Tag Archives: Simon Sinek

January 14, 2024 · 3:00 am

Has Radio Lost Its WHY?

When commercial radio was born in the 1920s, radio’s WHY was thought to be a technology that could provide nationwide communications that would be a unifier for cultural and social systems. Radio’s regulatory guiding principle was to “operate in the public interest, convenience and/or necessity.”

When people were still trying to wrap their minds around what exactly radio would be, there was one common reoccurring theme about what radio broadcasting could do, and that was to unify a nation and create an American identity.

It could accomplish this in several areas:

  • Physical Unity: the ability to unite America from coast-to-coast, border to border, with instantaneous wireless communication.
  • Cultural Unity: through entertainment, news and the spoken word (English); radio could create a kind of national homogeneity.
  • Institutional Unity: corporations and the federal government would come together on a mandate that this new powerful form of communications needed centralized control.
  • Economic Unity: through advertising, radio could now offer national, regional and local opportunities for businesses to expose their products and services and grow our nation’s economy.

Radio vs. The Internet & Artificial Intelligence

Just about every business has found its original business model challenged by a population connected to the internet. Think about the original radio WHY areas and you can easily see how each of them has been overtaken, embellished – and depending on your point of view – improved upon by the world wide web and artificial intelligence.

The internet, it turns out, is a better innovation for addressing those original foundational tenets of radio’s purpose than radio itself. So now what?

Radio needs to re-think its “WHY;” its reason for existing. Then it needs to communicate it, clearly and simply or suffer the consequences.  Bud Walters of The Cromwell Group loves to say, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” Until the radio industry figures this out, getting new people to listen (or former listeners to return) will be a challenge.

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

-Simon Sinek

Two Questions

To help you get started on defining radio’s WHY for the 21st Century, I’d like to share two questions that GOODRATINGS Strategic Services consultant Tommy Kramer asked his clients:

  1. What do you have that I can’t get everywhere else?
  2. What do you have that I can’t get ANYWHERE else?

Tommy says that coming up with the answers to these two questions will decide your future.

I would add that working through these two questions might just uncover your new WHY for your radio station(s) in the 21st Century.

Why do you do, what you do?

4 Comments

Filed under Education, Mentor, Radio, Sales

Tagged as , , , ,

September 17, 2023 · 3:00 am

Is There A Future For Air Personalities?

This past week, Fred Jacobs shared the latest research about radio air personalities and how they view the future of this profession. Here’s what struck me about the presentation.

The Radio Talent Pool is Shrinking

Jacobs Media Strategies has been producing this research for Don Anthony’s Morning Show Boot Camp since 2018, and during COVID, no research was done in 2020. So, from the first survey in 2018 to the latest one in 2023, the number of participants shrank 62%; from 1,168 to 442 people.

COVID, with the resulting Work From Home (WFH) operating model,  has greatly impacted radio station cultures and has not returned to anything like pre-pandemic days.

Less People, More Hats to Wear

Not surprising, with fewer people working on the content side of radio, those that remain “wear more hats” than ever; 54% of radio personalities now say they are responsible for more than four different areas.

No Talent Farm

When I began my radio career, it was board operating Sunday morning church programs. That first radio job would give me the opportunity to land a nights/weekend part-time air shift. This was pretty much the norm for baby boomers in broadcasting. In fact, Jacobs research shows that 78% of us started in radio this way.

Today, those entry level radio positions are gone, with only 14% of today’s up and coming air talent having those same opportunities.

Talent Development

One of the concerns expressed by today’s air personalities is believing their radio station and/or their company is not working to discover or develop new air talent. Radio’s biggest companies are blamed most, with medium and small companies being exceptions.

Would You Recommend Radio as a Career?

When today’s air personalities were asked how they would respond to the statement:

“I would absolutely recommend [that] a high school student pursue radio as a career,”

  • More than half, 52%, said they would disagree or strongly disagree.
  • A quarter of the sample was neutral.

Possible reasons for this negative attitude might be:

  • Four in ten air personalities are in debt or struggling
  • Few air personalities expect to make more money this year
  • Three in ten air personalities are now involved in a second business
  • A majority of the air personalities feel they are taken for granted
  • 76% are personally concerned that Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) will lead to many more on-air radio jobs being lost
  • Four in ten of those air personalities currently “on the beach” say they won’t be back

Welcome to Consumer Choice

Gone are the days of the gate keepers of music; those people being the radio program directors, record store owners and record companies. Consumers are now in charge and define the characteristics of the media world we live in.

Any solution to the problems we confront must understand our audience’s needs, wants and desires, and put those first.

“People don’t by what you do, they buy why you do it.”

-Simon Sinek

21 Comments

Filed under Education, Mentor, Radio

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

January 30, 2022 · 3:00 am

What Purpose Does Radio Serve in 2022?

I often think about how much radio has changed since I began my career as a professional broadcaster in February 1968, 54 years ago. Local radio at that time told us who was born, who died, whether school was open or closed, what happened at the city council or school board meetings, what was going on in the world, our nation and our community. We depended on our hometown radio station for weather, sports and entertainment.

In 1968 local radio was the way we often learned about events first; it was “magical.”

Radio’s Prime Purpose

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia 6th ed. in 2012 defined radio’s purpose this way:

The prime purpose of radio is to convey information

from one place to another through the intervening media

(i.e., air, space, nonconducting materials)

without wires.

Isn’t that the same thing my iPhone does? It conveys information to me through the same intervening media without wires.

In fact, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued my broadcast license back in ’68, it was called it a “Radio Telephone Third Class Operator Permit (Restricted Radiotelephone Certificate).” This always made me wonder why it was called that, as I studied to earn this permit for the sole purpose of being able to operate a broadcast radio station, not work for a telephone company.

Radiotelephone

A radiotelephone, it turns out, is a phone that uses radio transmission. Wikipedia defines it this way:

A radiotelephone (or radiophone), abbreviated RT,[1] is a radio communication system for transmission of speech over radio. Radiotelephony means transmission of sound (audio) by radio, in contrast to radiotelegraphy, which is transmission of telegraph signals, or television, transmission of moving pictures and sound. The term may include radio broadcasting systems, which transmit audio one way to listeners, but usually refers to two-way radio systems for bidirectional person-to-person voice communication between separated users, such as CB radio or marine radio. In spite of the name, radiotelephony systems are not necessarily connected to or have anything to do with the telephone network, and in some radio services, including GMRS,[2] interconnection is prohibited.

Today’s smartphones are both radios and televisions – and a whole lot more.

First Source for Breaking News

In 2011, a rare earthquake shook our nation’s capital and then Hurricane Irene added to the area’s misery as she swept up the coast causing fatalities and billions of dollars of destruction. Both of these events disrupted lines of communication for millions of residents in the Washington, DC area.

Larry Thomas, a former Shift Commander for Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Services who lives in Annapolis, wrote in the Association of Public-Safety Communications newsletter, about the important role radio played in both of these natural disasters. Thomas wrote:

“Public safety authorities know that radio is the single most reliable outlet for information, which is why a battery-operated radio is so important and always part of any preparedness kit recommended by every organization from local agencies to FEMA and the Red Cross.”

Yet, stranded motorists on I-95 during a recent winter storm found their car radios providing none of the needed information they sought.

Those within range of a news station like WTOP, were kept informed, but sadly, those types of radio stations prove to be the exception rather than the rule.

Has Radio’s Purpose Been Appropriated?

When I think of all the things that made radio important in people’s lives, I can’t help but notice that these very attributes are now fulfilled by other sources, and often done better than broadcast radio. Here’s a partial list of what I’m talking about:

  • Weather: The Weather Channel, Accuweather etc.
  • News: NY Times, Washington Post, TV News Apps, other News Apps etc.
  • School Closings: Schools notify students, faculty & staff via text messages, websites etc.
  • Births/Deaths: social media etc.
  • City Council/School Board meetings: watch them online live
  • Road closures or other important information: text messages, websites, emails
  • Sports: the schools broadcast games online
  • Or to put it more simply, everything radio was famous for, today is easily accessible via the internet on a smartphone

I’m not saying these things to be hurtful to the radio industry, but to ask the fundamental question about its future.

What is Radio’s WHY?

Simon Sinek’s book “Start With Why” is a deep dive into why “some people and organizations are more innovative, more influential and more profitable than others.”

Sinek says what all the successful individuals and companies have in common is their starting point. They first clearly must define their WHY.

What I’m not reading in any of the radio trades, in any of the materials from the Radio Advertising Bureau or the National Association of Broadcasters is what is radio’s WHY in the 21st Century. Instead I’m reading about how radio is developing podcasts, streaming, centralizing their news operations around regional hubs, consolidating their radio dayparts around national hosts…and on…and on…and on.

As Sinek says:

“Any organization can explain what it does; some can explain how they do it; but very few can clearly articulate why. WHY is not money or profit – those are always results. WHY does your organization exist? WHY does it do the things it does? “

What does your radio station do, that provides your advertisers and listeners, with a unique experience that has them coming back day after day?

“How do you get there if you don’t know where you are going?”

-Lewis Carroll

The WHY for commercial radio to survive and thrive in a 21st Century world is not the same as when it was born over a hundred years ago, because both radio and the world were different then.

Without a clearly defined and articulated WHY, I fear that radio will continue to be tossed like a rowboat in the stormy sea of mediated communications.

37 Comments

Filed under Education, Mentor, Radio, Sales

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

September 19, 2021 · 3:00 am

What is Radio’s WHY Today?

One of my favorite authors is Simon Sinek. In his 2009 book “Start With Why” he wrote that “any organization can explain what it does; some can explain how they do it; but very few can clearly articulate why” they do what they do.

Sinek found that all inspiring leaders and companies “think, act and communicate exactly alike.”

“They can be found in both the public and private sectors. They all have a disproportionate amount if influence in their industries. They have the most loyal customers and the most loyal employees. They tend to be more profitable than others in their industry. They are more innovative, and most importantly, they are able to sustain all these things over the long term. Many of them change industries. Some of them even change the world.”

And they think, act and communicate completely opposite of everyone else.

Has Radio Lost Its Why?

When commercial radio was born in the 1920s, radio’s why was thought to be a technology that could provide nationwide communications that would be a unifier for cultural and social systems. Radio’s regulatory guiding principle was to “operate in the public interest, convenience and/or necessity.”

When people were still trying to wrap their minds around what exactly radio would be, there was one common reoccurring theme about what radio broadcasting could do, and that was to unify a nation and create an American identity.

It could accomplish this in several areas:

  • Physical Unity: the ability to unite America from coast-to-coast, border to border, with instantaneous wireless communication.
  • Cultural Unity: through entertainment, news and the spoken word (English); radio could create a kind of national homogeneity.
  • Institutional Unity: corporations and the federal government would come together on a mandate that this new powerful form of communications needed centralized control.
  • Economic Unity: through advertising, radio could now offer national, regional and local opportunities for businesses to expose their products and services and grow our nation’s economy.

Radio vs. The Internet

Just about every business has found its original business model challenged by a population connected to the internet. Think about the original radio why areas and you can easily see how each of them has been overtaken, embellished – and depending on your point of view – improved upon by the world wide web.

The internet, it turns out, is a better innovation for addressing those original foundational tenets of radio’s purpose than radio itself. So now what?

Radio first needs to know its “WHY.” Then it needs to communicate it, clearly and simply or suffer the consequences.  Bud Walters of The Cromwell Group loves to say, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” Until the radio industry figures this out, getting new people to listen (or former listeners to return) will be a challenge.

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

-Simon Sinek

Tommy Kramer’s Two Questions

To help you get started on defining radio’s WHY for the 21st Century, I’d like to share two questions that GOODRATINGS Strategic Services consultant Tommy Kramer recently asked his readers:

  1. What do you have that I can’t get everywhere else?
  2. What do you have that I can’t get ANYWHERE else?

Tommy says that coming up with the answers to these two questions will decide your future.

I would add that working through these two questions might just uncover your new WHY for the radio industry in the 21st Century.

Simon Sinek says “When you compete against everyone else, no one wants to help you, but when you compete against yourself, everyone wants to help you.” When you develop your WHY you do what you do, it will give you the strength to keep going and a desire to keep improving with each passing day.

My Question for YOU

What do you think radio’s WHY should be in today’s world?

Please post your thoughts in the comments section on today’s blog. If we can get enough people to think about our industry’s WHY, the what and how of doing it will naturally fall into place.

If you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.

-Henry Ford

15 Comments

Filed under Education, Mentor, Radio

Tagged as , , , , ,

September 30, 2018 · 3:00 am

What’s Radio’s Why?

WHYSimon Sinek says people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. Watching the live streams of the 2018 Radio Show sessions and reading all of the reporting on the meetings in Orlando this past week, left me asking the simple question: “What’s radio’s why?”

College Kids on Radio

The RAIN Conference in Orlando put four college kids from the University of Central Florida on stage and asked them about their radio listening habits.

Spoiler Alert: They don’t have any radio listening habits.

These four students said things like “radio is obsolete,” “there’s no need for radio,” and “it’s very rare that I listen to radio.”

To these kids, radio doesn’t have any “why.”

What does?

YouTube, Apple Music, Spotify…in other words things that stream what they want, when they want it.

Write The Wrongs About Radio

George Johns and Bob Christy are getting together to write a blog aimed at fixing radio, by writing about the things they hear radio is doing wrong.

“(Radio) has to evolve to be relevant in today’s world,” they write. “There has been almost no evolution in radio (and) what George and (Bob) want to do is challenge radio to evolve and become relevant again.”

They write the  3 basics of great radio are: 1) be professional, 2) be interesting and 3) be entertaining.

The 25-54 Demo

Fred Jacobs wrote about the fabled radio demo of 25-54, also known as, the “family reunion demo.” It never really existed, except as a way for an agency buyer to get the C.P.P. (Cost Per Point) down for a radio station they really wanted to place their client on.

You would have thought as the number of radio signals increased, that the variety of programming choices would have too, but the reverse happened. Radio offered less choice of programming and music formats. As Fred writes, “broadcast radio surrendered its Soft AC, Smooth Jazz and Oldies stations to SiriusXM and streaming pure-plays.”

Millennials are not kids. I know, both of my sons are part of the millennial generation. They are both well-entrenched in successful careers and raising families.

The college kids referenced earlier are part of Generation Z. And those kids don’t know (or care) what radio even is. They don’t even know what life was like before smartphones. And smartphones have really replaced just about every other device Millennials and Boomers grew up with.

Norway Turns OFF Analog Radio

Norway is a country of about 5.5 million people. Norway turned off their FM signals almost a year ago and went all digital using DAB+. So what’s happened to radio listening in Norway?

Jon Branaes writes, “Norwegians still choose radio when they think it’s worth choosing. Radio has not lost our biggest fans but the more casual listeners.”

Norway has also seen FM listening replaced by internet delivered radio, which grew significantly after turning off analog FM signals. They expect smart speakers to contribute to even more of that type of listening in the future.

The Takeaways

Radio first needs to know its “WHY.” Then it needs to communicate it, clearly and simply or suffer the consequences.  Bud Walters of Cromwell loves to say, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” Until the radio industry figures this out, getting new people to listen (or former listeners to return) will be a challenge.

“FM is not the future. DAB+ (digital broadcasting) can keep radio relevant in a digital future of endless choices.” But Jon Branaes adds, “Radio must respond with its core strengths – being live and alive, useful and present in listener’s lives.”

21 Comments

Filed under Education, Mentor, Radio, Sales

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

July 30, 2017 · 3:00 am

NOT the Music of MY Life

112I read the transcript of the interview Mark Ramsey did with Gordon Borrell about how radio advertisers are less interested in audience and more interested in a buyer. It got me to thinking about my own radio sales experiences over my career.

Live by the Numbers, Die by the Numbers

Anyone who sells in a rated market has probably heard that phrase about what happens when all you sell are your ratings numbers. But what happens in unrated radio markets? How do these folks sell?

Cash Register Rings

Early in my radio career I landed my first general manager position at the age of thirty. It was as GM of an Al Ham formatted “Music of YOUR Life” thousand watt AM daytimer with no pre-sunrise or post-sunset authorizations.

In a market with no audience ratings measurement what we did was create a fan club for our listeners. We then created a fan club book of the names and locations our listeners lived. This book included state representatives, mayors, major business owners and even television & movie stars. It was a pretty impressive foot-in-the-door and helped us to close many sales.

But the way we measured the impact of our advertisers’ radio commercials were in cash register rings. That’s the real measure of R.O.I. (Return On Investment) for local owner/operators.

Does Anybody Really Listen to THAT Music?

I remember calling on the manager of our local Agway store as if it were yesterday. Rick Hurd was his name and he was about as old as I was at that time. He loved contemporary music and the big band selections my station played were definitely NOT his “cup of tea.”

“Does anybody really listen to THAT music?” he always asked. I said “YES, lots of people do and they are the very people who own the big country estates that you should be doing business with.”

After lots of weekly calls, Rick Hurd gave me my opportunity to show what my radio station could do.

Tell Our Advertisers You Heard About Them on “The Music of YOUR Life”

A key component of my marketing strategy was to air on a continuous basis how important it was for listeners of my radio station to tell our advertisers they were listening. We did this in a variety of ways and made sure to keep this type of messaging fresh.

Shortly after Rick began his Agway store advertising on my radio station, I stopped in to see how it was going. He said, “Dick, I still find it hard to believe that anyone enjoys the music you play over the radio, but WOW are those folks ever vocal and passionate about your radio station.” “I hear about your radio station at least once an hour from customers, some of whom I’ve never seen in the store before,” he told me.

How Many Listeners Do You Need to Be Effective?

I won’t ever know how many listeners we had to that radio station, but I do know how many were in our fan club.

The “secret sauce” of our marketing was making sure our audience understood how important it was for them to tell our advertisers they were listening and that they loved our programming and that in order to keep it on-the-air, they needed to patronize our advertisers and tell them what brought them into their place of business.

Bonneville Beautiful Music

Based on the sales success I had with an AM daytimer, my company’s President/CEO promoted me to general manager of his newly acquired Atlantic City radio stations. The AM station was a thousand-watt full-time news & information station and the FM was a 50,000-watt Bonneville Beautiful Music formatted radio station. Both stations appealed to a senior audience.

Atlantic City was a rated market and so Arbitron Ratings were important, especially for the advertising agencies out of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore etc.

But what we really sold was the quality of our audiences and we worked very hard to build personal relationships with all of the buyers.

As general manager, I often went on out-of-town trips with my director of sales to call on the people who bought the advertising. We constantly heard “we’ve never met anyone from any of the radio stations in Atlantic City before.”

Relationships are VERY important in the radio business.

And as Simon Sinek likes to say “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

Age Wave

Another factor I employed in talking about the quality of our audience and the tremendous buying power they wielded came from the research of Dr. Ken Dychtwald that he conducted during the period of 1973 to 1979.

In 1986 Dr. Dychtwald coined the term “Age Wave” and formed a company to consult companies on how to market to a mature market.

I devoured Ken’s book and used it to market my Atlantic City radio stations to advertisers.

Key Factors to Consider

The Age Wave http://agewave.com/ website lists four key factors that will reshape supply and demand as the boomers move into maturity. The two that radio should be considering how to leverage are:

  • Boomers will have increasing amounts of discretionary dollars (for many) over the long-term as a result of escalating earning power, inheritances, and investment returns
  • Boomers will undergo a psychological shift from acquiring more material possession and towards a desire to purchase enjoyable, satisfying, and memorable experiences

The future is filled with challenges and opportunities, but then that’s always been the case for those who could see them and were willing to roll up their sleeves.

16 Comments

Filed under Education, Mentor, Radio, Sales

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

March 12, 2017 · 3:00 am

The End of Mass Media

84Jack Nicholson famously said in the movie A Few Good Men “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!”

I think he was right.

We can’t.

We say we can. We want to believe we can. But the reality is the truth is scary.

The Future of Mass Media

The reality is the future of our business – mass media – is that it won’t be all that “mass” anymore.

The future will be a media that is built around relevance and quality of message, not volume.

And that’s scary.

Not to just us broadcasters but to the ratings service known as Nielsen. We aren’t going to need to know the volume (aka cume) or AQH (average quarter hour) numbers in the future. The real value that we will deliver will be based on how relevant we are to our listeners and what value we deliver.

The King is Dead

Remember when the catch phrase of the day was “Content is King”?  Bill Gates famously said that.

There were others that felt that distribution was king.

Turns out the “king” is dead for both of these theories and the new king is relationships. And relationships are based on mutual interests and relevancy.

Facebook

What’s the power of Facebook?  Relationships.

Oh sure it uses complex algorithms to manage our relationships, but we are not smitten with algorithms we are drawn to relationships and we friend or unfriend based on the relevance of those relationships too.

Google gets it too.

Each of us is an individual and these social media companies go to great lengths to treat us in just that way.

One Size Does Not Fit All

Commercial radio broadcasting still strives to deliver the “one size fits all” solution. Those days are over.

Radio needs to build, as Seth Godin might say, tribes. People who believe what we believe.

Simon Sinek says that people aren’t attracted to what you do but why you do it.

What’s your WHY?

If there are enough people in your coverage area that will make you a meaningful size tribe of listeners, then do it. If not, find something else that is meaningful.

But trying to be all things to all people – the concept of “mass media” – those days are over.

Advertising

The 800 pound elephant in the room is how to pay for it. Ad supported media is being challenged by the internet in ways that Netflix, Amazon, Google and others that grew up on a different metric are not.

Today supply far outweighs demand in the advertising world.

Even those special live television events that were growing in audience every year are now seeing they’ve peaked. Nothing goes up forever.

The future is creating something relevant to the people you develop a relationship with. The value will be in how strong those relationships are not necessarily how big, in terms of numbers of people, they are.

The future for all media I suspect will start to look more like that of public radio or Christian radio. Each of these mediums has established strong relationships with their listener. They also don’t abuse those relationships with underwriting announcements that either doesn’t fit their audience or by unbalancing the content to underwriting ratio.

Commercial broadcasters seem to take the view that adding one more spot to the hour; the cluster etc won’t affect their audience. They would be wrong. It does.

Keeping things in balance and running seamlessly will be critical to broadcasters whether they’re being consumed over-the-air on AM or FM, or over the internet.

Sales people in this new world will be business evangelists that seek out business owners with innovative ideas and solutions to their problems. Businesses owners who benefit from these relationships with media sales folks will in turn reward the media enterprise with their support.

What’s your WHY?

But it all starts by first defining, as Simon Sinek says, your WHY.

“People don’t buy what you do; they buy WHY you do it.”

Answer that question, and you will have taken the first step.

 

16 Comments

Filed under Education, Mentor, Radio, Sales

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , ,

March 5, 2017 · 4:00 am

Relevancy – Part Two

83Last week I wrote about “relevancy.”

For any business, but especially the radio industry, making sure every element that goes on-the-air is relevant for the listener your station targets is critical.

Unfortunately, the way things get on the air these days makes it nearly impossible for any program director overseeing multiple properties at the same time to be so diligent. Worse, the commercials often come to each hour from a variety of sources (network, syndication, barter, distressed insertion, ca$h, etc). Sometimes different entities sell the same customer and the very same ad might air more than once in a single break.

TV also has this problem, and as Bernie Sanders might say, it’s YUGE!

Make it about the listener

Simon Sinek tells the story of a homeless lady.

Like many homeless people she sits on a street corner looking for money and holds a sign.

Simon says that most signs all say basically the same things:

  • I’m homeless
  • I’m hungry
  • I’m a veteran
  • I’m a God-fearing person

What does each of these types of signs have in common?

They are all saying versions of me, me, me, me.

It’s not about you

Using the approach above in signage a homeless person might expect to earn up to $30 a day.

Could they do better than that with a different sign?

A marketing person wanted to test this theory and asked a homeless person if they could change the words on their sign. The person agreed to give it a go.

A day’s pay in just two hours

Using the new sign, the homeless person made $40 in just two hours.

In the same 8-hour day that brought in $30 total – if they were lucky – using this new sign they were on pace to earn $160 in that same 8-hours.

The words you use make all the difference

So by now I’m sure you’re dying to know what the new sign said that produced such amazing results.

It said this: “If you only give once a month, please think of me next time.”

Why was this sign so effective in increasing donations?

The change was in making the donation not about the receiver but about the giver.

Leaders Eat Last

In his book, “Leaders Eat Last” Simon Sinek explains why leaders make it all about their people and not about them.

Successful radio stations do the same thing.

If you are constantly telling people why your station is so wonderful, you’re like the homeless person I started off talking about. You’re talking about you.

But when you make your listeners feel wonderful, when you make it about them, it’s you that will reap the rewards.

Is this relevant to you?

19 Comments

Filed under Education, Mentor, Radio, Sales

Tagged as , , ,

February 21, 2016 · 5:00 am

Are We Killing the Golden Goose?

25Do you remember Aesop’s fable of the goose that laid the gold eggs? Let me refresh your memory of this tale. It’s about a farmer that was poor. One day he makes a startling discovery when he finds a golden egg in the nest of his pet goose. Skeptical at first, he has the egg tested and finds that it is indeed made of pure gold. Even more amazing, each day this farmer awakes to find that his goose has laid another golden egg. In very short order, this poor farmer becomes fabulously wealthy. But then his wealth brings greed and impatience. No longer satisfied with just one golden egg per day, the farmer cuts open his goose to harvest all of its golden eggs at once only to find the goose is empty inside. With a now dead goose, there will be no more golden eggs laid.

In remembering this fable, it sounded so familiar to the world of radio broadcasting. A radio station was like a wonderful “goose” that laid daily “golden eggs” for many an owner. It was an industry joke that having an FCC broadcast license was like having a license to print money. It was “golden.”

But broadcasters not wishing to wait for each day’s golden egg, cut open their goose with the Telcom Act of 1996. Twenty years ago, this act deregulated radio and now owners, like the farmer cutting open his goose to get all the eggs at once, now could own as many radio stations as they basically wished.

And how did that work out? Not much better than what the farmer discovered.

The moral of Aesop’s fable is if you focus only on the golden eggs and neglect the goose that lays them, you will soon be without the very asset that produces the golden eggs.

The radio industry’s quest for short-term returns, or results, took their free FCC licenses and ruined them by not maintaining the balance between the production of desired results and the production capacity of the asset.

Aesop’s fable is the very principle of effectiveness. It’s a natural law. Like gravity, you don’t have to believe in it or understand its principles, but you can never escape its effects.

Radio broadcasters probably saw the moral of the fable being the more geese you own, the more spots you add to the hour, the more effective your R.O.I. (Return On Investment) will be. But ironically, it was the principle of “Less Is More” that in the end rules the day.

To be truly effective, you need to maintain the balance of what is produced (golden eggs/revenue) and the producing asset (your goose/radio station).

Stephen Covey wrote extensively about all of this in his book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.”

“When people fail to respect the P/PC Balance in their use of physical assets in organizations, they decrease organizational effectiveness and often leave others with dying geese.”

-Stephen Covey

One could certainly make that case for two of America’s largest radio broadcasters today. They are reaping the results of those who’ve gone before them who’ve in essence liquidated the asset, before they took over and now the accounting system appears to show that they are not performing at the level of their predecessors. But is that really the case? Did they in reality inherit a very sick goose when they took over? The debt problem say many who are more schooled in this area of high finance than I, will probably be addressed with a re-set. And once that happens, it will come back to the people of radio.

Covey says to “always treat your employees exactly the way you want them to treat your best customers.” Herb Kelleher at Southwest Airlines built his company on this very Covey principle.

Covey puts it this way: “You can buy a person’s hand, but you can’t buy his heart. His heart is where his enthusiasm, his loyalty is. You can buy his back, but you can buy his brain. That’s where his creativity is, his ingenuity, his resourcefulness.”

The bottom line is the future of radio will be determined by the vision of the people leading the radio industry. It will also be determined by the hiring decisions they make going forward.

“If you hire people just because they can do a job,

they’ll work for your money.

But if you hire people who believe what you believe,

they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.”

-Simon Sinek

13 Comments

Filed under Education, Mentor, Radio, Sales, Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

November 29, 2015 · 6:36 am

Building Trust

trust-building-big-sizeA couple of weeks ago, I wrote about “Why I Fired My Top Salesperson.” And it all came down to a single reason, trust. I can’t think of one thing a successful leader needs to do more in a business than establish a culture of trust.

 

Leaders influence people. Trust is the foundation upon which the ability to influence others is built.

 

Simon Sinek puts it this way: “Being a good leader is like being a good parent. You catch glimmers of hope when you catch them doing something right, but you really don’t know if you’ve done a good job for like 30-years.”

 

Trust is comprised of two basic components: character and competence. Character means you make decisions that go beyond your own self-interests. Certainly, in firing my top salesperson, that wasn’t going to help my month or quarter. It wasn’t in my own self-interests for the present moment. But knowing that the long-term good of my radio stations was the value I was protecting, and maintaining the trust of the people who I worked with every day, made doing the right thing clear albeit difficult. Competence doesn’t mean having all the answers. Competence means having the experience and knowledge to make decisions that positively impact the performance of the enterprise and the courage to ask for help when you need it. (I always tell people I have an awesome contact file full of brilliant people to call when I need help.)

 

When your people trust your character and believe in your competence, they will follow you wherever you lead them.

 

Being a trusted leader is done with love.

 

I attended Weight Watcher meetings for the first time in my life this year. Like everyone else on the planet I wanted to drop a few pounds, but I also wanted to see if I could pick up any new information about nutrition and living a healthy lifestyle. What I learned was that change occurs by what you consistently do every day. That message was shared by others in the room that had lost lots of weight, all taking the same journey and it was shared with love. Simon Sinek also says when we are surrounded by people who believe what we believe and we feel loved, trust develops.

 

10,000 Hours

 

Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book “The Tipping Point” that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to get really good at something. You can’t rush trust building anymore than you can rush how long it takes to make a baby. Babies are born when they are good and ready. And you can’t build trust via email, Facebook, Twitter or any other form of modern day communication. You build trust when people come together through human contact. It’s why webinars lose one of the main benefits of seminars, that being people coming together and meeting one another. (Besides, I don’t know about you, but I’m always doing at least two other things when I’m on a webinar.)

 

Again, when we’re surrounded by people who believe what we believe trust develops.

 

Be Like Ed Koch

 

Ed Koch was a three-time mayor of New York City. Mayor Koch was famous for asking people everywhere he went “How Am I Doing?” He got in their faces and asked. Over and over and over; Mayor Koch asked “How Am I Doing?”

 

You build trust by being consistent.

 

The best teachers teach by sharing their mistakes and what they learned. People don’t connect with perfection. People connect with people who’ve been there, screwed it up, learned from it and shared the experience. Real courage is being able to share your mistakes with others and like who you are in the process of doing that.

 

When you reveal yourself in this way, you demonstrate what you believe and value.

 

In other words, you build trust.

2 Comments

Filed under Education, Mentor, Radio, Sales, Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , ,