3 Things You Need To Launch a Successful Business

25 years ago today, I oversaw the launch of Thanet Local Radio. I’d been brought in as Managing Director three months before the launch to do three things:

• Finish getting the station built.
• Complete the recruitment of the team.
• Get some revenue on the books.

Launching a radio station is unlike launching any other business. For a start, you have two groups you need to satisfy – the listeners and the advertisers (not to mention the shareholders).

I’ve always been a great believer in giving people what they need or want. It’s a simple concept that means you are always going to be marketing-led, rather than sales-led (trying to sell someone something you want to sell).

We needed to get the programming right, and we needed to get the businesses in the area convinced the station was going to be a success. Then, we needed to get the message out there to each audience.

TLR had broadcast across the area previously through Restricted Service Licences – 28 day licences granted by the then Radio Authority to radio stations broadcasting within the UK to serve a local community or a special event.

I was very fortunate that my Programme Controller already had a shortlist of people he wanted on the presentation team, as well as having one or two broadcast journalists he felt he could bring on board to head up the newsroom. He also knew exactly what he wanted from the studio build, and so we were able to work on a plan to get everything ready for ‘test transmissions’ that would start just before Christmas 1987.

I then needed to work out how we were going to get businesses in the area to buy into running campaigns on a new station. The first thing I did was to approach a couple of salespeople I rated, who had worked in the local area. This was important, as they already had the relationships with the business decision makers and had therefore earned their trust and had rapport with them.

Our message was simple, we are going to win a lot of listeners and if you don’t advertise, we’ll have to approach your competitors, who will. It helped that we were prepared to offer a guarantee in relation to the number of listeners we thought we were going to get and the amount of time they might listen to TLR 107.2.

Advertisers understood our vision, which was to create the number one station in Thanet for listeners and businesses.

As a sales team, we encouraged every advertiser, especially those buying our annual ‘Founders’ packages, or committing to sponsorship deals, to invest in quality commercial production. This would not only compliment the way the radio station sounded, but it would also make their message more memorable.

So, I then had to look at my listener marketing budget to see how far I could make it stretch. Working with my Programme Controller, we knew we wanted to maximise the impact we could get through three key areas – leaflets, delivered via Royal Mail door to door, outdoor advertising via 48-sheet posters, and another form of outdoor, buses.

We were able to buy very well, dealing with local reps for each form of advertising. So much so, that we had enough budget left to advertise on the backs of car park tickets at key car parks close to the main shopping areas in the region.

We went on air on the 17th of January 1998. We had more than ￡15,000 committed in commercial production revenue alone – no mean feat for a ‘small scale’ licence.

It was clear from day 1 that we had a good audience, something that please the board as we had given guarantees to our advertisers. Our launch competition for one lucky listener to win an all-inclusive trip to Florida generated hundreds of entries from our door-to-door campaign in the first few weeks, followed by a?‘sticker spotter’ competition that surpassed our wildest expectations.

Based on these successes, I persuaded the board to enter the station into RAJAR, the joint industry body for measuring audiences, at our first opportunity. When the results came out in the autumn of 1998, we had almost doubled our projections with almost 1 in 5 adults in the area tuning in every week and for an average of 18 hours each.

How did we do it?

I had the right team around me, we knew why we existed, and we generated the revenue to ensure we had a healthy business moving forward,???