A few months ago I worked with a company in Minnesota that had built its entire business around a physical book. For years, that book was the way people in their region found resources for elderly care. Then the internet caught up. People started Googling. The state put resources on its own website. And the book, which had been the company's main offering for decades, was selling less every year.
They came to us with what looked like a digital transformation project. What it actually was, once we got into it, was a question about relationships. Could they move into a digital format without losing the part of the business that the internet could not replicate?
That question keeps coming up for me, because it applies to a lot of organizations right now. Maybe yours too.
The Product Was the Book, but the Value Was Somewhere Else
The book itself was a directory. Addresses, phone numbers, services, the basics. If that had been all of it, the internet would have replaced them years ago.
What kept the business alive was everything that did not show up on the page. Decades of relationships with local providers. A list of resources nobody else knew about, because the people running them did not have a marketing budget or a strong online presence. Trust between the staff at this company and the people they served, built one phone call at a time.
That second layer is what the internet could not replicate. It is also the part that is hardest to bring into a digital format.
The Question We Kept Coming Back To
Through every conversation with the team, the same theme kept surfacing. They were comfortable with technology. The thing that worried them was losing the part of the work that mattered most to them.
They told us, over and over, that relationships are the foundation of how they operate. They call people. They go to coffee with their partners. They show up in person. When someone needs help finding care for an aging parent, the company does not hand them a list and walk away. Someone walks them through it.
So the real question was about how to go digital while keeping all of that intact.
What We Learned About Translating Relationships
I do not have a clean step-by-step framework here, because every company's relationships look different. But a few things stood out from this project that I think apply more broadly.
Before you change the format, write down what the format was actually doing. The book was more than a directory. It was also the reason for the staff to talk to providers every year when it was time to update entries. The annual update was a relationship maintenance ritual disguised as a publishing schedule. If you move to digital and lose the ritual, you lose the relationship that came with it.
Look for the parts of the relationship that are already digital, even if you have not named them that way. Phone calls leave voicemails. Coffee meetings get scheduled over email. There is more digital infrastructure under your relationships than you might think, and that is the place to start, not the final product.
Budget constraints can also be useful. This company had very limited resources, because their parent organization absorbed most of what they brought in. That sounds like a problem, and in some ways it was. But it also forced clarity. They could not afford to digitize everything, so they had to choose what mattered most. The constraint did the prioritization for them.
What I Want You to Walk Away With
If you are sitting on a physical product that worked for years and is starting to feel outdated, this is what I would say.
Going digital does not have to mean losing the part of your business that made people trust you in the first place. The quality of the product and the quality of the relationship with your clients can both survive the transition. That only works if you treat the relationship as part of what you are moving over, rather than as something that happens around the edges.
It is possible. I have watched it happen. Trust that it is.
