Two Easy and One Hard Marketing Tactic to Help Private Equity Strategies Thrive

A Q&A with Scott Christiansen

On a recent appearance on the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast, ROOT3’s Founder and CEO Scott Christiansen spoke about some of the biggest marketing opportunities (and greatest mistakes) private equity firms often make with platform companies and roll-up strategies.

Below is a transcription from the podcast, revised for concision and clarity and with emphasis added by the R3 editors. Click here to listen to the full episode.

Scott Becker: Your marketing firm ROOT3 has worked with many private equity portfolio companies. What are some of the biggest marketing opportunities that drive the most value for PE firms especially for platforms? 

Scott Christiansen: We work a lot with platform companies and roll-up strategies. There are three areas we handle that we can see have a huge impact on productivity, efficiency, and profitability.  

Two are easy; one is hard. 

Brand: To avoid most of the pain of brand is actually pretty easy. The tactic is to sit down with the people that manage your brand and figure out what its job is at every level of success. When you peg brand evolution to success it turns a scary conversation into an easy one.  
Communications: This one is also easy. Consistency is the key here.  Not the amount of information you share – but letting the market and your team know you are there. The fastest business deal of all time still moves at a glacial pace compared to internal and external communications. 
Technology: This one is a little hard, but now, with AI on the rise it should be prioritized. Your info and data either work for you or against you. There is no middle ground. Getting your businesses and teams on the same page will avoid a lot of confusion and actually help your strategy deliver results faster.

SB: Let’s start with brand. Your recommendation is to basically future proof the brand from the start. How does this help?  

SC: First let’s acknowledge this is a sensitive topic. I wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole if I didn’t have to, but Brand is a leaky pipe. The longer you wait to address it, the more damage it will do.   

Developing a brand strategy means thinking into the future – if everything goes well, at each level of success what is the brand’s job? 

Some examples: 

Your platform is Toledo Janitorial Services – that brand doesn’t scale for reasons of geography and services. What happens when you start to serve Cleveland? What happens when you add landscaping?

What if the brand is a name and that person exits? Do you still want the name?

What if you buy 4 similar companies in the same area that all compete for the same customers

- Do you want to support 4 brands, four websites, do you want to compete with each other in the digital marketplace that is your front door?

The reason I call brand easy is that you just have to develop the plan – in all the examples above which are very common, the solutions and when they need to happen are simple. Those baby steps of logo lockups, switching to same colors/fonts/icons, moving to the same name allow you to showcase your value proposition which is making the combined entity more powerful than separate entities:

You can move to one email address

You can move to one website

You can drive customers to your businesses without paying for separate programs or competing against yourself.

You can build brand equity

Two recommendations on brand: 

The name of your MSO should be a scalable brand name. If you are successful your brand will quickly become way more powerful than the regional or local brands and new partners will want your name. 
If you are already far along consider creating a house brand. You will use this brand for things like denovos, when you purchase a business that might not have the best reputation, when you need to merge multiple brands in a single market, for a company named after a person if that person leaves, etc.

One more thing: a brand strategy is also valid for an IT businesses. Think about naming conventions for new products. Decide what is a product and what is a platform. How will it scale into new industries? This will help considerably with brand clarity in the market and prevent brand creep – which is when things get named during development. 

SB: How about communications?  What do you think is crucial for internal and external communication? 

SC: I am also calling this tactic easy.  

Let’s start with Internal.

When you are at your quietest – the market, your clients, and your people are often at their loudest. Never give up control of what the market and your team members think about you. 

This tactic is not about how much info you share but how often you communicate. 

Change makes people uncomfortable.

Discomfort only leads to bad places.

Continuously give them reasons to be excited. Brand your growth to the team. Give them the glass half full reasons to embrace the chaos of growth – more opportunity within company, new investments for department, better brand recognition, doing more good for the community!

Silence kills. Create a consistent drip of communications — not a one-time event.

Can be a simple monthly email update or eventually something more complicated but start there

Now for external: 

If you are not telling the market what to think about your growing enterprise – who is? 

Constantly update your value proposition to the market. It won’t be true yet – consider it a self-fulfilling prophecy. If your clients, your team, the market understand what you are trying to build – they will understand how to buy it. 

Your competitors will have their own narrative so take control. This is the time for segmenting your audiences and developing niche content.   

I highlighted this podcast as an example. Caber Hill developed niche content for PE, one of its clients, and used a niche media product. Your podcast to reach that audience. 

One theme for 2025 is developing your own content – think about it – if you sell to rural land owners near energy infrastructure, that is a niche audience. Who can educate them about the benefits of what you do better than you? 

SB: I know you want to talk about technology, and I wanted to ask you about what you are seeing in AI specifically. 

SC: I think the biggest impact AI will have this year on the middle market is that it will be a catalyst to embrace technology at every level of their business, and it will become a competitive advantage. You will see connecting and automating Sales, Marketing, Operations, Service, Finance. You have to reach this step before you can leverage AI 

AI is never going to be delivered in a box on your doorstep. It is coming in the back door and it is already in the house.   

Marketing was forced to move to 100% digital platforms more than a decade ago – we are in an era that data and intelligence drive every decision from an email subject line to a six figure ad spend. Because we are already using these platforms we are now benefiting from a host of AI tools within those platforms or that plug-in to our workflows. We get better and more efficient every day with these tools. 

Those who adapt earlier will have a competitive advantage that will continue to widen as more and more advancements become available. 

For Roll-Ups: 

Your data can work for you or against you. The sooner you get it on your team the better. 

Tech should be a high priority for roll-up strategy. Going from one office with one or two services to 8 offices and 10 services is a potential data nightmare that can easily be controlled – usually with a basic CRM package. This will control the chaos – and demonstrate investment in efficiency and visibility. 