What we find on the website of a company that just changed hands
The same handful of things turn up on nearly every small company website in its first year under new ownership. None of them are design problems, and the order they get fixed in decides how much of that first year converts into revenue.
Where the money is already sitting
Enquiries that arrive and stop. The contact form posts to an address the founder monitored personally, the phone number rings a mobile that now belongs to someone who has left, and nobody can say how many calls came in last month. This is revenue that already exists and is landing in a place no one owns.
The best service on the thinnest page. Small companies usually write most about what they started doing and least about what now earns the margin. The page for the highest-value work is often a paragraph inside a list, competing against firms that gave it a page of its own.
Spend that cannot be judged. Where advertising is running, conversion tracking frequently counts page views rather than enquiries, which makes every channel look similar. The budget is defensible only once the thing being counted is the thing that makes money.
The order we work in
Capture first. Routing every enquiry to an address the company controls, with call tracking on the phone number, takes days. It changes nothing about how the site looks and it stops the leak while everything else is still being decided.
Measurement second. Conversion tracking on the actions that represent revenue, so the next two decisions are made on numbers rather than opinion. This also produces the first reporting the sponsor can read in a minute.
Pages third. New pages take sixty to ninety days to earn their position, so they are started early and judged late. Doing them first means spending the quarter waiting while the leak continues.
Add-on acquisitions were 72.9% of all US buyouts in 2025, on PitchBook data published by Cherry Bekaert, which is why this sequence is worth having as a standard rather than reinventing per company.
What we leave alone
The pages that already rank. A page holding position for a term that brings real enquiries has earned that position. It gets left in place, and anything new is built alongside it.
The name and the domain. The equity sits in the name customers already search for. Rebranding in year one spends that equity to buy a logo.
The founder, where customers knew the founder. In trades and industrial services the relationship often carried the business. That history is an asset, and it survives the change of ownership better than most things on the site.
Where we fit. Ironcliff runs marketing for companies in their first year under new ownership. We advise the sponsor and do the work inside the business, at a flat fee.
If you want a brand workshop or a social media presence, we are the wrong call. If you have just closed on a company whose marketing is a founder's phone number, we are the right one.