How to Integrate Brands After M&A with Megan Adler

When two or more companies merge, they bring an inevitable clash of identities, disjointed messaging, and fractured cultures. Far too many organizations waste critical post-deal runway trying to push a messy grab bag of products without a unified commercial story. If your team is struggling to navigate customer friction or figure out which brand names to preserve, you are facing a classic, high-stakes brand integration crisis. On this episode of FiredUp!, we dig into the strategic playbook for conquering the post-deal corporate transition with Megan Adler, CEO and Founder of Sublime Designs Media.Learn how to evaluate market equity, align cross-selling models with your buyer personas, and deploy internal change management programs that transform fragmented corporate divisions into a single, high-growth revenue engine. This week, episode 138 of the FiredUp! podcast is about how to integrate brands after M&A! 

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In this episode of the FiredUp! podcast, Megan Adler shares the importance of understanding competitors and market share when merging brands, and actionable steps you can take right now to enable sales teams to effectively sell across different brands.

Megan Adler is the CEO and Founder of Sublime Designs Media. She founded Sublime in 2002,  growing from a small local firm to an international company with clients across verticals. As the daughter of a diplomat, Megan lived in Chile, Spain, El Salvador, and Germany. This international experience has shaped her approach to almost everything she does and given her a rich and diverse approach to marketing with a special sensitivity to other cultures and ideas. Megan is bilingual in Spanish. 

Megan and Morgan discuss:

• Audit the Brand Puzzle and Market Equity: Never guess which brand assets to absorb; always execute deep interviews with customers, partners, and vendors to measure regional sentiment and market share before making a rollout decision.
• Set the Master Brand Platform First: A major post-M&A mistake is failing to establish an overarching parent narrative. Without a unified parent message, sales divisions operate in silos, leaving significant cross-selling revenue on the table.
• Treat Branding as Change Management: Internal rollout requires a methodical, multi-touch drip campaign featuring town halls, interactive working groups, and direct leadership engagement to earn full cultural buy-in from your employees.
• Balance Human Intuition with AI Efficiency: Use specialized AI projects pre-loaded with verified brand data to automate competitive analysis and content distribution, while keeping core messaging, positioning, and creative strategy purely human-driven.
• Build AI Guardrails for Your Staff: Combat brand dilution in the generative AI era by providing pre-prompted AI frameworks to internal stakeholders, ensuring all newly created collateral strictly honors your established brand guidelines.

This week, review your organization's recent acquisitions or cross-division assets. Identify one instance where your sales team is struggling to explain how your products connect under your parent company's narrative, and draft a clean, three-sentence bridge explaining the combined value proposition.

Thank you for listening! Tune in to all the episodes for practical tips on crushing your startup marketing goals. Don’t forget to follow, rate, and review the podcast, and tell us your key takeaways!

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5.5.2026

Transcript

Morgan McLintic: 0:00

M and A is back, but the real work from a marketing perspective starts after the deal is signed. Today we're talking to a brand specialist who's going to walk through her playbook about how to integrate the brands you've acquired. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Fired Up, the podcast for marketers working in early and late stage startups. Hello everyone. Welcome to Fired Up. My name is Morgan McClintic, and today I am joined by the wonderful Megan Adler, who is the CEO and founder of Sublime Designs Media. Megan, welcome to Fired Up.

Megan Adler: 0:39

Thank you. Great to be here today.

Morgan McLintic: 0:42

It's great to have you. It's great to have you. So, M and A is back, and you are an expert on helping companies after the deal think about their brand strategy and their positioning, which brands they should keep, which brands they should merge. How do you even go about that? I guess that's the top of the show here. Talk to us a little bit about how you approach a roll up from a brand perspective.

Megan Adler: 1:08

Absolutely, so first of all, I just want to say that the world has shifted towards this consolidation mentality, and most industries, everything from physical security, gardening, dentist office, everything is starting to consolidate, and it's leaving companies with a bunch of unanswered questions. So we roll up a brand, we roll up two brands, three brands. What happens to those brands? Do they all roll up under the same umbrella company? Is there enough brand equity to keep those separate, so what we do is we come in and we start to take a look at each of the companies. What kind of brand equity do they have in the market? Do people know them? If that brand goes away completely, will it be something that will harm the new umbrella company? So we need to evaluate that. We also need to look at marketing budget. If you have to maintain five different brands, that's expensive. If you roll them up under one brand and everyone is sharing the same brand, that will help you save money and resources, and you get more bang for your buck. Another thing to consider is to think about what happens with cross selling, so when you have different brands, sometimes you can't cross sell because you can't cross sell to another company. So rolling them up can help you come up with a clear cross selling strategy that can open the doors for more organic growth. And then we also want to look at what's going to happen in the future. Are you going to acquire more brands? What will that look like, and how will it all fit together? So we start to look at all these individual pieces, and it feels like a brand puzzle. I always talk about how we go into these trying to solve a juicy brand puzzle, and that's what we're doing, we're pulling together all these pieces, asking these questions to create a strategy that will work

Morgan McLintic: 3:06

excellent. So that's the overview, and I want to dive into all those different elements, because I think this is super pertinent today, and a lot of marketers that we talk to have faced these these challenges, and right at the very beginning there you said, okay, there's been an acquisition, there's a number of brands here, we need to decide which ones to keep and which ones to absorb, and you're trying to work out, okay, what is the brand equity, and of course each of these companies have customers and have invested in their brand, so it's not zero, how do you even go about deciding which ones to keep and which ones to absorb?

Megan Adler: 3:46

So, when we're looking at a brand and we're trying to decide whether we should keep it or not, it's really important to start with the customer and market perception. So, we'll always do a series of interviews with customers, partners, vendors to understand how the brand is perceived in the market, and how deep the connection to the brand goes. We often have local brands that are tied to their community, so you need to look at how that change will disrupt it. From there, we also do market analysis to understand who the competitors are, and how this brand fits into that space, and what share of market they have that helps us evaluate to see if they've already captured a big share of that market. They have really deep brand equity and connection to customers. Often we'll keep that brand if we're looking at a brand that people aren't very connected to, maybe has small market share, oftentimes we'll be like, okay, let's roll it up, because we're stronger together. I think the other thing to consider is just thinking through what the benefits are of letting go of a brand, because when you let go of a brand, you have to do a lot of change management, so there's risk. Asks to that, and there's also big rewards on the other side, and you have to weigh them, and if the rewards of being able to cross sell across a unified brand, so you change the brand, if that outweighs the negatives, then that can be another thing that that factors into your decision.

Morgan McLintic: 5:18

I think that brand is very personal, often to the founders, I've been involved in some acquisitions on the PR side. We, my last agency, we acquired a number of other agencies, and it's a brilliant process, but one of the sort of tricky parts up front is, what are you going to do with the brand? Sometimes it's even named after the founder, right, like it's their name above the door, it's personal, you mentioned dentists or whatever, but who tends to fight the hardest to keep their brand, and how do you get them to sort of let go?

Megan Adler: 5:49

That is such a good question, Morgan, and it sounds like you've experienced this firsthand, but founders are often the most attached to their brand, but you create a business and it becomes like your baby, and then having to change that is something that's really hard. We also are working with a company right now that is named after the founder and has had really deep roots in the community for 20 plus years, and so we're considering what's going to happen in this community. This is an insular community where everybody knows each other. I interviewed some customers, and they said with some other competitors, their brands changed and the quality went down. So, if I saw that the name changed, I would know that the quality was going to change of the services provided, and so that's coming into play before the decision is even made, so I think talking to the community is really important as well, because sometimes with local businesses like that, that brand connection and the perception and the fear of change can be really big.

Morgan McLintic: 6:52

Yeah, it's not just about the founder, yet it's the customers, everyone's sort of pretty well, it's all going to change now, and they've even changed the name, and I quite like the last name, there's a lot of factors that go into that, but I guess you had said yes, you know the cost of it, but there are also benefits, because if you clean up the brand and you don't have that anymore, you're not paying to support a multi-brand strategy,

Megan Adler: 7:14

that's exactly it, and the other thing is really, you know, the second part to your question is, How do you convince someone to let go of the brand. It's really about having a good story, and Morgan, you know this better than anyone from the PR side, but having a great story can change perception. And so, if you come to an employee of a company and that employee is really attached to the brand, and you say, I hear you, I know you're really attached to this brand, but look at all these amazing things that you're going to get out of this brand change, or you go to a customer and you do the same, telling a great story where you're really putting forth the benefit and value of the change, that's where you can start to get people excited, tell them what's in it for them.

Morgan McLintic: 7:57

I think that leads us on to our next topic I want to talk about which is messaging and creating this sort of an umbrella messaging from the disparate parts, because often in a roll up one of the primary drivers is just to acquire new customers, right, and then maybe try and do some sort of integration with the products on the back end, which can be a real challenge, but you end up with a bit of a grab bag of different messaging that might not always fit nice and neatly into that puzzle, as you say, you know, there might be pieces missing. How do you just sort of even go about creating that umbrella messaging, so it all ties together?

Megan Adler: 8:38

Yeah, absolutely. So that also starts with a great story, right. What we're trying to do is figure out how all of these companies work together. What's the thread that ties them together, and how can we tell that story in a way that really connects with customers, so that it's effective, right? And that messaging needs to be able to be the foundation for your sales efforts, for your marketing efforts, for all of your go-to-market efforts, and so it needs to connect with customers, it needs to connect to the pain, and it needs to put forth the value of all of these companies together, and this is a really important step that we often see overlooked, so we see companies that are continuing to roll up companies under them, but they haven't set that parent level messaging, and it's a huge mess, because what ends up happening is people go into sales calls, they can't accurately or in any beneficial way talk about how the brands are connected, or the benefit of them, or how they can cross sell, and when it's not defined, you're just leaving money on the table, and that's why it's really important to take the step of creating this umbrella messaging that ties everything together, and then bringing it down throughout any of the sub-brands that you decide to keep.

Morgan McLintic: 9:57

Yeah, I think a good acquirer. Has their own messaging locked down, and then has a good thesis beyond we're going to acquire more customers here about why these two companies are going to be better together, because what's the story? How do you make a how do you make a bad company take two good companies and merge them together? Because if that is missing, I find that's a real challenge. If it was part of the ethos of we're buying this company because they're in an adjacent space, they're going to buy our products, our customers are going to buy theirs. It's great. The messaging sort of falls into place if it's just sort of, well, I want to buy some SMB customers and sell them my enterprise product, that's

Megan Adler: 10:38

not going to work exactly. And that's why it's really important to tell a story that's connected to the target audience, to your customers, to your prospects, and to the market. And the other thing I think that's really important is to evolve that story over time. What we see a lot of companies do is they're rolling up companies really quickly, they set a message, and then they look at it two or three years later, and they're like, this doesn't work anymore. Why are our sales slowing? Why aren't we acquiring new customers faster? All of that has to do with your messaging, so you want to make sure that you're continually evolving your messaging, that you should constantly be looking at it, making sure that it's up to date with the companies that you've rolled up, how you're going to market, how customers are responding, and what's happening in the world. Think about AI, right? A couple years ago, there was no AI, and then it was AI, and then it was agentic AI. It just evolves really quickly, and so you need to make sure that your messaging is keeping pace with what's happening in the world, as well.

Morgan McLintic: 11:41

I think that's a great point. And you had talked about, okay, we need to build a brand platform here, because we're going to be making other acquisitions down the road. What is a brand platform?

Megan Adler: 11:53

That's a great question. So, a brand platform is something that ties together all of the companies that you've acquired into a neat package that explains to the market how they're all connected and the benefit, and as you start to get, you go upstream to bigger and bigger markets, what you find is the platform expands. Downstream, you might have a company, for example, that their platform is cybersecurity, and they've rolled up several adjacent cybersecurity companies, but as you get bigger upstream, it might be services for your home, and they might have rolled up cleaning services, gardening services, so it's not necessarily they're all adjacent verticals, and they're connected, and so the platform can get bigger and bigger as you start to roll up adjacent verticals, so you stay with one vertical, and then you expand it from there, but the platform really has to tie everything together into a neat package, and that's what gives you the ability to scale. That platform is the differentiator, and that's what private equity is looking for, that's what gives you growth,

Morgan McLintic: 13:02

and is there a timeline behind this? Because they get acquired, and then they keep their brand, and they're an acquirer code company, and then suddenly they become the whole company becomes a product line, maybe under the master brand. Do you normally find there's a bit of a life cycle to this process, or is it better to just wipe the old brand off the table at the beginning and just go, okay, we're just taking the pain up front.

Megan Adler: 13:26

It's different for every company, and I think it's really hard, also because holding time for private equity really varies. So, some private equity firms might want to hold companies for three years, some for eight years, some for one year, and they're expecting a certain result within that time period, so you need to align to the holding period, and then you need to align also to what it will take to complete the change management and to roll out the brand,

Morgan McLintic: 13:54

that's a great point. In the PR field, when you're acquiring a company, there's often a sort of transition phase, like an earn out period, where an acquiring company will buy, let's say, 50% of the business, and then over the subsequent two or three years acquire more if they hit certain numbers, but of course, if you come in on day one and then change the brand, that becomes a touch point, because that could inhibit the selling company's ability to hit their numbers, and so that does become a bit of a discussion point. Let me just say, a factor, and so I think the fact that you're saying, "Hey, the commercial part of this on the marketing side, it's a big thing to factor in that people might not normally think about.

Megan Adler: 14:35

It really is, absolutely. And going through this type of process is expensive, and it God, think about all of the different pieces that your brand touches. There's digital presence, there's in-person presence. If you have an office, there's so many things to consider, and you have to do a thorough job, because you have to go forward with a very cohesive brand strategy of. Otherwise, you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot.

Morgan McLintic: 15:02

How do you find that you can get buy-in for the new messaging that you've got, so that it brings the company together culturally?

Megan Adler: 15:12

Yeah, that's a really great question, because often what we see is that companies roll up other companies and they have very different cultures, and so what we do is, as a part of our process, we bring people along at every step of the way, we make lists of all of the stakeholders, we figure out how to engage them in different ways at different steps, and then once the brand is ready, we make sure we get buy-in on the other side in the appropriate way from the appropriate stakeholders, and we also put together a really comprehensive change management and rollout program, so that it's not like sending an email to the company, "Hey, there's a new brand, enjoy it. Okay, this is a phased approach. We're going to get people excited with the drip campaign, we're going to put out a video, then we're going to have a town hall, then we're going to have smaller working session groups where the CEO is going to personally join and ask questions, email drip, then we're going to incorporate it into our company party or newsletter, so we really make sure that we create a comprehensive rollout plan that's multi touch over the appropriate amount of time, and that's just for the internal rollout. You need to get everyone on board,

Morgan McLintic: 16:28

and anyone who's developed a brand within one company and been in the room when we're deciding logos and visual identity, et cetera, will know that how hard that is, and how you need to be a real expert to get everybody on the same page, because everyone has an opinion. This becomes much more complex when you're talking about multiple companies, right? This is multiple management teams. It's AI, and you talked about the change management process. Tell me a bit about that process. How long is it normally, and what have you learned from it.

Megan Adler: 17:01

Yeah, absolutely. Getting people to change is not easy, getting them on board, getting them on the same page. But I have to tell you, it's something I love personally. So I actually, my dad was a diplomat, and we moved to a new country every three years when I was growing up, and so I had to start over, understand people really deeply, pull ideas together, and it's something that's a part of who I am and how I grew up, and it's really helped me. So, when we go into these branding processes, I actually lead them personally, especially at a bigger scale. So, I'm able to go in and bring all that experience working with different types of people and helping to get them on the same page, and I think a lot of it is listening, showing people that you care, and also making sure that we're running the process in a way that's inclusive. We take a lot of care with that. There's a lot that goes into it, and it can take a long time. With one company that we worked with, it took almost a full year to create the brand and roll it out with smaller companies. We're working with a smaller one right now. There's only 10 people, that's a lot quicker.

Morgan McLintic: 18:08

Yeah, I'm interested in that. I mean, I can well believe it will take a year, although many will be thinking, I, you know, that's incredible, because it is a gradual process. And do you tend to know what the destination is going to look like in your mind, and you're trying to convince people to your perspective, or is it much more.. hey, I don't know. I know where we need to get to, and I know what it's going to look like at the end, but I have no preconceived notions of what the brand will be. Tell me about your philosophy there.

Megan Adler: 18:36

That's exactly where I go in, Morgan. What I find is the more preconceived notions I have the worse we end up doing. So, it's good to go in with a completely open mind. A lot of times, we'll just go in. I think having that kind of outsider perspective is what our customers value. So, we try to really go in within just the perspective of, hey, we're going to be listeners, and we go in. We do a lot of interviews, we try and deeply understand customers, we deeply understand the company, we listen, we ask a lot of questions, and we start over the course of all of our work understanding and getting to know the company, that's where we start to think through different scenarios, and we come to the workshops with a few scenarios in mind, and then we go through the process as a group to decide what works, because ultimately the people in the room at the workshop, they're the experts, and they're the ones that need to live with this brand every day. Bring these different paths together with their expertise helps us get to a really great outcome that works for everyone.

Morgan McLintic: 19:41

I love that. I love that. So, it's very much a- you've got the process, but it's very much a sort of discovery for everyone, and that keeps it nice and open, and everyone can get there, but it feels heard and gets their input. Yeah, slightly to agree with the outcome. You talked a little bit about the rollout of the new brand internally. There, we're going to. You know, a little drip campaign, and there's workshops, and you're getting the CEO do the do a Q and A, and there's maybe some sessions on how to use the new brand, etc. Just tell us a little bit more about how you should roll out the brand, I guess, inside out internally, and then to partners and customers, etc.

Megan Adler: 20:19

Yeah, absolutely. So, I think internal rollout is something that skipped a lot, and we went through some of the things that you can do, but it's important to tailor a plan to your company and your culture, because every company is different, and so we want to make sure you get all the appropriate touch points. One company that we worked with a few years back, we actually rolled out the messaging to the entire company, and they had 2000 employees, and so we put together a stand and deliver program for the entire company, where they had group leaders, and then those group leaders led workshops, and by the end of it, every single person at the company was singing the same song, and that is the way to do it. You need to get people on the same page, you need programs, and you need to make sure you're doing it in a methodical way. Once you have your internal team excited, they become brand evangelists. Everyone goes to barbecues, everyone has networks, everyone posts on LinkedIn, and so getting people on the same page about this message can help. It can really have a multiplying effect for your brand. Once you get that, it's time to think about the outside world. Talking to customers is really important. Nobody likes change, so we need to talk to customers and tell them what's in it for them. Hey, we have this new brand, but look at all the great things that are ahead for you because of that. Same with partners and vendors, we want to communicate the benefits for each individual group and make sure that's clear, and then for there just thinking about the greater market to prospects when we're going to market and we're rolling out a brand and announcing it, usually what we'll do is put together a launch campaign, and what will that look like? Social media posts, sometimes there's a media PR component, there could be video blogs, and we're really bringing together a multi-touch strategy to ensure that we're reaching as many people as possible across different mediums, and we're also thinking through what is the messaging and how can we communicate this in a way that's going to get people excited and show them the benefit of it, so that campaign creates a moment in time where people are excited and you need to capitalize on that. So, what we usually do as a part two to that is a campaign, and during that campaign we capitalize on the excitement of the launch, and we go to market with a thought leadership campaign, a report or something that really showcases that expertise of this new brand, and there's a whole strategy behind that as well, but the idea is you kind of have multi touch across a couple of different campaigns,

Morgan McLintic: 23:00

yeah, I like the idea of having a very detailed rollout plan, so that all your sort of stakeholders have their own elements to it, but also externally for rest of world. Okay, this is a moment where people are paying attention to you, have something else for them to then engage with your thought leadership piece, or your demand change piece, or whatever the other engagement is, because this is one of the few moments when you've got attention. What are you going to do with it? Because otherwise we're going to read the CMOS blog of here's why we've got the new logo and why we've learned. And okay, but then I just bounce out and I go and do something else. You want me to then go, okay? And here's an example of our new brand and some of the thinking that we've got and where we're going, so that we give them a real taste for it. So, beyond the sort of financial engineering and maybe technical integration behind an M and A, there's also this concept of cross selling. Right, we have a proposition, and I can now sell it into our new customer base, and their customer base can buy our existing proposition. Cross selling, as you mentioned, right at the beginning, is really important, because I think a lot of the numbers are predicated around all right, we think x percent of our customer base is going to buy, let's factor that in, that's upside for us all, but they do have to buy, it has to actually happen, and so you know. Okay, it's easy to write that down on a piece of paper on the model. Then marketing, okay, off you go. How do you think about cross selling? How do we make that happen?

Megan Adler: 24:36

Absolutely, so I think that first of all you need to take cross selling into consideration at the very beginning of the process, so when you're making decisions about brand and messaging, start there and make sure you're thinking about, is this a message we can take to market to help us scale our revenue from there. As you start to roll it out, that's another part of the rollout process, right, making sure that sales and. Marketing are trained on the new messaging on the new brand and creating those avenues for cross selling, so we're working with a customer right now that has a few different internal divisions, and they're not cross selling with those divisions, so we're helping them put a program into place where they have umbrella messaging, like we talked about, that connects everything together, and then messaging that allows them to cross sell across each of the four divisions, and having a plan in place for cross selling, and to enable it is key. Otherwise, it's not going to happen out of the blue. You have to train people, you have to have a process, you have to have the right messaging, and that's something we really help our customers think through.

Morgan McLintic: 25:46

Brilliant. I have worked with a company that got bought by Cisco, and Cisco has a massive order book. They have loads of things that they're selling for their sales team, and of course, their sales team can't know all the different things. So we literally were doing paid media campaigns and social media campaigns not aimed at prospects, but aimed at the Cisco sales team, so that they knew, "Hey, we're a company that, but Cisco had bought four other companies at that point, they would just pop in company, we had to literally market as if they were prospects to the sales team of the parent company to get attention, unbelievable, but really important, because then they just drag you along, and that you're the garlic bread to the pizza that they're selling, they're like, okay, just have some of this with a great, it'll work very well, but yeah, you've got to sales people are busy, and they are used to selling their own, they're very familiar with the with with all these products, these things I don't know about them. Also, I don't know how to price them. I don't know whether they're good. I don't want to jeopardize my main deal. There's risk, right? You have to incentivize them, but you also have to just get them familiar with the brand.

Megan Adler: 26:54

Enabling sellers is tough, right? They also don't like to read a lot because they're really busy. They're not spending a long time digging through 20 page documents that maybe you would see in other functions, and so it's important to get to them and communicate with them in a way that's clear, that's concise, that's short. We do a lot of in-person work with sellers, and we do a lot of training to make sure that everyone is aligned and doing things in the same way.

Morgan McLintic: 27:21

This is really important, and a very broad definition of brand, like a lot of this is change management or management consulting. Even, okay, we can't have a podcast without talking about AI, because it's the law. Tell me, I know that you guys use a lot of AI, but just tell me about the role of AI in this entire process.

Megan Adler: 27:41

Absolutely, we are definitely living in a world where AI is the law. I like the way you frame that, and honestly, we use it a lot in our work as well. So, with AI, if you put in a bunch of stuff that's low quality, you're going to get something on the other side that's low quality. So, our strategy, our messaging, our positioning, that's something we do with humans, we use our top strategists. We spend a lot of time thinking about it and getting it right, but we're using a lot of AI to do things like market research, competitive analysis, buyer persona profiles. A lot of that research stuff that used to take so much time is automated, it's fast. It allows us to move faster, and then once we have this really solid foundation with a great brand design system, brand messaging, and we put it, we use it as input for AI. That's where we can start creating marketing collateral a lot faster, or sales collateral, right? You can spin up one pagers using AI if you have the right input. You can take a piece and spin it into a lot of different formats, so maybe you have a one pager and we turn it into a LinkedIn post, and then we turn it into a blog post. AI is really great for that. It's basically enabling us to move faster, do more personalized at scale. That's really important, and then also we use it to help with geo, right, with generative AI search, and so you can use AI for things like just beefing up your content and finding ways to make sure that it's more visible in AI searches.

Morgan McLintic: 29:23

Yeah, I imagine, because when you're doing an acquisition, there's just a lot of information to absorb, and so that even just that research piece, just ingesting all the information about this brand and their ICPs and their customer, digging through all sales calls, all the information that is available to you that you might not normally have got to, at least you can now ingest and absorb and synthesize and turn it, make sure it's a good input. So I love that. Now we've gone through all this work with all these different brands, creating this umbrella brand, and maybe some sort of child brands underneath it, product brands underneath it. Nice visual identity, everything's reset to the core here, but one of the downsides of AI is now all of the employees can create their own assets, because, hey, I know it dissipates across, like this is true of all marketing right now, but How do you keep people having a cohesive brand and stop it just getting diluted by enthusiastic marketing material creators.

Megan Adler: 30:27

Absolutely, that's an age-old problem with people going and spinning up their own version of things, and that's something that I think all companies struggle with. And I think having clear brand guidelines, having templates that people can leverage the other thing that we're doing internally at Sublime is we have AI projects that are loaded, pre-loaded with our data and our information about the client, so we have our team use those, so we know that they're working from our data and that it has the background they need to do it successfully.

Morgan McLintic: 31:01

Oh, that's a good idea. So, you're creating the Claude project, if you like, for the client stakeholders to use, and say, okay, I know you're you can't resist the temptation to create this new one pager using AI, at least use ours, which has got all the prompts and has got the right information in there, and has got the guard rails, and I might not see the actual output, but I know that I've controlled. I think that's very smart. I love that. There's an idea for all the marketing teams to borrow. Okay, just as we wrap here, you've written a whole playbook about how to do these brand roll-ups. What's one thing that you've learned about brand integration the rest of us probably haven't noticed

Megan Adler: 31:42

how complex it is. I think a lot of times we go in and we're like, oh, look, there's a new logo, how cool is that, new brand, great, done, but so much work went into that. There's so much work on the change management side, the research side, the creation side, the rollout side, and just I've gained a new appreciation for that, and also how important it is. We have literally seen companies get a huge bump in their revenue, improve cross-selling, everything turns when they have a great message and a great brand, and we've seen other companies who floundered because, and they came to us because they didn't have the right foundation, and so it's critical, it's foundational for everything that you do,

Unknown: 32:30

and you'll want to make sure you get that right.

Morgan McLintic: 32:33

I love that, you know, Brian, it comes to M and A brand, it can feel soft, but when it's in M and A, it's deadly serious, and has a huge impact on the success of a deal or not. So, having a good framework for that, and a process, and putting the right effort behind it sounds vital. And just some of the examples you've given that have been really proven there. Okay, so Megan Adler is the CEO and founder of Sublime Design media, and Megan, thanks for sharing some of this. It's been great talking to you. If people want to get in touch with you, where should they go?

Megan Adler: 33:09

They can add me on LinkedIn, just look for Megan Adler, and I will be there.

Morgan McLintic: 33:14

Wonderful, Megan, thanks for your time today. Really enjoyed that, and we look forward to talking to you again soon.

Unknown: 33:22

Bye.