September is our birthday month. Union Street Media – which started in a Middlebury College dorm room in 1999 – turns 27 this year!
What I keep coming back to at this point is not the technology. It is the people. We have always said we believe in independence and in real and genuine relationships, and 27 years on, that is still the best explanation I have for why we are here.
The part that never changed
The ground has moved under this industry many times. We were the first company in Vermont to build IDX websites and then the first in New England to show listings on a Google map. Search became the front door. The portals arrived. Mobile rewrote the rules. Now buyers are asking AI assistants to do the looking for them.
We were able to turn with every one of those, and independence is the reason. There has never been an acquirer’s integration plan to work around or an investor’s exit window to optimize for, so when our clients needed us to change, we could simply change.
The other reason is that we rarely have to guess what they need, because we have known them long enough to ask. 64% of clients have been with us for more than 4 years, nearly 10% have been with us over 15 years, and our average relationship is over 7 years. Our longest relationship still running started way back in 2002 and is still going strong.
I look at that second row more than any other number in this business. A third of the firms we work with have been with us for a decade or more, through most of the changes above. That is what real and genuine relationships look like when you put them on a spreadsheet.
What comes next
The same instincts, pointed at a new problem. We are making our clients’ sites legible to AI assistants without writing for machines, building infrastructure that serves the crawlers worth serving, and measuring how our clients show up in AI answers while that channel is still young.
And we intend to still be an independent company at 35.
Thank you
Twenty-seven years is a long time to be trusted with someone else’s business. Thank you to the clients who have given us that trust, many of you for well over a decade, and to our team across every department and several countries, who do the quiet work that makes the visible work possible.
Here’s to the next 27!
