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I spoke with someone I know well recently who is working on a startup. Throughout the conversation, as he was explaining his project, he kept getting more and more excited. His passion for what he is putting together is through the roof and it was great just to feed off his energy. There’s nothing quite like that new business feeling.
Lucky for him, he was telling me that so far, the conversations he has had about investments and bringing other really skilled people on board have all gone really well. I told him I had to think that was mostly because of his energy and enthusiasm when he talks about it. It becomes infectious.
For those that have ever done or been with a startup company, you know that feeling of hitting those little milestones along the way. Everything is exciting as you build it. For anyone who hasn’t been a part of that, just think of that feeling you had when you were younger, and you really started to get good on the air and realized it could be your career. Or for someone in sales, when you started closing enough business that you saw the light at the end of the tunnel and how profitable it looked. It’s that, over and over again.
One of the best business books I’ve ever read is the one in the featured image of this column, Think Big, Act Small by Jason Jennings. As the subtitle of the book suggests, the content is about “how America’s best performing companies keep the start-up spirit alive.”
When I read the book, Jennings and his team researched more than 100,000 American companies to find nine that had increased revenues and profits by at least 10% for ten consecutive years, but these weren’t companies that were plastered all over the news media or in business magazines for how successful they were. And these aren’t small companies, they’re big ones, like PETCO, O’Reilly Automotive, Sonic and Koch Enterprises to name a few. The book has since been updated and these companies have now hit 15 consecutive years of double-digit growth.
Ultimately, the commonality amongst the nine companies is that they all think big on things like creating value for their customers and making their products better. At the same time, the companies keep the start-up spirit alive by staying humble, treating employees like owners and having managers who dive in and get their hands dirty. They don’t have a lot of time to stop and pat themselves on the back, so they act small.
I think radio was, for a long time, a Think Big, Act Small operation, relatively speaking. The thought that used to go into station promotions and marketing and how to beat the competition by hiring the best people and letting them go do their thing. At the same time, everything was community driven. The radio station belonged to the city and the listeners.
But, then it didn’t.
Some companies tried to go off and create Think Big, Act Big radio and got away from the local, start-up feel. All of a sudden everything was bigger and supposedly better. Until it wasn’t.
To put it in sports terms, the Dallas Cowboys are the best example of Think Big, Act Big. Everything they do is big and the owner of the team, Jerry Jones, loves to scream and shout about how great everything is and will be. But what does it lead to? The team is constantly under a microscope and criticized more than most teams when they fail.
Why? Because they act big all the time and when you finish 9-7 or don’t advance in the playoffs, you look silly and get ripped all the time, deservedly so. You shove every little piece of success down everyone’s throats, so when the failures come, people are lining up to yell and scream about those, twice as loud as you. It’s sort of like what happens when big radio companies smile and tout their successes then turn around and lay off a bunch of good people right before the holidays.
I don’t need to go in to which media companies put up the Think Big, Act Big front, you already know who they are. One, in particular, loves to use the word ‘scale’. The same company spends so much time acting big, it’s like they don’t even realize the public or internal perception of the company. Scale kills a lot of companies.
That isn’t just limited to media by the way. How many other businesses have failed because they, too, got too big and decided to expand and keep trying to replicate the original success they had only to find out it’s a helluva lot easier said than done.
The bigger you get, the harder it becomes to keep that start-up feeling. When managers could focus on a couple of stations and really execute the game plan that was one thing, when it became hundreds of stations, the whole business started to fall apart. Now, so much negativity is thrown at the industry when a lot of it is geared towards the Think Big, Act Big companies. Now, there’s the thinking that radio is damaged, radio is old-school or insert whatever negative thing you hear. Most of it can trace back to the loss of that local, start-up feeling.
I urge anyone in a management role to read this book and heed its advice. We love success stories, and these companies show that you can be successful and grow and even hold a dominant position in your industry, without ever losing the spirit that made the company successful in the first place.
Dave Greene is the Chief Media Officer for Barrett Media. His background includes over 25 years in media and content creation. A former sports talk host and play-by-play broadcaster, Dave transitioned to station and sales management, co-founded and created a monthly sports publication and led an ownership group as the operating partner. He has managed stations and sales teams for Townsquare Media, Cumulus Media and Audacy. Upon leaving broadcast media he co-founded Podcast Heat, a sports and entertainment podcasting network specializing in pro wrestling nostalgia. To interact, find him on Twitter @mr_podcasting. You can also reach him by email at Dave@BarrettMedia.com.
