Radio One: Cathy Hughes

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And then every Monday, you'll get the new episode right to your smartphone. Thanks. You have to be so very careful about who you discuss your hard times with, because those who love you and care for you the most like your mother, like your best friend, they'll give you the worst damn advice in the world. You need to get a job. You shouldn't be sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag. From NPR, it's how I built this. A show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Ross, and on today's show, why Kathy Hughes refuses to take no for an answer, and how that helped her build one of the biggest African-American-owned businesses in the country. So you might have never heard of Kathy Hughes, but the company she started, Radio One, it's the largest African-American-owned broadcaster in the U.S. And it now has more than 50 radio stations and media outlets all across the U.S. Now Kathy didn't exactly stumble into this line of work. She grew up in the 1950s in Omaha, Nebraska, and even when she was little, she couldn't stop talking about what it was that she wanted to do. I wanted to be the first African-American to have a syndicated radio show. I've had that desire since I was 8, 9, 10 years old, but this is what you want to do from an early age. From childhood, it's so interesting. When I go back to the high school that I graduated from, that every single solitary weeks in a note home to my mother, saying she talks too much. I'm like I'm practicing for my future career. I grew up in a household where there were six of us, one bathroom. And I did my radio show every morning in the mirror with a toothbrush, and no matter how many blows my brothers and sisters would, you know, heap up on my head when I finally opened the bathroom door so they could get ready for school. I never came out of that bathroom every morning until I finished my radio show. Everyone thought at that time there was something wrong with me. I mean, there are no black people in radio, particularly no black women. Because again, remember, we're isolated in the middle of the United States. In the 1950s. In the 1950s, exactly. And so they thought I had a pipe dream. My nuns at my school described it as "delusions of grandeur." Told my mother that she perhaps should seek counseling for me, because I had this vision of being on the radio and people hearing me from coast to coast. Yeah. Okay, so you have this dream, and a lot of people think you're crazy, but you still want to pursue it. But then as a teenager, I guess you're 16, you get pregnant. First sexual experience. I'm in the doctor's office. He tells me I'm pregnant. I said, "I couldn't be. I only have sex one time." He said, "I hate to surprise you, Kathy." But it only takes one time. God arranged it that way. Were you shocked when you found out? Arrested development. No question about it. I went into a state of shock, but I realized that I had a mission. I had an obligation to someone greater than myself. And I was determined that he wouldn't be a black statistic. I was determined that he and I would not grow up in the public housing that I had grown up in. I was determined that he was going to have an opportunity, which meant that I had to be very serious of purpose. Why was still a young teenager, a child myself? But it's still pretty hard to, you know, to try to support yourself and your child. Yes, but I'm third generation entrepreneur. So I grew up having to work in a family business. A hundred and ten years ago, my grandfather started a school after being the first black to get his EDD comparable to a PhD. And then my father was the first African-American to graduate from Creighton University with a degree in accounting. He opened up a tax service. And I was in charge of the Prentice Hall Ledgers. which were all the tax regulations that changed every week. I was typing at 10 years old. I was taking shorthand by the time I was 12 and having to be proficient at it because I was a staff person. My family kept imposing them on me to come to work, okay? So even though, you know, pregnant is 16. A mother at 17 sounds like how did you do it financially? Well, I was already working. And I was very blessed. And I say this to young mothers is easy to be a teenage mama when the baby's still in infancy because all they do is eat, go to the bathroom and sleep. That's all they do and cry a little in between. And so I could take him to class with me. So you actually, when you enrolled, do you enrolled at university? Yeah, and I took him along to university of Nebraska at Omaha. And you would take him to classes? Yeah, he'd be right in a carriage on the floor. And but it became a problem once he got up and start walking. And did you work at like the college radio station? Yes, I volunteered at that radio station. It provided a voice for us in Omaha in a city that was severely segregated. Yeah, I read that that why you were there, you met someone who at the university who basically changed the course of your life. Yes, Tony Brown, an African-American host of Tony Brown's Journal comes to town. Yeah. And to me, you're wasting your talents in Omaha, Nebraska. You need to be where you can really have an opportunity to do what you want to do, which you knew was radio. 10 years later, he was offered the opportunity to establish the Howard University School of Communications. He became the first dean. And he asked me if I was interested in coming to Washington, DC. So you move halfway across the country with your, I guess, four or five-year-olds on at that point. And you just like you find an apartment and you start working in the city that you did not know. And got lost. I can't tell you how many times I would go out New York Avenue and get lost or I'd go out a street that its name changed. I did a bit of Virginia some more and he's trying to get to our-- What in Washington feel like to you? I mean, you come from Omaha, Nebraska, which was-- I want to tell you about a letter I wrote my mother. Yeah. And in it, I told her that my eyes actually were tired at the end of the day, staring at the greatness of black people. I had never seen so many wonderful people of color doing so many wonderful things. I actually put in a letter to my mother that my eyes were tired at the end of the day of just staring. I was still am to be very honest with you. I mean, there's no city like Washington, DC, in the whole wide world. You would come to the city in the '70s from a predominantly white city to a city that was-- Thank you. --run by black people in charge. In charge? Yeah. And wait, during my whole duration in the nation's capital isn't really gotten better. I've gone from watching a black mayor get elected to watching a black president get elected. OK, so you get to Howard and DC. And you're working at the radio station there, right? That is the sales manager at the station. And what was the station like? What kind of play music at that time? What was it doing? It played jazz. One night, they did an 18-minute long piece of Pharaoh Saunders. And I think he held the note the entire time, OK? All right, 18-minute jazz song. All you heard was this one. And I was like, I can't sell this. So your job was to find advertisers to advertise on the house-- --but also to help define how the radio station should be structured. And at the station at the time, just a mess. Oh my god. It was a total mess. So it sounds like it was a kind of place that because it was a mess, a young person, like you-- An opportunity in your 20s could take it over. Absolutely. And the fact that the then dean was a big fan of my work, Epic. He said, you need to see, can you teach these kids how to work like you folks from Nebraska work? I always believe that rising at 4am and then getting dress and leaving by 515, 530 for the office, that was just my lifestyle. And staying late, I had been reared to believe-- which again, so critical for entrepreneurs-- that you don't stop based on what the clock says. You stop based on the accomplishment of the task. You see your NDC with your son. By the way, how are you doing all this as a single mom? We know it's oftentimes people ask me if I had anything to do over what it would be to have more children. It was easy with him. Remember, I just started off taking him to college with me. So he had his first little tuxedo before he was out of great school because he was my date. I took him everywhere. I had a sleeping bag in my office. We'd have dinner together. We would do his homework. Then I put him in the sleeping bag until it was time for me to take him home. I didn't know anybody. I didn't have anyone to leave him with. So what were you able to do at the station at that time? I mean, you get there in early 70s, some mess. The first thing was to create structure. So I realized that the first thing they needed was an understanding of the entrepreneurial opportunity given them. So how are you able to grow it? The quiet storm. Tell me about the quiet storm. Well, it was simply recognition of the fact that the city had a sizable population of single unattached human beings who still wanted to feel good about a Friday night or a Saturday night. All they were missing was the entertainment. So I structured a format called the quiet storm. This is your quiet storm. That basically was a five-hour presentation of entertaining you at home by yourself. And keeping you company with the selection of music. Before hip-hop, if you were going to be successful in the world of black music, you had to tell a story with your music. And so all I did was weave those stories together. What were you playing? Oh, Sam Cook. If you ever changed your mind. Commonly cray-- the balleteers, basically. How did that show take off? How did it become popular? Well, I hit the right target demo. And I guess we should mention that the audience was predominantly African-American. Interestingly enough, my first audience was gay, predominantly gay. I put the first openly gay air personality on the air at Howard and almost lost the top of my head because of it. So the gay community absolutely loved the quiet storm. And then the black community migrated to it. So people just start tuning in? Oh, yes. Absolutely. It was strictly word of mouth. And it went from number 36 in the ratings to top five. And when I left, we were number three. So you have this incredibly successful career at WHUR. And you decide, you know, I think I can do this on my own. Like what? Not a story. Not at all. There was a group of investors called the Washington Broadcasters and 32 board members and investors. They included some of the most distinguished black and white Washingtonians that had tried for well over a decade to get a signal that was dark back on the air. They had gone through millions of dollars, and they could not get this signal on the air. Would they want to revive a radio station? Yes, they wanted this dark signal. They had, OK, but they had spent all-- they had spent their money in all the wrong places. They approached me and offered me double what Howard University was paying me. But more importantly, they offered me the opportunity to build a station from the ground up. So these owners, they bought this station and they hired you to run it? Yes. They hired me to get it on the air. Then they hired me to run it. Then they ran out of money. So they told me to shop a package for financing. And I said to them that that's not the responsibility of a general manager, that I will do that if you give me an equity position in your company. And one of the members said to me, if you think that you're smart enough to own a radio station, you should do it for yourself. We're not giving you any equity in our station. He was me and facetious. But I took it verbatim seriously. I was like, oh my goodness. He was right. I should do it for myself. Guy, I'm not exaggerating. It was like a charge went through me. I said, oh my goodness. This person who's a multi-millionaire, who I've admired, who's now probably in their 70s, is saying to me, here I'm barely 30, that I'm smart enough to do this for them. And he's challenging me. If I think I should own part of their station, do it for myself. I said, thank you, Lord, I hear you, I hear you. I literally, literally put all my papers in my case and skipped, not walk, skipped down the hallway from the board meeting. And they're like, what just happened? Did she have a nurse break down or something? I knew what I was destined to do. Cathy Hughes, founder of Radio One. Coming up, the story of how she did end up buying her first radio station, the first of dozens, and how in those early days she lived. literally lived in that station. You're listening to how I built this from NPR. Does your team want a website that looks and feels handcrafted but is still fast to ship? Well, Framer is built exactly for that. With Framer, you design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting, and a CMS built-in. So the work is production ready from day one, and you can get it done with help from Framer's AI agents. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. AI agents and humans work together. The agents bring speed and scale, and people bring taste, judgment, and control. 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This football season, all in the same app. And now, prize picks is available nationwide. So, what are you waiting for? Lock in for kickoff, because everyone and everything is on prize picks. What you want? Download the prize picks app today and use code Wundery. That's code Wundery. To get $150 in lineups, if you win your first $5 lineup, prize picks, run your game. Let's be present in certain states, visit prizepicks.com for restrictions details. It's how I built this from NPR, I'm Guy Ross. So, it's the late 1970s, and Kathy Hughes has just walked away from her job managing a radio station to start her own. And she's looking for stations that are up for sale. And she happens to find one of a Black AM station in Washington, D.C. that had fallen on hard times. So, she decides to buy it. What were they asking for it? One million dollars. Wow. And this is like 1980. No, this is 1978. We didn't get it until 1988. So 1978 to buy the license for this station. You had to come up with a million dollars. How much money did you have in your bank account at the time? About 10,000 dollars. So, that's what you had more. Yeah, that's what I had. Was anyone else bidding for the station? There was everyone at that time, Senator Edward Brook had just left the United States Senate the first time since, you know, reconstruction days. He was a Black Senator from Massachusetts. That's right. He was a bitter, Muhammad Ali was bidding for it. Everybody wanted it. It was a nation's capital. Well, you were bidding for this station against a former senator and Muhammad Ali. Yes. So, how did you get it? I had an angel, Dewey Hughes, and I were married at that time, and he had worked at the station. So, when Dewey went to the owner and said, "My wife and I would like to buy the station," he said, "Where are the world are you going to get the money?" Yeah. So, where did you get the money? Like, did you go to banks and like, ask for loans? Yes. 32 of them. 32 banks. 32. 32 lending institutions. And all of them said no. We're not going to give you a million dollars. And you showed them like, exactly how you were going to make money. They asked me questions, like, did I plan to have any more children? Wow. They asked me if I didn't think that I was too young to be doing this, taking on that level of responsibility. They asked me questions that had nothing to do more often than not. How did you go to 32 banks, get rejected, and rejection after rejection? Remember I told you that my father was a CPA? I knew the law of averages. Yeah. I knew that if I kept asking, a yes had to come up. So, how did you get the yes? A female banker first week on the job, Lydia Cologne, chemical bank of New York, said that she thought that her first loan, her first week, would be to a Puerto Rican. And she probably guessed that it would be a male because she was Puerto Rican. She said, yes. And I just kept by now, my presentation should have been taught in colleges because it was flawless. I mean, after 32 times of perfecting it, okay, I mean, I was, I should have gotten an Academy Award. I was so good at it. I kept convincing her. And she said something to me that I teach all myself, people. She said, please don't sell past the clothes. And I never forgot that because that was another one of those slaps in the faces. I was like, wow, she's absolutely correct. She said, yes, I couldn't believe she had said, yes. When she said, yes, you kept selling her on. Yeah, I kept convincing her. Right. I kept trying to convince her. So you get the money and you buy this station. And, and where was it, by the way, DC? We're part of the city. 1680 Wisconsin Avenue. And you walk in that part of Georgetown in the highest rent district of the city. So that's why I moved into it. Wait, wait, sorry, sorry. I moved into the radio. You moved into the radio station. I lived in the radio station. You moved into live there. I lived there because I had to pay rent in Georgetown. And 1680 Wisconsin was then and still is a beautiful, valuable, diagonally set on the corner piece of property. Made a real convenient to go to work in the morning. I walked down the hall. Wait, so you moved in there with your son and husband? I know. I moved in there with my son. By then, my husband was like enough. I don't want to do this. So your marriage fell apart? Absolutely. The station broke us up. The debt was just overwhelming for him. He had never been an entrepreneur, never having been in business before even. So it was just me and the kid. How many years did you guys do in your son live there? Almost three. Wow. That must have been hard. No. Number one, again, remember the part of the story I told you that I was just an awe of Washington DC. I'm in Georgetown. I haven't been able to move back there yet. Okay. During my struggling days, I had a prime corner. You would see the president having dinner at one of the restaurants. But I mean, you must have been under a lot of financial pressure, right? So how did you deal with that? When you have overwhelming financial obligations, the first natural human impulse is to hide, to recoil, not return the call. Well, what I have been trained to do is play offense, not defense. So I would call my lenders. And I would say, I know I owe you $10,000 this month. All I have is $1,250. I'm sending it to you as a token of good faith that I will repay you every cent that I owe you. But right now, this is all I have. And most of them said that they had never, ever interacted with anyone who let them know upfront that they could not make repayment. I think that it's the reason I've never been foreclosed on. I've never had to file for bankruptcy. And thank God I have never had a paycheck bounce. I've never had a business check nor personal check bounce because I tried to stay ahead of the issue of not being able to pay the debt. But I mean, you had people like who were depending on you for salaries, right? I was running a 24 hour seven day a week broadcasting facility with 14 full and part time employees total. 14 of us. And you were one of the people who went on the only thing I don't know how to do is fire up the transmitter. You had to go on the air. I had to because you didn't have enough people you could pay. And what did you do? You just opened up the mics and started talking. Well, it started off because we did what they call a format search. And we found out that what was missing and what Washington D.C. was news talk from a black perspective. What that research did not tell us, as you well know here at NPR, it's the most expensive format that you can do. All right. Music is one person can play the music, read the news, do everything. It's a one person show in music. When you talk about news and our talk and information, research is critical because there's always someone in your listening audience who knows more than you, and just waiting there in the cut to catch you, okay, oh no, that's not correct, okay? You can't do it by yourself in this format. How are you able to run the station, administer the station, deal with the stress of all that debt and raise a kid and have a show? How many hours does show by the way? Four hours. Four hours show every day. Six to ten a.m. How are you able to do all of that? Because it was exciting. But that's, when you said the stress of the debt, it wasn't stress. I had no doubt that I was going to pay them. I used to brag. I used to brag to my lead investor syndicated communications. I used to say I will be the most profitable company in your portfolio one day and they were like, "Yeah, Kathy, okay, good, okay, great. Keep that dream alive, Kathy." I used to tell them, "You will make more money off me and my company than you've made off anyone." Now, this is when I'm also telling them, "I can't make my payment this month." If you think, "Oh, it's overwhelming, I've got all this debt, I can't sell anything, I'm working 18, 20 hours a day," then it's too hard. You can't do it. But when you know that the day is going to arrive, when you're going to have enough money to pay everyone, that's what you have to see in your mind's eye. That's what you have to believe. I saw that, I knew it, I could feel it and that's when I was in the sleeping bag, cooking on a hot plate and washing up in the public bathroom in the radio station at 1680 Wisconsin. I sold it, I knew it. I just knew I had to hold on and when you're starting off in business, you have to be so very careful about who you discuss your hard times with because those who love you and care for you the most like your mother, like your best friend, they'll give you the worst damn advice in the world. You need to get a job, you shouldn't be sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag, what type of environment is that for a child? Kathy was the station profitable pretty quickly, seven years. So what was it that made you guys profitable, how did you get to, just keep profitability? It's what Dr. Martin Luther King said, you just keep sweeping the floor every day to the best of your ability and one day the world is going to say nobody sweeps a floor better than her. So is that when you started to expand? Yes, I realized that I could not survive with just a little thousand watt AM that I had to grow, I either had to grow or I had to go in which meant buying more stations. Yes, because our specialty is we're turnaround, aren't we? So you're all taking over distress stations. You got it, we took distress properties and turned them around because we could afford them. How did you get the money to buy them? Again, if your lenders know that their money is good with you, they give you more. All right, lenders don't invest in ideas, everybody's got ideas, they invest in you. People loan money to the person, not to the business, not to the idea. They have to feel good about you. How many stations did you eventually buy? Think that we were up to, think 35. So what was the point where you said, let's go public. Let's make this into you of 35 stations. My son went to Wharton and got his MBA and walking across the campus of you pin. My son says to me, do you still believe that we have to grow or go? And I said, of course, I believe we got to grow, he said, then we have to go public because we've got to take a leap. And with the deregulation, 11% of all radio stations in the United States of America were owned by one company, it's kind of hard to compete with you over here with two or three. I mean, they would come into a market. They'd have five powerhouse radio stations with one format eliminated all the competition. So we knew that we had to grow into scale. We had to get much larger. So you had to go public? Yes, we had to go public. We had no choice. A lot of people told us that they didn't think that that would be a wise decision for us, try to discourage us. We had a couple of false starts, but it was the best thing they could have happened. And the other thing that we have done in our company is we stand our lane. We're not trying to open a restaurant, we're not trying to go into concert promotion. We stay in the telecommunications industry. So at the height of Radio 1, how many stations did you guys actually have? 75 stations, which was the height, when we bought a package of stations from Clear Channel. 75, that had never been done in urban broadcasting before. Were you able to retain a significant share of the ownership after you went public? Yes, not just own, but also the voting stock, which has again been a blessing. The same syndicated communications, 37 years ago, who sat down and showed me how to write my first business plan. They're still in business with me. Well, one of the things that you haven't really talked about is discrimination, because you must have faced a lot of it, not only as a woman, but as an African-American woman in this business. Yes, one of the issues that has always faced entrepreneurs of color is the lack of available capital for them to go into business or to maintain their business. I remember there was a bank in DC rigs, and I had a big contract, but the payment was coming in slow, and it was so interesting because a black banker of that bank said to me, "You had loaned her $15,000 to buy a car, but you won't loan her $10,000 to make her payroll." And yet she has the contract showing that the money will be coming in. So often, it's been easier for an entrepreneur to buy a new flashy car than it's been for them to meet payroll, which is a tragedy of us not having as many lending institutions in our community as we need and want. Here's the thing that I still try to write my head around, which is, you faced all of these challenges and you kept going. What was it that kept you going? A belief in God, because when you really believe in God, you can believe in yourself. As I said, that day I quit my job. Not knowing where the next piece of money was going to come from, where the next check was going to come from, I knew that I would be sitting here today talking to you. I believed it because I believed in the power of the Creator. And I used to never, ever give a speech or accept an award right in first, thank God. And I still do. But back then, when I first started, they said to me, "I didn't know I was interested in all that religion." I said, "That's not religion. That spirituality. There's a big difference in my book between being loyal and understanding. Yourself in relationship to creation." I have one last question for you. This energy, this glow, this joy, this passion, this intensity that you have and this unshakable belief that it will work out. Is it something that you have that is specific to you or do you think it's something people can actually learn? Oh, definitely an acquired skill. If you allow yourself to be bogged down and lose your enthusiasm, then you're dead in the water. But if you remain optimistic, cheerful and committed to your goal, there's nothing that can stop you. Kathy Hughes, the founder and chairman of the board of Radio One. His company now has more than 50 radio stations across the country. Kathy Sennalford, the little kid of a baby tuxedo who went on to Wharton, is now the CEO. Hey, thanks for listening to this show this week. If you want to find out more or listen to previous episodes, you can go to howibuildthis.npr.org. If you have a chance, please subscribe to our show through iTunes and let other people know about it. You can also write us directly at [email protected] or tweet us that's @HowiBuiltThis. Our show this week is co-produced by Rund Abdel Fata and Rhymteen Arablui, who also composed the music. Thanks also to Niva Grant, Sanna's Mexican poor and Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Ross and you've been listening to HowiBuiltThis from NPR. Hey everyone, it's Guy here. We have an app at NPR that we really like. It's really great and we'd love for you to try it. It's called NPR1. You can use it to listen to NPR news shows and podcasts and as you do it actually listens to you. But what you like best and then gives you more of that. So you can download NPR1 now, try it out. You can find it on your app store right now.