Some of the most consequential business relationships never start with a pitch or an ad, but with a conversation. Here’s why face-to-face is outperforming the digital-only playbook – and how the founders growing fastest are building their strategy around it.

By Jo Caruana, CEO & Founder, Finesse Group | StoryBrand Certified Guide

Some of the best business I’ve ever done started in the middle seat of an aeroplane.

I’ve struck up conversations with strangers on flights more times than I can count – and on two separate occasions those conversations have turned into significant pieces of work for Finesse. No pitch, no plan, no scroll-stopping LinkedIn post. Just two people who happened to be wedged next to each other for a few hours and decided to talk.

I know many who would dread this idea. But I’ve spent 20 years watching how business gets done and the pattern is remarkably consistent – real opportunities tend to emerge from conversations no algorithm could have engineered.

The story we’re being told is that the future of business is digital, automated and faceless. I believe it’s time we questioned this narrative.

Don’t misunderstand me – digital still matters. We use cold email, LinkedIn outreach and paid campaigns for our clients all the time, and these core aspects of modern business operations earn their keep. But they’re not the whole story. In fact, they’re not even the most important part of it.

By mid-2023, in-person events accounted for around 60% of all business events – up from roughly 30% in 2021. That kind of swing is structural, not temporary. From where I stand, in-person has only accelerated since. However, geopolitical pressures on travel may create headwinds, and we may yet find that 2024–25 turns out to have been a high-water mark for a while. As per John Donne’s famous poem, “no man is an island” – to which I’d add, neither is a business, especially in the shifting tides of today’s market.

By 2024, in-person had reclaimed around 60% of the business events landscape, with virtual at 35% and hybrid filling the remaining 5%.

But the moment a buyer is choosing a partner rather than a product – bringing someone into their business, trusting them with work that matters – expectations change. They want to meet that person. And no amount of polished content compensates for time spent in the same room.

In-person business events nearly doubled between 2021 and 2023. The shift has been structural – and shows little sign of reversing.

The trouble with a screen is that it flattens everything. Body language and tone become more difficult to read and the instinctive half-second judgements we all make about whether we want to work with someone are diminished online. You can absolutely build a good relationship through a screen – it just takes longer and feels trickier to navigate.

And it’s getting harder to trust what we see online at all. We know now that a significant proportion of the content we scroll past has been created entirely by AI – not curated or polished by a human, but generated from start to finish without one. This isn’t the same as using AI as a tool, and people can sense the lack of human input. The result is a growing suspicion towards digital content, which only makes genuine human connection all the more valuable by contrast.

I ran a series of interviews recently and was reminded again how differently people come across in person. The energy is stronger, the connection faster – you know within minutes whether you’re going to enjoy working together. Online, that same judgement might take weeks of meetings to arrive at.

When I look back at the strongest business relationships I’ve built, nearly all of them have a shared experience at their core. The StoryBrand network I joined in 2020. Years of theatre work in Malta. Difficult projects that revealed who could deliver and who couldn’t. These are the relationships I’d pick up the phone for tomorrow – and most of them came out of being in a room with someone, not on a video call.

In person, you know within minutes whether you’ll enjoy working with someone. Online, that same judgement can take weeks of meetings to establish.

I want to be careful here, because there’s a soft version of this argument that doesn’t really help anyone, where you ‘just get out there and hope for the best’. That isn’t what I’m advocating. The founders I see growing fastest right now treat relationships as a deliberate part of their strategy.

In practice, that looks like a few different things working together. They know who they want to be in front of; they invest time intentionally in the events and communities where those people gather; and they bring curiosity about what other people are working on, with no immediate expectation of return. Then, when the right moment surfaces in conversation, they’re ready to offer a solution to a problem the other person has just described.

It doesn’t always look like networking with name tags. Sometimes it’s as simple as inviting someone whose work you admire out for lunch and saying, candidly, that you’d love to hear more about what they’re doing. The simplest invitations often open the door to the most interesting collaborations.

Compare that with the founder running ads, posting consistently, building a funnel and waiting for the algorithm to deliver. That approach used to work. In 2020 and 2021, the platforms rewarded it – everyone was pushing towards 100% online, so the algorithms were adapting and the returns were strong. 

But in 2026, the world has changed. Amid climbing costs and saturated channels, a buyer who scrolls past a hundred ads a day stops noticing the hundred-and-first. The algorithms themselves don’t work the way they did. Everything is more driven by paid spend and the organic reach that once made digital feel like a level playing field has eroded.

The founders winning now have understood something simple – that the conversion rate of a one-to-one lunch beats the conversion rate of any funnel ever built. They still use the digital side, but to multiply, not replace.

It’s no coincidence that we’re also seeing a surge in demand for PR – partly because it’s proving to be one of the most effective routes into AI-powered search results, and partly because brands are realising they need to be discoverable in the places where people are looking now. But alongside that, more companies are asking for help to plan their calendars around visibility – how to show up in front of the right people and how to train their teams to have better conversations when they get there.

The conversion rate of a one-to-one lunch beats any funnel. The founders growing fastest now treat relationships as a deliberate part of their strategy.

Look at the clients you currently have, the work you’re proudest of and the doors that have opened for your business in the last few years. Most founders I talk with recognise that many of their own milestones came from a relationship, not a campaign. This tells us something about how businesses actually grow.

The harder question is the more useful one: 

If relationships are doing the real work, what are you doing – intentionally, week in and week out – to build them? And which parts of your business might benefit most from an in-person approach versus a digital one? 

That distinction matters because the answer probably isn’t the same for every part of what you do.

There’s a related thread I want to explore next month about why so many of the most credible business touchpoints right now are the ones you can physically hold in your hands. But for now, I’d love to hear from you. When you think about your own best business relationships, where did they start? And what would your business look like without them?

Thinking about how to build more of your business through real relationships rather than relentless campaigns? Finesse Group helps founders and leadership teams develop visibility calendars, PR strategies and the kind of presence that puts them in front of the right people, in the right rooms. Book a free 30-minute consultation with Jo to explore what this could look like for you.