get to that goal.

It doesn’t mean, hey, because you called me, I’m going to sell you on a whole new website. If you don’t need a whole new website, we’re just going to fix what’s not working. And let’s just fine tune and tweak those pieces and then get you into what’s the next step now to hit that goal.”

“And other clients might call and say, oh, I just want SEO. 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 going to look at all of the tools and resources that we have and figure out how do we then now achieve that goal instead of just, yeah, here’s a cookie cutter package. We’re guaranteeing you it’s going to work every single time because we’re aware every business is not the same.

Right. Right. Yeah.

I saw your client list and it’s, you know, B2B, B2C, just services, products, everything. So 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 or whatever.”

“And just feel like I’m taking this on. It must be really fulfilling for you. And 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? Interdependence, really connecting with people, smaller businesses and communities, things like that.

You can focus on the community that you want to support the most. You know what I mean? So, thanks for being an inspiration to others.

And if you had like one piece of advice on if someone’s, you know, 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, you know, like one piece of advice or something that you’ve said to, you know, younger entrepreneurs that are coming up behind you on the same path or a 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 network because it wasn’t, you know, where I was at. I don’t have, you know, oh, I’ve got all my people that I went to school with. Let me go, you know, pull a couple of 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 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 in yourself and invest in yourself to make that happen.

Well put. Thank you. That’s great.

Yeah. We need to get that message out more and more. And conditions will never be perfect.”

“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… I would have just kept balancing from a job to a job to a job.

After 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. We’re going to have everything so that people can contact you and Tree Ring Digital. So many great things about the company and you obviously, just walking the walk and talking the talk too.

So thank you so much for being a leader and 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.