Digital Assets Are Business Assets: Protecting Value Before Succession or Sale

What if the deal falls apart—not because of finances or operations—but because no one knows who owns the website, the data, or the digital tools? 

In this episode, Elizabeth Ledoux sits down with digital asset expert Paige Wiese to uncover why digital infrastructure is now a critical driver of business value during succession or sale. Paige explains how unseen risks—vendor ownership, missing access, compliance gaps, and undocumented systems—can quietly derail transactions or drastically reduce valuation. 

This conversation is essential listening for owners, successors, and advisors who want to future-proof businesses and protect the value they’ve spent years building. 

In This Episode: 

• What qualifies as a “digital asset” in today’s businesses 

• Why buyers care deeply about digital infrastructure—especially late in due diligence 

• The seven pillars of digital asset ownership and protection 

• Common “no moments” that trigger panic during transitions 

• How vendor contracts can unintentionally strip ownership 

• Real stories of lost websites, frozen systems, and emergency recoveries 

• Why digital continuity planning protects both value and legacy 

• How to start preparing your digital assets now—before transition pressure hits 

Chapters in this episode:

00:00 — Welcome & Why Digital Assets Matter 
01:01 — Paige’s Journey & Founding Tree Ring Digital 
02:36 — What Counts as a Digital Asset 
04:38 — “No Moments” That Trigger Transition Panic 
06:29 — Digital Infrastructure as Core Business Value 
08:26 — The Seven Pillars of Digital Asset Protection 
10:54 — Vendor Ownership & Contract Landmines 
13:55 — Delegation, Trust & Knowledge Gaps 
15:40 — Digital Assets as Exit-Readiness Infrastructure 
17:31 — How Buyers Evaluate Digital Risk 
18:53 — Where to Start: Checklists & Ownership Mapping 
20:10 — Digital Due Diligence & Trust Building 
22:19 — Digital Continuity Management Explained 
24:22 — Why Human Support Still Matters 
26:17 — Knowledge Transition & Asset Handoffs 
27:43 — Real Crisis Story: Sudden Loss & Recovery 
30:14 — Reframing Digital Assets in Your Roadmap 
32:10 — Acceleration of Digital Dependence 
33:45 — Paige’s Final Advice 
34:28 — How to Connect with Paige 
35:04 — Closing Reflections 

Connect with Paige Wiese & Tree Ring Digital 

Website & Digital Asset Checklist: https://treeringdigital.com/transitionstrategists 

Paige on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com 

Connect with Elizabeth Ledoux and the Transition Strategists: 

Website: https://transitionstrategists.com/ 
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thetransitionstrategists 
Elizabeth on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethledoux/ 
Transition Strategists on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/transitionstrategists/ 
Transition Strategists on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@transitionstrategists 

Subscribe to “The Business Transition Roadmap with Elizabeth Ledoux” on your favorite podcast player: 

Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3MxSYA2 
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3IhMMux 

Get Elizabeth Ledoux and Laura Chiesman’s latest book, “It’s A Journey: The MUST-HAVE Roadmap to Successful Succession Planning”: https://amzn.to/3oq2LQv

Digital Assets Are Business Assets: Protecting Value Before Succession or Sale  Transcript

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Hi everyone and welcome back to the Business Transition Roadmap. I am thrilled today to have Paige Weiss with us. ⁓ She is the founder and the CEO of TreeRing Digital. And today we’re gonna talk a little bit about digital assets, how to get your digital assets in order before you go through a sale or go through succession. It’s a really, really important topic.

And Paige, being the founder and the CEO ⁓ of this full service digital agency, this conversation and her work goes way beyond just building a pretty website or doing something like that. This is really about your digital assets and how do you keep those, protect them and handle them going forward into a sale or a succession situation. So Paige, welcome and just if you can tell us a little bit about you and.

you know, the founding of T.R.I.N.G. Digital.

Paige Wiese:
Yeah, thanks for having me on. I’m excited to be here. So yeah, with TreeRing Digital, I started it just doing freelance website design and was looking for a way to make money at the time I was 23 and having some health issues. So trying to figure out what I could do from home. Mind you, this was pre-Zoom, pre-digital nomad, pre-like anything like that. Where trying to find a work from home job was much harder and a struggle for sure. So I started teaching myself website design and development.

A lot of trial and error along the way there and then moving into more of a marketing side with clients hearing, this isn’t working. Are we really just turned into, I have questions, can you help? And I really enjoyed that process of troubleshooting. So I think that that’s something we’ve really carried through the whole life cycle of the company is moving into even just like, yes, let’s figure out what that question means. Let’s dive deeper into why you got that email instead of being like, that falls outside of our wheelhouse. It’s, know, we don’t do

this or that service, but instead like it’s relevant. It’s important to you and we’re in charge of your digital presence. So let’s take a look at that.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Absolutely. How’d you, I’m just curious, how’d you come up with your name? What’s the meaning behind that?

Paige Wiese:
Yeah, so

the Tree Ring Digital, it represents the Trierings, how they represent growth, longevity, uniqueness. So really that relationship that we’re wanting to build with our clients instead of so transactional. All of our services are unique and tailored to the customer and the business as we know that it shouldn’t be so cookie cutter and just, you know, looking for the growth out of it all. So that’s really where the inspiration for Triering Digital came from.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
That’s really cool. Just to get people oriented a little bit, when you talk about ⁓ digital assets, what goes into that bucket? What should owners be thinking about our successors?

Paige Wiese:
Yeah, I think digital assets is something right off the bat. They, one, don’t really entirely know what that means. I think even there’s a lot of people that are still navigating that there is a digital side that can be an asset. They’re so focused on the tangibles, the finances, all of that, but they’re really not looking at, there’s value in your website. There’s value in the domain names that you own. There’s value in your brand presence. There’s value in your Google reviews and your social media profiles. And so when it comes to exiting or succession,

how do we start putting a value on what that looks like and how do we really protect and safeguard those digital assets instead of, all right, well, the deal happened somewhere in the legal paperwork. says that the, you know, these, the domain, the hosting, whatever is going to transfer ownership, but what does that really look like? And how do we start to break down the email accounts, the, you know, do you have the right compliance and ADA and…

privacy policies and stuff in place? Or is that going to be something when you get to the deal during due diligence that’s going to come up and now we’ve got unexpected fees going to the deal or things that start to give them opportunities to negotiate the price. And obviously when we get that far in, we don’t really want to see that.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Right. ⁓ Just to get a little bit of emotion or some framework around some things, what are some of the things that you see that are like no moments as a business owner might walk into or walk through this that we can start there and then we’ll talk a little bit about how some of the shifts can happen to get rid of or mitigate some of those no moments.

So what are some of your favorites and the most likely that we might see?

Paige Wiese:
Yeah, some of the no moments are gonna be the, hey, my employee’s got that handled or someone else set that up or even a previous business owner set it up and they just look at it as, I’ve got a credit card on file, it’ll auto renew, it’ll be fine. ⁓ Then all of sudden something goes wrong and it’s the panic call that we get and we have to start understanding why is this happening, where is the root of it because your email’s going down doesn’t just mean.

your emails went down. It could also be attached to maybe it’s no longer connected to your website. Maybe it’s, you know, your domain name is actually what’s down. So there’s a lot more diagnosis that goes into it than just, okay, let’s fix this little issue that’s going on. So a big no is I feel owners of the company have really been stepping back and letting others, whether it be a vendor, an employee, someone else on their team, a virtual assistant that they’ve hired, stepping in and saying,

I know I need to delegate. We’re told to delegate as a leader, right? But they’re not asking the question back and saying, now, how do I have ownership? How do I make sure that I’m the one who can log in should anything happen for any reason? And I think the other side of that is other no’s are, yeah, I’ve got the password, it’s in my email. My web developer sent that to me a couple of years ago. I don’t know if can find it if I had to. It’s not the model we’re looking for. Like, it’s great that it’s…

someplace but it should be something you can easily access just like that. If your Facebook profile stopped you know you can’t log in it shouldn’t have to be a 20, 30, four day whatever turnaround to get logged in and back into it all that should be something you should have ownership to and so we see just a lot of these times where they think that it’s in a good spot but haven’t really put in the policies and procedures of how to safeguard that.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Yeah. I can only imagine ⁓ just how crazy that would be in a transition, especially if something happens to the owner and they’re unprepared. But even in a strategized intentional roadmap, ⁓ getting these digital assets so that you really have your arms around them and have knowledge about that asset. We’re moving so quickly into AI and into

Paige Wiese:
of them.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
online and people are using that data at such a high rate. ⁓ know, there is, there’s, it is a big part of your infrastructure these days.

Paige Wiese:
It’s more so than people think. know, you know, back in the day and more traditional blue collar companies, like they had a website, that’s what they needed. You know, there wasn’t much more to it. But now you’re right. We’re seeing so many more third party tools involved or how many different things does it actually take to connect the whole website process for the customer journey from email marketing campaigns to

you know, how is your social media connected in to how are you accepting payments online? How are you, you know, receiving the inquiries or tracking any sort of online quoting systems that while we, it’s a great time for businesses because we can’t automate so much. We’ve identified about 300 plus touch points that go into having a business online. And that’s not necessarily having an e-commerce business online, right? That’s literally just

having a business presence online, there’s 300 digital touch points. And so that’s really, think most business owners can name the better part of maybe 20 if we’re getting lucky, but not all of them. And so that’s really where we started coming, know, doing more and more of the digital asset protection and the ownership mapping framework to start to identify and put these things all into place as you’re saying.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Yeah, yeah, that is so interesting because basically pretty much small business to big business, ⁓ we all are working to have that presence online and it’s so important again for the infrastructure of our business and I don’t think that ⁓ the people have thought about it that way as it being a true pillar. So ⁓ you talk about the seven pillars, right?

Can you walk us through and just introduce us to those seven pillars and maybe which of the, what are the top two or three that are usually in the worst shape? So let’s start with seven.

Paige Wiese:
Absolutely. So with the seven pillars, one, that’s just kind of where we start to categorize how those 300 digital touch points come together and they fall under the seven pillars and that starts to be, how’s your domain, you know, where’s your domain, how’s it hosted, where’s your website, what does all that look like? And then it goes into more of the online marketing. What are you using? Google ads, Facebook ads, TikTok. What does all of that look like?

Are you tracking anything? How are we tracking KPIs, analytics? And what we notice is a lot of times business owners think that they have ownership of these or I know the logins. Those are the two responses that we start to hear, but they haven’t really fully read the vendor contract to realize that if they were to stop Google ads, they’re probably not going to get the ad account to come with them. The vendor is going to take that with them. So while yes, they’re running ads, they haven’t fully identified who’s the owner.

of this, we’ve seen websites get built and it’s like, well, you can’t take the content that’s ours. That’s not how it should be, but if that’s how it’s written in the contract, that’s the contract you signed. And so now while you want to rebuild your site someplace else or carry the content and everything to a new platform, you might be stuck with limitations. And it used to be an old school way. We still hear it on a regular basis though of like, no, that’s the web developer’s property.

It just kind of baffles us. It’s never been the way that I’ve ran TreeRing Digital. I’ve always ran it as you paid us for a service. You get that as return, right? Like, so for us, it’s more natural that ownership should be across the board, but we’ve seen domains held hostage by vendors that bought them on behalf of. Contract went south and I’m like, no, I own it. It’s in my account. I’m not handing it over. And it’s like, okay, well, yeah, the business owner though should have asked the right questions ahead of time.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Wait a minute. Yeah.

Paige Wiese:
to make sure that they do in fact own it. So these are just things that we see. So that kind of gets us into, you know, like the some of the pillars. And then we get into brand assets. Do you have the actual copy of your logo? Do you have trademark or IP around any of these things? Do you have, you know, a set source where everyone can find the appropriate files, the stock photos that you’ve paid for, videos and photos, all of that. And then it starts to move into third party tools. And we talked about your…

CRM systems, your email marketing campaigns, your online payment processing, anything like that that starts to fall into how is the website actually working or just your company and brand in general that’s using these tools. You mentioned AI and we can talk more about that, but like even there, it’s another third party tool that goes into your digital presence. And we can even look at the valuation of how well is it trained or not trained on your company? How dependent is your company on this tool?

And are we taking that to the table when we put the deal together? So you get there and then you move into more of the recovery and backup. What happens? Who’s going to call? Do you even know who’s in charge of? We see a lot of companies, especially after an acquisition, they have no idea. They don’t know who to call. They just know something happened and they’re just going to start going through every email they can find attached to some contact and hope one of them can help. That obviously delays the recovery time though.

We had another situation where a client had moved the hosting off of our servers and then they let the employee go. The owner didn’t realize that is what had happened. They thought that it was possibly still hosted with us. And so on the departure, the employee just deleted the entire site immediately within two, three minutes, thousands of dollars worth of a website gone. And so, yeah, we get this panic call from the client going, what do we do? What happened? What’s going on?

Elizabeth Ledoux:
my.

I

Paige Wiese:
We have it all in writing here. They said, take it off of your server, shut it down. We’re not going to renew all of these things. But that’s the hard part even on our side is like, did the owner know that that’s what happened? And so we really want to focus on what is that recovery plan? How do we make sure that your business isn’t impacted, not just for hours, but for days, for months, that that’s not happening. And then from there, we move into compliance and privacy policies, all the legal stuff that go into.

you are you following the right disclaimers, especially if we’re in a financial space? I know there’s even more disclaimers that we have to put in, HIPAA, all of that. So we start tracking that. So as you can see, just even with the seven pillars, there’s a lot more that goes into it than just do I have my, do I know how to log into my website, posting in emails?

Elizabeth Ledoux:
you

Yeah. Yeah. And I would think that the top two or three pillars that are usually in the worst place or the worst shape ⁓ have to do with how much knowledge and how much ⁓ delegation, I guess. And it’s not even delegation, it’s how much trust as an owner you’ve put into a team of people. And as this grows, it grows so quickly.

Paige Wiese:
Mm-hmm.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
that the team of people and the specialization continues to multiply. Yeah, it’s just.

Paige Wiese:
Yeah, or just vendor turnover. You know, you, hey,

we’re leaving this one starting to a next one. But like, did they create a new account? Were you able to pick up on the one they left off? Who set up the Facebook profile? Was that, you know, an intern that came in at some point, now they’ve left, but they didn’t entirely know. It’s not their fault. They didn’t know that this is the email address that should be used or how to put people, you know, as admins onto the account so that when they leave, but

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Yeah.

Paige Wiese:
Facebook doesn’t tell us who’s in charge of that account. It just says the account exists. And so then it’s like, all right, now we have to go all the way back through all the years to figure out who’s the one that set this up or at least maybe hopefully has some sort of admin access. And that can impact a deal, you know, if you go in and say, hey, we’ve got this really strong social presence, but we don’t actually know how to do anything with it. They’re going to start saying, well, we got to rebuild. We got to start, you know, competing against ourselves basically with a new profile.

This is going to take more time and energy than we thought. you we do want to start looking at a different direction or lowering the valuation.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Oh my gosh, I can just imagine the headaches coming for people and being in my shoes, building a business where in the beginning we didn’t even need or really have a website. It wasn’t even a big deal to have that to now evolving to where 300 touch points and it’s so complicated. Again, is one of, as you just mentioned, one of your

Paige Wiese:
Hehehehe

Elizabeth Ledoux:
infrastructure assets that becomes a part of your sale price or a part of your transition price. ⁓ And I also think of, ⁓ you know, we do at the transition strategist, we do a lot of long haul strategies for people to walk through. What do they have to do in order to prepare and become exit ready? And one of the things that you help people do is become exit ready with regard to their digital assets.

and also reduce the risk of the loss in basic operation. So if you’re transitioning it from you to potentially an internal person, how do you make sure that that business is in really good shape, giving those people the best opportunity to run it into the future well?

Paige Wiese:
Yeah, you

spend so much time investing into a well oiled machine, right? And that’s what you’re going to the table with and wanting to be exit ready for and whatever the capacity that looks like, whether you’re handing it to a key employee or whether you’re selling it to a different company. Like you want, that’s the value that you’ve been building all of this time is like, we understand how

We have this marketing effort working. gets into the email marketing campaign and from the email marketing campaign, we nurture it through here. We know what our conversion rate is on our website. We know we’ve got this so time tested, but if one piece of that breaks during a transition, the whole company can start to go down or at least get kind of even ⁓ off track and having to like, well, we thought we could have gone right back to market as soon as we bought. No, instead we’re going to have to slow down and put six months into rebuilding this infrastructure.

And then we can have this, you know, moving as an asset again. And that’s not what they’re looking for when they’re acquiring. so, or even as they take over, like they didn’t want the headache, you know, if they’re taking over the company, they knew what they were doing. They saw what you built and they knew that they could keep that part running smoothly. so anytime those hiccups happen, it’s usually cost the company way more. We’ve seen anything from a $20,000 fix to $250,000 fix.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
No.

Paige Wiese:
just depending on where and what piece of that is impacted. And so that’s where I say, think a lot of people don’t think it’s really gonna devalue the business or it’s not really giving them that space to change the price, but it can. And the savvy buyers are gonna know that too. The savvy buyers are gonna know if you don’t have this, this is what it’s gonna take for my team or somebody else to put this back into place. I don’t wanna, I don’t even know if I wanna.

or something if it’s gonna take that much leg work.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Absolutely. Yeah, just the concept of build versus buy. And the reason why they’re buying typically is because they think they can do more faster by buying than by building it themselves. And so they’ll go make that effort to make the purchase and go through the process. So if you ⁓ had a prescription for a business, ⁓ how to start to get their digital assets ⁓

I would just say safe, right? Because you want them safe for the business and as you build them to be safe in your journey, likely they’re going to then become a higher valued asset in a future transition or a near future transition. So how do we just do best practice and what’s the prescription for getting ready and staying ready?

Paige Wiese:
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so one thing is we have a free checklist that you can start with, which is really just our digital asset, you know, assessment, if you will, where you can go through, you can download that. That’s at truanddigital.com slash transition strategists. And from there, it’s just kind of more the checklist of the seven pillars broken down into a little bit basic terms of, let’s start, do we at least know these things so that you can kind of assess as a business owner?

Where am I even starting from? What does that look like? So that’s kind of one of the best places to start getting a grasp and an understanding of what is digital asset protection even mean? What is that? Right? After that, we recommend our ownership mapping framework. And with that, that’s where we deep dive into outlining who is ownership of all of these. What are all of the assets that go into it? Are you in compliance with the various aspects? So everything in that seven pillars that we just spoke about.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Yeah.

Paige Wiese:
We go through that in our ownership mapping framework. And that’s really good on the exit ready side. We really do even put that more into like the exit ready due diligence piece where ideally at the end of that, you’re coming out with the paperwork needed to go to the deal table during due diligence and say, yeah, I have, you know, the past six months or six years of analytic data to show you our ad spend and how it relates to our website traffic. Yeah, I understand exactly what our conversion rate is on our website.

Absolutely. I know that I do in fact own the domain name and it’s not attached to a previous business owner, co-owner. I do know like all of these answers and yes, we are in compliance. You’re not going to run into any issues with that after the transition. All of that is actually building a ton of trust also. If you can get to that point in the due diligence, they’re going to feel much more like, wow, they didn’t cut any corners. They’ve been doing this right. It should be a really smooth transition for us.

I have no hesitations. Let’s continue moving forward with this company. So that’s really what our goal is. What we see is digital is the kind of the last piece that’s touched in due diligence. And so that’s where I think we see it derail deals so often is like, great, you’ve gotten through the legal, you’ve gotten through the finances, you’ve gotten through the operation. And then they’re like, right. We should also ask these questions and

No one, no one throughout the whole process has been working with the business owner to prepare them for those questions. So that’s what the ownership mapping framework is going to do. And then after that, we just recommend digital continuity management where we just keep up with it. You have turnover, you just have to email and say, hey, this is, you know, employees no longer with us. How do we change the associated email accounts? Hey, the credit card is no longer, you know, working and we had to shut it down for fraud.

What credit cards are attached to that so that nothing in our system goes down? So now we’re really there in those pieces to say, you’re no longer going out alone. Even if it’s a different vendor that’s running your Google Ads, at least you can come to us and say, who do we talk to? Why is this happening? And we can say, here’s the vendor. Here’s the person you need to reach out to. You’re ready to go. So that’s where the digital continuity side starts to step

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Yeah, so you’re truly, I mean, in your work and in your vision, you’re truly a partner side by side with, and I think of it with the business, right? No matter who the owner is, you’re side by side with that business, with the team, helping them to make sure as they go forward that their digital assets remain safe and working properly and supporting the business the way that it needs to be supported.

Paige Wiese:
Yeah. And I think you’re correct there. Another piece of that is like, ideally the owner is somewhat involved so that they are the ones that are aware of these things. But to your point, we usually are working with some sort of marketing manager, marketing team, someone in that, you know, that area of the infrastructure that maybe doesn’t have a good grasp on websites, but they were hired for marketing. Maybe they have never had to deal with any of the compliance stuff because they’ve just been running it more of a

you know, administrative role in the marketing front or just an administrative in general. And now all of a sudden they’re tasked with like, we need to go, or why is this down? Go figure it out. We get that email all the time of my boss just said to email people and try to figure out why this is happening. And it’s like, well, thankfully like you contacted us, we have this, but you can tell they don’t know, but the owner doesn’t have the time to slow down and figure out why. So they’re just tasking it to anybody.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Good night guys.

Paige Wiese:
And so that’s where, again, when you can start to build that relationship, now we can just say, anytime something comes up related to your digital, we’ll get you going in the right direction. We’ll be able to help answer those questions. And if we don’t know, we’re going to tell you exactly who to contact to get to that answer as quickly as we can. Even with our digital continuity, we say, you know, offer a zero downtime guarantee that if you’re running on that with us.

website or like your business will never be offline for more than four hours because we’re going to know exactly where things go, what’s going on, who to contact and you’re not going to see that leg of you know ⁓ we forgot to renew something, who knew that our CRM credit card expired and now the whole thing is down.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Yeah.

Yeah. And what a great partner to have. What a great, in a way, insurance policy to have, if you want to think of it that way too. But a live person, live community insurance policy that is there to help you when you really need help and you don’t know where to go. So many of the people that we work with, the transitioners typically are like,

Paige Wiese:
Mm-hmm. ⁓

Elizabeth Ledoux:
50, 60, 70, we have one client who’s just turned 80. So yeah, which is great. It’s great. But again, some of the knowledge that is required, I’m a big, big, big believer in experts in different areas. And you truly portray that as an expert in the digital assets area for keeping them safe.

Paige Wiese:
my.

Boo hoo.

Yeah,

well, thank you. And also for that, though, to your point, I mean, the amount of stuff that is moving to AI bots, the amount of stuff that’s like, we’re not even going to give you a single way to contact a human. A lot of times when we get the phone call and I’m on it, they’re just like, a human. They don’t really care about that. They’re just like, finally someone you know, and it’s, there’s that happy balance in the tech space, especially as I’ve been in it for so long to see that transition. And

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Yeah.

Paige Wiese:
It is, it’s super frustrating when you’re starting to use all these third party tools and no one wants to get on a live chat anymore. No one wants to be giving out phone numbers. And it’s just like, we’re not there yet. We can’t do that. So it is extremely frustrating to a business owner. It’s extremely frustrating when those things come up. And so to your point, I think that’s something that people really, really appreciate is it’s not just, hey, I have an answer.

It’s a human that knows the answer that understands my business and understands the importance and why this is like so urgent for me specifically and why we need to get this under control immediately.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Absolutely. Well, just, mean, if you’re getting a call like that, the company, the owner, they are not in a great situation. There is something on fire that needs to be fixed right now. And with a little bit of ⁓ thought into it and intentionality, because again, in our work is people come in and they go through the Evolve program and they walk through

the building of a strategy to not only understand what they want, but prepare, prepare their successor, prepare the business, prepare the team, all of those different pieces. ⁓ Transition knowledge, because how do you transition all this knowledge? Let’s say the owner is engaged and maybe heavily and highly engaged in this with the quote unquote ownership of the assets. ⁓

There’s trans in that transition. How do you transition all the knowledge that the owner has to do that, you know, and to manage it well because it is ⁓ and I think will continue to be a growing asset ⁓ inside of the business. I don’t think it’s going down in value. I think it’s going up in value and it’ll be a greater and greater value ⁓ component of a business going forward.

So there’s a knowledge transition in just the ownership of the assets and how to handle them.

Paige Wiese:
I mean, and that’s what we go into is like, do you have a policy when people are setting up new accounts to use so that no matter what that transition looks like that’s in place? I know, you we’re also sharing another story is we had a client that was a long term client of ours, he referred his son to us. So we were like, okay, great. Like we brought that on. And I just always been the type to just document everything. And so, you know, as we were building this relationship with his son, we were putting everything down and like, okay, we know how to do this. Okay, we’ve got

access to this, we’ve got ourselves set up, not delegated access on that. So we’re really going through this process, if you will. And then all of a sudden, I get the phone call that the son passed away. And he had about four or five different employees, you know, attached to it. And one, I mean, it’s one thing to be going through the grieving and the loss of, but two, he was more concerned of like, are the employees going to drain the bank account? Because I don’t know what they do and don’t have access to as far as Stripe.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Yes.

Yeah.

Paige Wiese:
you can go in and request a loan through Stripe as long as you’ve got the right access. And that’s what the employees had because that’s what part of their role in job was. So it’s like, how do we make sure that now we’re not also putting some sort of random debt on the company because of this passing? How do we make sure that there was also files that we had to recover from the computer of service they were selling and only the son is the one who had access to the core raw video files.

So it was like, how do we work through and put all these pieces in place to put the puzzle back together? And yeah, I mean, I think it took us the better part of six months to work through all of the different pieces that did like went into running that business, even though we actually had a ton of it under our, you know, ownership. And there were these little nuances where we didn’t have the computer.

We have no idea how to get into, you know, his personal email account to locate some of this stuff. So we had to go down that path, but that was also just kind of a testament to like, we’re not going to stop and we’re not going to give up. Like what are the options? We want to make sure we exhaust everything. But to your point, how do we not ever find ourselves in that situation? How do we make sure that yes, you’ve built this legacy, you want to hand it off to somebody, your family, someone else, whatever that looks like, that if something should have happened.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Mm-hmm.

Paige Wiese:
how do we just make sure the company isn’t just completely at a halt and now worth the zero dollars and you can’t do anything with everything you’ve been spending the last, whether it be five, 20, 50 years building, how do we really make sure that it’s even gonna stay that legacy and in place should something happen?

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Absolutely. So moral of the story is, ⁓ in what I just heard and reflecting back is stay on top of this. ⁓ Think about and reframe your digital assets as a large component of your value of your company, knowing that it’ll continue to grow and then treat it just like another component of your transition roadmap.

Paige Wiese:
That’s

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Just another piece that needs to be handed off. I think of it like the accounting needs to be handed off because it’s the blood of the company and the cash flow. How do you deal with that? Now, digital assets, think, are becoming as important as money. As important as the flow of money is the flow of the digital communication and ⁓ how things flow through your company, both in and out.

Paige Wiese:
Right.

Yeah. I mean, think about it. If your emails are down for any reason for, you know, four hours to five days, I mean, how much of the finance that you just outlined is actually at a halt and how much is that impacting, you know, the business overall, an online system and online appointment tool. If you can’t accept appointments, like how much money are we losing? So to your point, the finances matter, but I don’t think people are realizing how much of the finances are dependent on that online infrastructure to make it happen.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Yeah.

Paige Wiese:
more so now than ever in companies too.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
That’s right. Yeah, there’s a big shift that’s happened over the last, I’m going to say 10 years plus, but it’s happening at a higher and higher rate, faster and faster, and people are adopting things faster and faster. And COVID, it happened. And because of that, I think we accelerated so much into people accepting the use of digital interaction in general, like Zoom, like podcasts, like, you

Paige Wiese:
Okay

Thank you.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
scheduling, all of that, it just happened. It’s easy.

Paige Wiese:
Yeah.

We instantly went from, you know, maybe a handful of tools to a dozen tools. And it’s just changing every single day with, you know, the advancement of all the other tech coming out, AI, the SaaS tools, et cetera, that it’s, there’s more now than ever. And we’re just at a really fast speed too. So where it’s easy to lose track of it all. We signed up for another account, didn’t realize that we were testing it out. Didn’t realize the trial ended. Next thing you know, you’ve got some random credit card charge for the, you know, the past.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Absolutely.

Paige Wiese:
six months that you didn’t know you were paying and it’s just money out the door, how do we get a better grasp around what that looks like so we know why the money is coming in going out too?

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Absolutely. Well, gosh, Paige, this has been incredible. I don’t want to leave people with a fear, right? But I can feel a sense of urgency to incorporate this kind of thinking into your transition roadmap as an owner, successor, transitioner. If you’re working on that right now, I can see a sense of urgency and a high priority to start to incorporate that into this journey as a component of

Paige Wiese:
Hehehehe

Elizabeth Ledoux:
knowledge transition, ⁓ asset transition, and just helping to mitigate some risk that you might have in the future as you start to wander through an actual transaction. So, Paige, you’re just a wealth of knowledge. I always end, and our time goes so fast always, but I like to end with one thought from you on.

Paige Wiese:
Thank

Elizabeth Ledoux:
what you would leave with our audience. If you could leave them with one thought, what would be the most important thing you would help them with?

Paige Wiese:
I think you can just get a grasp on it. I really had to think about it even when I started looking at like trust in estate planning and what do I do with my company? I’m the one who knows where a lot of stuff is and what happens should something happen to me, you know, unexpectedly. And so even a little bit before some of the exit side, it’s like you should always be ready. You should always have that digital plan in place so that no matter what happens, whether it is the succession, whether it’s the exiting, whether, you know, it

Be prepared and don’t let it delay because it will really cost a lot more in the long run than just getting a grasp of it now.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
Absolutely. So Paige, if people would like to get a hold of you to learn more, to dive in deeper, what would be the best way for them to do that?

Paige Wiese:
Yeah, the best way to do that would be to find me on LinkedIn. So page Weiss or like I said, you can also go to treeringdigital.com slash transition strategists and that will also give you the download the checklist just to start evaluating yourself where you at with everything. What does that look like in a little bit more deeper level than everything I’ve just spoken about here because it’s a lot. It’s a lot of information in a short amount of time for sure.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
It’s a lot, it’s a lot. And it seems as though it’s like a spider web, right? Yep, and you keep the spider web intact and beautiful and working and all of that when it’s a pretty fragile web, or it can be, with one one spot that goes out. yeah. Anyway, Paige, thank you so much for being here today and for sharing so openly and vulnerably. ⁓

Paige Wiese:
Hehehe.

yeah.

Elizabeth Ledoux:
just what you do and congratulations. What a cool thing that you do for people. So appreciate you. Yeah. All right. Be well.

Paige Wiese:
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on. Yeah.

You too.

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The Business Transition Roadmap with Elizabeth Ledoux

How do communities thrive? When businesses experience healthy growth and transition. Join CEO of The Transition Strategists, Elizabeth Ledoux as she and her guests identify what makes a successful business transition roadmap. If you know you want to transition or exit your business “one day”, today is the right day to start planning. This show will give you the roadmap.

If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, you can check out other episodes here: Podcasts – The Transition Strategists