E277: Most Marketing Teams Get Axed After a Sale - Here's How to Make Yours Unkillable - Watch Here

About the Guest:

Victoria Hajjar is the founder of Ugli Ventures and a marketing strategist with deep experience building brands from the inside out. With a background that spans A&E, real estate development in China, and leading marketing departments for high-growth companies, Victoria has learned to build marketing engines that are scalable, measurable, and ready for acquisition. Her superpower? Turning messy marketing into a growth asset—fast.

Summary:

In this episode of How2Exit, host Ron Skelton sits down with Victoria Hajjar, founder and CEO of Ugli Ventures, for an energetic, no-fluff conversation about what it really takes to build a marketing machine that adds value in an M&A context. Instead of chasing vanity metrics or relying on branding for branding’s sake, Hajjar breaks down the systems, scorecards, and human factors that make marketing a driver—not a passenger—of enterprise value.

Whether you're a seller prepping for exit or a buyer looking to avoid post-acquisition marketing disasters, this is required listening. Victoria doesn’t just theorize—she’s been on the acquisition side and knows firsthand what it looks like to inherit a marketing mess… or a marketing moat.

Key Takeaways:

1. Marketing departments often feel the most vulnerable in acquisitions because buyers usually already have their own team. But dismissing the seller's marketing team too quickly risks losing the local expertise and systems that are driving current revenue.

2. Buyers should pause before overhauling anything—Victoria recommends a 60-90 day observation window before making marketing changes post-acquisition.

3. Most sellers don’t have a documented, measurable marketing system, and this lack of structure reduces perceived business value.

4. Brand value isn’t just logos or followers—it’s trust, relationships, and conversion rates. You need to prove that your audience responds to your messaging with measurable action.

5. Having one “rainmaker” on the marketing team is risky. Buyers want marketing systems that are transferable and not tied to individual talent.

6. Scorecards, SOPs, and a full-funnel strategy (not just top-of-funnel lead gen) are what differentiate valuable marketing machines from chaotic ones.

7. AI can’t replace human accountability. You can use AI tools for implementation and analysis, but you still need a human to own the marketing outcomes and make judgment calls.

8. Hyper-personalization is the future of marketing. With AI, customers will expect messages tailored to their unique context. Businesses need to prepare for that now—or get left behind.

Article:

Why Most Marketing Departments Get Axed in M&A—and What to Do Instead

Let’s talk about what nobody wants to say out loud: in most acquisitions, the marketing department is first on the chopping block.

Victoria Hajjar knows why. As the founder of Ugli Ventures, she’s been inside enough marketing war rooms during post-acquisition chaos to spot the pattern: the acquiring company brings its own team, its own tools, and a playbook that often bulldozes the nuance that made the target company successful in the first place. The result? A “streamlined” marketing system that tanks revenue.

In her candid conversation with How2Exit host Ron Skelton, Victoria urges buyers to pause. “Don’t change anything for the first 60 to 90 days,” she says. Watch. Listen. Understand what’s really working. The rainmaker you just fired might have been single-handedly keeping the lights on.

And sellers—brace yourself—your marketing team probably isn’t acquisition-ready either. Victoria calls out what many founders don’t want to hear: “You might have great results, but if it’s all locked in one person’s head, you’ve got a problem.”

Her framework? Systematize everything. That means brand communication strategy, lead pipelines, conversion metrics, customer segmentation, and internal SOPs. In Victoria’s world, if your marketing machine doesn’t have a scorecard, it’s not a machine—it’s a gamble.

Ron pushes back on the fluffy side of branding, calling out the snake oil tactics sold to small businesses under the “brand awareness” banner. Victoria agrees—with caveats. “Branding isn’t just colors and logos,” she explains. “It’s your communication strategy. Are you saying the right thing to the right people at the right time?”

The conversation dives deep into marketing's role as part of customer service, the overlooked power of mid-funnel and post-sale nurturing, and why so many small businesses waste money chasing new leads while ignoring existing customers. Her mantra? “The biggest lever most companies ignore is their own customer base.”

Then there's the tech layer. Ron and Victoria both geek out on AI—how it can personalize messages, streamline execution, and even simulate boardroom-level marketing debate. But they’re also clear: without a human in the loop, your AI will eventually drift, hallucinate, or prioritize the wrong goals.

Victoria wraps with a reminder: “AI is amazing, but you still need someone to own the strategy. Someone accountable to results.”

This episode is a wake-up call for acquisition entrepreneurs who think marketing is secondary. Whether you’re prepping a business for sale or integrating your latest acquisition, marketing isn’t just a cost center—it’s a value multiplier. If, and only if, you treat it like one.

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