Radio loves tradition. It’s one of our superpowers. That — and naming stations after animals.
It’s also, at times, the thing that keeps us stuck defending structures that no longer match the reality of business.
As January comes to a close, most operators face the same familiar pressure: revenue softening, tighter budgets, fewer people wearing more hats, and they aren’t free hats from the promo closet. You haven’t had those since 2014.
That pressure usually leads to one of two outcomes: freeze spending and hope, or make cuts and pray. Both of which, by the way, sound like excellent album titles.
There’s a third option radio hasn’t fully embraced yet, despite the fact that nearly every other category already has.
It’s the fractionalized business model.
Fractional Is Already Everywhere
Outside of radio, fractional contributors are commonplace.
Creative agencies. Marketing strategists. Designers. Social media managers. Account executives. Legal counsel. CFOs. CTOs. CMOs. C3POs (just seeing if you’re really reading or skimming. Hey, Mark Adams!).
Entire companies now operate with elite, part-time specialists over slow-moving, full-time myopic traditionalists.
One of my long-standing Phil-Osophies from managing several thousand people is: It’s better to have an A-player for part of the week than a C-player all week long.
Radio still tends to frame staffing as binary: on or off staff. Inside the building or not invested. Me? I’m more nonbinary.
Rob Base Was Wrong
In many large and major markets today, it’s not unusual to see stations operating with two people covering enormous operational ground. It takes more than two.
PDs are now doing what I call the 7 Transmitter Challenge. Sounds like a TikTok trend, but we’ll get to that.
- Monitor what’s on air
- Monitor what’s on the app
- Monitor what’s on the stream
- What’s on Instagram
- What’s on TikTok
- What’s on Facebook
- What’s on the website
And this is if your PD is only programming one station. Yes, there are still a few people who have that luxury. Wild, I know. I don’t mean the station is named Wild (hey, Dan Hunt!).
It’s almost impossible to deliver 24 hours of on-air and online content with 50% fewer resources. Maybe it’s time we move to a 12-hour content clock. More on that in a future article.
Enter the Three Wise Kens
Yes, the PD is ultimately responsible for the product. That doesn’t mean the PD has to do every task personally.
Once your station architecture is built—your strategy, your sound, your rules—music scheduling becomes a data entry job. Important, yes, but still a data entry job. Making sure Sabrina Carpenter doesn’t play back-to-back and sound-coding Harry Styles’ “Aperture” is not the highest and best use of a PD’s time. Also, how would you sound-code that song? Do you have a lo-fi Berlin disco category?
That’s where fractional expertise comes in.
Kenny J, widely regarded as Country’s most trusted ear, can be accessed fractionally. Not as a full-time line item, but as a specialist who brings pattern recognition from multiple markets and deep format fluency without the overhead. Plus, he might be related to Juicy J or was that Jessie J, I don’t remember.
Kent Phillips, through Timeless Cool, provides scheduling and music strategy support. Some readers may ask, “Shouldn’t the PD be doing the log?” To me, that sounds like traditional PD thinking (pretty dumb).
Your PD should be coaching talent, shaping brand, building culture, finding the local content that matters, building trust with their staff, creating memorable audio moments that aren’t music, watching those seven transmitters listed above, and helping sellers drive revenue.
Then there’s Ken Jennings. He seems to know a lot — maybe worth an interview (zoom).
Three Kens. Three specialists. No payroll tax.
“But Won’t Fractional People Care Less?”
Let’s address the objections head-on.
“They won’t care like the staff does.” Caring isn’t measured by hours clocked; it’s measured by outcomes. Fractional experts build their reputations on results not through hitting reply all to your SuperBowl squares email.
“You can’t outsource culture.” Correct. Fractional doesn’t develop culture—you do. Fractional team members support what you drive.
“This is just consulting with a new name.” No. Consulting is an aircheck, a market visit, and a Mediabase report. Fractional partnerships are ongoing, operational, and embedded in real day-to-day work.
“Our market is too unique.” Every market believes this. The truth is that pattern recognition across multiple markets reveals blind spots insiders can’t see.
“We tried consultants before and it didn’t work.” Then you hired advisors,not executors. Fractional works because it stays in the system long enough to adjust, learn, and deliver.
“Coordination in the station outweighs it.” Only if leadership isn’t clear. Fractional thrives under strong internal direction and collapses under none.That’s not a full time staff or fractional problem. That’s a management one.
Big-Company Horsepower Without Big-Company Headcount
Jimmy Steal—whose experience spans New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and more is available to coach talent, develop marketing plans, and ideate promotions that smaller or mid-size stations could never have afforded in the past.
Paired with former iHeart and Entercom winning programmer Tim Richards at Collective Heads, they deliver some of the most effective audience analyses available—turning data into actionable decisions, not TL;DR reports with a JPG of your logo.
Larger broadcast corporations have in-house analytics teams and in-house marketing teams to act on that analysis. Fractional partners like Timmy and Jimmy put that same firepower into the hands of operators who previously had neither.
Plus, Tim and Jim rhyme—and it’s okay to use people not named Ken.
The 24/7 Advantage
There’s another advantage radio hasn’t leveraged: time zones.
Fractional team members don’t sit in the same building or at times even the same country. With qualified specialists across multiple regions, stations can effectively become 24/7 content machines again. While one market sleeps, another is building, editing, scheduling, analyzing, or planning.
Content can’t stop, won’t stop. Man… Diddy really ruined that phrase for me.
Nothing Lasts Forever
Fractional is part-time. It’s not payroll. No benefits burden. No contracts.
If your quarter turns around and you want to go back to “the way we’ve always done things,” you can. That phrase can be read as good and bad and that’s kind of the point.
Fractionalism is about replacing people. It’s about giving the people you do have the resources they don’t. It frees them to focus on what’s happening inside the building and what’s coming through a screen or a speaker, while others help handle the work that if we’re being honest was probably being overlooked.
The Phil-Osophy
Cost control keeps you alive.
Excellence gets you growing again.
And for stations willing to rethink structure, this might be the smartest move of the year. Or at least the smartest move of the year so far.
It is only January
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Phil Becker is a weekly music columnist for Barrett Media who has built his career at the intersection of creativity, strategy, and operations leading brands, marketing, and content teams across more than 200 radio stations worldwide.
Known for being ahead of the curve, he was the first to integrate social influencers into broadcast brands, launch station apps years before his peers, and pioneer AI air personalities before anyone else in the world.
With leadership roles at Clear Channel, Citadel, Cox Media Group, Alpha Media, and international ventures—as well as owning and operating stations—Phil blends entrepreneurial vision with operational discipline in the messaging and marketing space. He also hosts the Phil-Osophy podcast.
