Jay Ginsberg, Creative Director, KZST/KJZY, Santa Rosa, California
After ten years in radio, you feel like you know the game pretty well. After 20 years, you feel like a “veteran” in the biz. When you start hitting 30 years, you know you’ve been doing something right. But the 40 year mark… now that’s pretty amazing. This month’s RAP Interview checks in for the first time with Jay Ginsberg, a true veteran about to enter his 40th year in a radio career that has yet to let up. Unlike some long-timers who have clocked a decade or two at a single station, Jay is the opposite, pushing nearly 20 stations in his illustrious career. Currently the Creative Director at Santa Rosa’s #1 rated station, he’s also deeply involved in the voiceover business and even had his own production company for a good many years. Join us for a fun trip through radioland as Jay tells us his story, gives us some insight into his longevity, and offers up some great advice for radio creatives, voiceover talents, and wannabe entrepreneurs. Be sure to check out this month’s RAP CD for some awesome audio from Jay!
JV: Tell us how you started in the business and give us some of the highlights in your career.
Jay: I majored in broadcasting in Los Angeles, way back in 1968 at LA City College; it had a great broadcasting department. By 1969, I was on the air at KUSC, doing two shows a week in college radio. Then in 1970, I threw an ad in Broadcasting Magazine and had two offers. I accepted a job in Herndon, Virginia, at a 1,000-watt daytimer, a country station. I went from college radio in Los Angeles doing rock and roll to a little country station, being on air, selling, and doing production for $125 a week. In fact, I remember being the janitor at the station too, for an extra $20 a week.
I actually worked at four stations in my first year. After doing country in Herndon, I had an offer in Fairfax, Virginia, and went over there to do Top 40. Then I went back to the country station because they offered me a $150 a week to be their News Director, which is something I knew nothing about. I did that for a while, and then that station went full-time religion. And the doors just started opening. A station in Glen Burnie, Maryland offered me a job, another country station, so I went over there. About two months later, the Program Director of WAYE in Baltimore, Ty Ford, offered me morning drive in Baltimore working in a rock format. So everything kind of quickly happened there in the first year. About a year later, I became Program Director of WAYE in Baltimore. That was just such a great time in radio — 1970, ’71, ’72 — with freeform rock radio. It was just so much fun.
After a couple more years there in Baltimore, I came back to the West Coast and fell into a job at KFWB in Los Angeles doing production. If my memory serves me right, it was around that time when I took a class in lip reading at Beverley Hills High School, and there was a woman in that class named Myrtis Butler. Turned out she was Daws Butler’s wife, and Daws Butler, of course, is the voice of Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound, and was a great and important voice in Hollywood at the time.
Anyway, she introduced me to Daws, and while I had been in radio for quite a few years by then, I became more interested in voice acting and voiceover, and so I began studying with Daws. He became a close friend of mine and my mentor for over ten years, and even though I stayed in radio, he continued to critique my demos and we worked privately at his studio.
My son was born in Los Angeles, and then we decided to move to the Napa Valley up in Northern California to live more rurally. We wanted to take our son up north instead of having him grow up in LA. So I got a job in Napa at the radio station there, where I stayed for three years. This is in the late ‘70s. Then I got my first opportunity to work in San Francisco at KYA. I joined their production staff. I was Production Director in Napa, and it was around this time that I decided to get off the air. Basically, after I met Daws Butler, I decided I was much more interested in commercial production and voice acting and writing than being on air. So, I became Production Director in Napa. Then I got this job at KYA in San Francisco, and that’s where my San Francisco career started in 1980.
Over the next 12 years or so, I worked at five stations in San Francisco, and as Production Director at KMEL, when it was The Kamel with its AOR format. Those years were really, to some degree, the high point of my career. I loved working at Kamel. It was just such a great creative group of people — real rock and roll people. I was part of that because I loved the music. We were very innovative there and had good leadership and good management. We were really like a family at Kamel. It was great.
I did that for three years, and then the Kamel changed formats. I was one of those lucky guys that just went from job to job — finish one job on Friday and start another job on Monday. And that actually happened. I went from Kamel to KYUU, which was NBC, where I was part-time on air. I was a disc jockey again in San Francisco. Then I went over to KRQR because somebody I had worked with at Kamel became the Program Director at KRQR, the rocker in San Francisco. I went there and was their Production Director and was promo voice for all the stations in San Francisco that I worked at.
I ended my San Francisco career at KFOG, and in the late ‘80s, I went back to Los Angeles because my father was ill, and I was doing some entrepreneurial things and actually teaching at a broadcasting school in LA for a while. But then KFOG called and said, “Would you like to come up and be our Production Director and promo voice?” So, I decided to move back to San Francisco, to the Bay Area. I went to KFOG and was there for about a couple of years. Then there was a big change – a shift in Program Directors and so on. I ended up leaving there and started my own business in Mill Valley, California, just across the Golden Gate Bridge. I did eight years in a partnership where we produced commercials. We had a lot of national clients, and I was also teaching voiceover workshops.
Through this whole period, starting in the ‘80s, I had begun teaching voiceover workshops part-time, which I still do today. Then in the year 2000, I was invited to Los Angeles to be Commercial Production Director for the new startup Comedy World Radio Network. I moved back to Los Angeles, and I worked at Comedy World until it closed its doors. Then the next door opened; I became Production Director at KMPC in Los Angeles and worked there until I met this woman who wanted to move out of LA. There were some personal issues going on and stuff, so we moved up to the Portland area where I helped out Infinity Radio for a little while, in almost like a freelance position. They called it Creative Director but I really never had a studio there or anything. I was just sort of helping out.
It was so cold up in Portland, even though I liked it up there. One day I was on the RAB website and saw this opening in Sonoma, California, which was very close to where I used to live. It was the Wine Country, and the ad sounded so good. I contacted them and the next day I was on a flight to the Bay Area. I was picked up by the stations that I work at currently as Creative Director, which is KZST in Santa Rosa, and there are two other stations, KJZY and a new country station they just picked up, K106.
So I’m Creative Director there where I just do full-time commercial production. At the other stations I’ve worked at, when it was just a single station, I would do commercials and imaging. Here, I’m just in commercial production, and I do a share of the voice work myself and spread the rest around. I do outside casting and a lot of directing and working with the local clients, and I’m really, really enjoying it.
JV: That’s an amazing run in a career that sounds like it’s not slowing down a bit.
Jay: My career has just been so much fun. I’ve had this great opportunity to move around a lot. I’ve really appreciated that and I’ve worked with some of the greatest people in the industry, really talented people.
At this point, I’m doing more teaching. I’m developing a website called VoiceOverSchool.com because I’m doing more and more teaching. I’m teaching national voiceover tele-classes for Susan Berkley at the Great Voice Company out of New York, and teaching private seminars as well. I just got back from teaching a three-day boot camp in West Palm Beach, Florida, and we’re doing another big boot camp in August in Sausalito, and I’m teaching a private workshop, here in Santa Rosa.
So I’m doing more and more teaching. I feel that at this point in my career, going into my 40th year next year, which is unbelievable, I just want to share what I have with whoever is interested; and I enjoy doing that very much. And I continue my freelance voice career, which is going pretty darn well.
So I have this full-time job that I enjoy very much, and I’m doing freelance on the side and some teaching, and that kind of fills up my whole career right now. At last count, it was either 17 or 18 radio stations in my career. I’ve had this wonderful opportunity to work with so many people and learn so much, and I continue to try to learn a little more each day about the craft that I love and to share it when I can. At this point in my career, I’m still enjoying it very much. But like I said, I’m moving a little more into the teaching side and the voice acting side. I probably have another five years in me, I guess, working in radio. I don’t know. I guess I’ll do it as long as it feels good. Where I am is a very stable environment. The Production Director that was there before I joined had been there 15 years, and I’m going into my third year here.
I really enjoy it — great people and good ownership, and it’s not part of a big corporate conglomerate, which is what really tired me. I was almost ready to be done with radio because the corporate climate and the non-creativity I saw was so blatantly happening. But this has really changed my mind. It’s a smaller market, but the man has built a beautiful facility and offered me everything that I ever wanted, in terms of studio and supplies and support people, and a budget to hire outside talent and etc., etc. It’s really a great opportunity, and I enjoy going in every day still.
I loved working at KNBC in LA. It was a sports format, and I’m not a major sports guy. It was a lot of fun working with this super fun group of people who are really into sports, I mean just crazy people, doing sports radio and doing a lot of imaging. I was doing voice work for the Sporting News Network that aired nationally, and that was also a fun time for me. I continue to watch the trades and see where some of my old buddies from San Francisco and LA are, where they ended up and what they’re doing these days. I love keeping up with them and hearing about their careers.
JV: You mentioned your own production company that you did back in the ‘90s for eight years. That’s a dream a lot of our readers have, to break away from radio and make it on their own. Tell us a little more about it. Why did that go away? Why did you get back into radio?
Jay: Well, I was in a partnership with Peter Holter. Our company was Two Guys in Radio. It was Peter Holter, who was an ad agency guy, and I was coming from radio with the creative and all that. When I decided to put out my shingle starting out, he was my first client. Suddenly, he was bringing me $30,000 worth of business a year as my first client. He and I got along splendidly, and we lived about a half mile away from each other. He said “Hey, why don’t we do something together?” So we started this company, Two Guys in Radio. He was the sales arm and the marketing arm of the company, and I was more on the creative side, doing the writing, producing, voicing, casting, directing, and all that. He was a voice talent, too. We worked together for almost ten years, and he went through some personal changes and ended up moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico; and I got this job offer from Comedy World. It all happened at the same time in 2000. It was a great salary offer and I ended up moving to Malibu. Peter and I just decided to go our separate ways. He and I remain friends and we’re still in touch. He ended up getting a great job that he loves. He’s in Albuquerque and I’m still a California boy.
JV: What did you take away from that eight-year experience that you would pass on to somebody that wants to break away from radio and start their own production company?
Jay: I love working for myself. However — and this tends to be true for most people who have gone into full-time freelance or owning their own companies — you have to do the marketing side. You have to be willing to spend the time developing your clientele and handling the business side. That’s been the side that I really never had much interest in. But Peter, my partner, loved doing that. He loved going to client meetings and working on the marketing materials, while I loved being in the studio and working with people and writing. So, because we had that chemistry right from the beginning, it worked out really well. We had a lot of national clients. Peter was very good at talking that game, while I was good in the studio.
For anybody who wants to do their own business, I wish them luck, and they may do extremely well; but there is that side of needing to get out and hustle up the clients all the time. We were very lucky to get some big clients, and I had the pleasure of gaining that experience of working on these large accounts — Dole Foods, Kaiser Permanente, large national clients. But the getting of the clients wasn’t something I was interested in. So when I got the job offer at Comedy World with a really nice payday, I just thought “Yeah, let’s go – I’ll go do that for a while.”
My career has always been kind of jumping around. I’ve taken occasional time off from radio to do some inventing; I have some patents. I was touring manager for a deaf theater company for a couple of years when I took a break from radio. I had a deaf girlfriend that I lived with for three years, and she was an actress. I actually helped them on the road, and that was a great experience for me. But I always ended up going back to radio.
That reminds me of a story, from back in 1972. There was this general manager of WAYE; his name was Harvey Tate. I was quitting that job because there was something going on politically at our station that I wasn’t happy with; it was probably about the music or something silly. I said, “You know, I have to stand up for how I feel; I can’t deal with this.” He said to me, “Jay, you’ll never get out of radio.” And to this day, I can’t get out of radio. I love radio. I always go back to it.
I’ve been so fortunate to be able to make my living in radio and have the creative experiences and the opportunities I’ve had. Every day I’m thankful. In fact, this afternoon I have a friend coming over to spend the night, he and his wife. I worked with him back at Kamel in 1982-83. He works at KGO now. We’re still old friends. I still have quite a few friends who have stayed in radio, and we stay in contact. We share our stories, and we’re still all enjoying it and grateful to be able to do the work we do, the work we love.
When I get tired of it, then I’ll stop. But each day is an opportunity to grow creatively. I enjoy the daily interaction at the radio station. That’s one of the other reasons why I like working in radio. I like going in every day. I like seeing the people. When I work at home and I’m working alone a lot, there’s that human experience that I miss.
JV: You’ve been doing the voiceover thing for quite a while. What have you picked up along the way about the voiceover business that would be helpful to someone trying to break into it?
Jay: Voiceover is a different industry from radio, and voice acting, as opposed to announcing, is a different element of what we do. It really takes commitment to make a living in voiceover. One needs to not only study voice and acting and work on technique and style and the development of all that goes with that, but also again there’s a lot of marketing, a lot of time spent reaching out to clients, showing up, doing a great job, and maintaining communication with your clients and so on.
The way to make a living in voiceover is to work hard. Some people, some of my students, will land nice accounts that can pay thousands of dollars for a 30 or 60-second spot, but then you go back to your $200 or $300 commercials, if you’re doing nonunion work, and it can pay even less. So you have to be ready to work hard and find something that you do that’s somehow different, that sets you apart because there are thousands of people now involved in voiceover. When I started in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, there were probably hundreds across the country making a living doing voiceover. Now there are thousands, and so many people from radio are making that jump, whether for creative reasons, because they need to get out of the radio station environment, or they just want to make more money and have more fun working on their own.
So, I wish everybody good luck doing that, but it’s a road where you’ve got to spend your time marketing and you’ve got to keep your chops up, in terms of your voice work. I had a great experience last week. I’ve done it a couple of years in a row now. I work with a fellow named Marcus Lovett, and he’s the voice of David Letterman – he does all the David Letterman promos and does all the promos for the ABC Morning Show. He travels around the country. Wherever he is, he just grabs an ISDN line and plays his tracks to New York. I love working with him because he’s just so darn good at what he does, and he gets paid really well for doing it. His ability to take the words on the page, read them really well, generally on a first or second take, to the tenth of a second to fit a video, is amazing. His level of ability is inspiring, but it also shows how hard he’s worked. He was on Broadway playing the lead in Phantom of the Opera. Now he’s the promo voice for ABC and has been for all these years. He’s an opera singer. He has this great tone. Besides doing the promo work, he’s also a musician. He’s very active creatively in lots of areas, and I think that’s what it takes.
When you’re doing full-time VO, it swings with the mood of the industry. You’ll be hot for a year or two, and then it really quiets down. That’s happened to me. For example, I love doing announcer work. I actually have a website dedicated to Racer Stevens. People call him my alter ego. It’s this kind of deep, over the top voice that’s sort of loosely based on Don Pardo. I used to love doing that kind of stuff. Well, there’s less and less of that sort of stuff going on now in VO. A lot of voiceover is this natural, conversational style, as opposed to the announcer or booming voice. There’s more narration work now than commercial work. Then you have to choose: are you doing union work, are you doing nonunion work? Where do you stand?
So anyway, there’s a lot of opportunity in both radio and voiceover, but for those people trying to make the shift, be ready to build slowly. Have some money in the bank when you get started, unless you already have clients – sometimes people will take clients from a radio station and make them their own. But you do have to work hard when you own your own business. You’ve got to take care of all the billing. You have to reach out to new clients. You’ve got client meetings. You’re doing voice casting. It’s a lot of work.
One of the things I love about radio is that you’re working with the same group; you know what their expectations are, and you try to meet that, of course. But every day you go in, you do your job, and you leave it there. You come home and do home life, and then go back to the job. When I was working my own business, I tended to take it with me. I’d even work weekends sometimes — just always working and thinking about it. Now I don’t do that. I leave the work behind at the station, and then I come home and I do my life. Then I go back and I do it again the next day.
I teach all my classes on top of that, and I do my own voiceover work. Every morning I get up around 6:30 or 7:00 and I start doing auditions for my agents in my own home studio. I have agents in San Francisco and all over the country. Then I go to the station. I’ll keep my e-mail open at the station and I’ll occasionally cut an audition at work, but not very often. Usually I do my audition work at home. They let me do a little freelance there at the station, which is really nice. They even gave me an office just for my freelance work, downstairs in the building — just a very unusual situation for me, and they made it really right. They support my freelance there, and that’s made a big difference.
I’m actually mentoring some of the people at the station now. I think they appreciate that, that there are a couple or three people there that are really interested in radio and have something to offer. I’m able to offer up my 40 years of experience. Some of them have only been in radio two or three years, so I’m there to help them, and that’s something I enjoy.
JV: Are these workshops that you do something that our readers can get access to?
Jay: Yes. The next big workshop that I’m teaching in person will be in Sausalito in August, and for more information they can go to GreatVoice.com. That’s through the auspices of Susan Berkley at Great Voice. And I also teach tele-seminars over the telephone. I teach how to self-direct and how to find the colors of your voice. Those are two different seminars I teach over the phone through Great Voice. And then I have my private students and do my own private workshops on top of that.
In development right now is a website called VoiceoverSchool.com, and in the next six months to a year, that will come online. VoiceoverSchool will be a way for radio people or voiceover people in general to work with me over the phone. I’ll be able to record the lesson and then post the lesson on an FTP so they can go back and listen to it. We’ll work on commercials and promos. I hope to reach out to Production Directors in smaller markets who want to add to their repertoire of voices, to have more control over what they do, a sense of their own style and other styles that they can do, so they can be more useful at their stations, and also be able to take some of my ideas — in terms of direction, which could have to do with opening up a vowel sound or hitting emphasis in a certain way or working on tonal qualities and gravel and all that stuff – and work with people around the country via the telephone.
I’m finding that that really works. I have private students all around the country who I work with when I get home from work. I get home at 5:30, and then at 6:00 I’ll do a half hour lesson over the phone with somebody who’s in Connecticut. This happens fairly frequently now, and that’s why VoiceoverSchool.com will be coming online. I’ll have a way for people to schedule half-hour workouts with me over the phone. But the in-person ones are a lot of fun, and the big ones are with Susan Berkley. I’m co-teaching with Susan Berkley in Sausalito. Rodney Saulsberry, who’s a very prominent voice actor in Los Angeles, is also coming out too to help co-teach that. He’ll be teaching one night, then I’ll teach two days with Susan. That’s in the middle of August, I think.
JV: You mentioned thousands in the voiceover business now versus hundreds back when you were starting off. From your perspective, what has that done? How has that affected you? Have you had to cut rates? Have you been able to keep your head above that?
Jay: I try to do exclusively union work, and that comes from my agents. But with Voice123 and these other casting houses, it really gives beginners particularly, an opportunity to get scripts in front of them and get opportunities. Early on when I started, my agent would say, “Hey, come on up and audition.” So I’d go drive into San Francisco and park the car and go up and read it a couple times and maybe have an opportunity to get the gig. Now you have your home studios and people are knocking out two, three auditions a day. I probably do two to three auditions a day, or at least have that many opportunities. I don’t always do them; it depends on my time.
There are X amount of opportunities and there’s X amount of people, so you just do the math. It used to be hundreds of people, now it’s thousands of people. So your odds of getting the work are not as good. But if you’ve got the chops, if you’re really seasoned and you’re very good, you have equal opportunity to all that work. But because there are so many people, your odds aren’t as good, and there’s a lot of nonunion work out there.
I don’t participate in this, but I see voice jobs going out at $25 and $50. In fact, we got a solicitation from a fellow that was offering voice work to our radio station for $10 a commercial. The general manager showed it to me and gave me the demo. It’s a little upsetting to me, and I think it hurts the industry when people start lowering prices. I listened to the demo and the work was okay, not great.
But stations will take advantage of that. Ten dollars? You can’t beat it, especially in a teeny market. However, it really brings the industry down. I think these low rates that people are accepting — $25, $50 — really hurts us and we need to keep our rates up. We need to make it worthwhile for the people who are doing so much training, spending thousands of dollars for training, and working really hard at getting good.
Still, there are plenty of good, high-paying jobs, I’m happy to say, starting at $200, $300, $400 and up. A lot of the auditions that are coming through these days that I’m seeing are paying in the $600 to $1,000 range, and that’s where you want to be. Most of that is either heavy-duty regional or national. If it’s a union spot, you can make thousands of dollars. And there are people out there making a really good high six-figure income doing just voiceover. You read about them, year hear about them, but it’s a handful as opposed to the norm for us voice actors, us freelancers. If you book one gig a week, you’re doing very well if you’re freelancing; and if you’re doing more than that, then you can start thinking, “Yeah, I think I may have what it takes to make a living doing voiceover.”
And then there’s the whole industry of doing promo voice work and imaging voice work for radio and TV stations, which is something that I love doing. I still love doing promos and doing hard-sell. I love exploring my tone – you know, doing a hard-sell sexy thing, just really down and dirty, and then you can do a light thing for an AC format. That’s the fun of being a voice actor. I guess I’m old enough to have learned to do these different styles and different tonal qualities, different attitudes that you can bring to a read to be able to do multi-formats, to be able to do a rock format and then also do a talk format or a sports format — that can be fun.
But to do that full-time, again, you’re going to have to do your marketing. You’re going to have to have the chops to compete with the John Driscolls. People like Bobby Ocean are still out there competing for work. And then you have all these new voices that have come on with these softer conversational styles that are very young sounding, very youthful. These people are getting the work now.
But there’s plenty of work out there for everybody; you just have to find your niche. For the people just getting into it, figure out what your thing is. What do you do? What are you going to bring to a read that’s going to make it stand out on the air? Do you have some direction? Do you know what to do when you look at a script, how to size it up? I know on the RAP website and in RAP magazine that you talk a lot about this, about copywriting. It starts with the words; but then you, as the voice actor, what are you going to do with the words on the page to fulfill the writer’s and the producer’s dream of what this is going to sound like? When they conceived of this idea, they had something in their head that they wanted it to sound like. Can you bring that to them? Or can you bring them something so good and different that they’ll have to go “Wow, there’s something we hadn’t thought about, and we even prefer that over our vision.” That happens too, and that’s always a great moment.
But you’re going to do a lot of auditions and not get the gig, and what’s important is to just move on, just get into the next audition. Don’t look back. Don’t worry about it, and don’t think you’re bad because you don’t get the gig because it’s so subjective; and then there’s the politics of getting work and the enormous amount of people out there. On Voice123, occasionally there’ll be over 100 people auditioning for one 30-second piece — they actually tell you how many people have auditioned. If I saw that 50 people had already sent in their demos… I’m thinking, me, as a producer, how many people am I going to listen to, to hear the read? If it’s not in the first ten, maybe I don’t know what I need.
JV: Tell us about your home studio.
Jay: I use Pro Tools here at the home studio. My favorite mic is a Sennheiser 416 shotgun, and I’ve been using that for about eight years. In fact, we use it at the radio station too, and we also have a U82 Neumann there. Here at the house studio, I also have an AKG 414 and a Rode NT2, the Australian mic, for some purposes. I kind of use the mic that fits the piece based on what I want to sound like, but I do prefer the 416.
In terms of processing, I don’t use a lot. I do have a DBX 166 stereo compressor/limiter that I use that I like; it’s very smooth. I’ve got a DBX preamp, the 386 preamp. From the compressor, I go into a graphic equalizer where I do maybe a little bit of fine-tuning on the mics. Then I run all that through a BBE Sonic Maximizer. It’s an older model called the 422A. I’ve had it about 15 years, but it really kind of tightens up the high end and you can add a low contouring if you want. I pretty much use it in the default position. It just adds a quality to the high end that I like. And I don’t always have everything on. Sometimes I’ll just run through them in bypass mode.
For libraries, I’ve got Megatrax and Killer Tracks at my disposal, and I’ve got thousands of sound effects. I do a share of voiceover demo production in the home studio these days, but I kind of avoid it because they tend to get very time consuming. I’m doing less of it. I’m doing more of laying voice tracks with people, giving them heavy direction in terms of laying voice tracks for the demos, and then sending it out. I have some producer friends in LA and San Francisco who will lay in the music and sound effects.
JV: What advice would you give to someone who’s been in radio 5 or 10 years and would like to enjoy a radio career as lengthy as yours?
Jay: Say yes. Just say yes. Don’t fight it. Just enjoy your work. It’s what you do every day for eight hours. The people around you and the experiences you’re having, that’s your life. Do your best. Use your work experience as a life experience, getting along with people, helping other people to improve in their craft, lifting the whole game for everybody.
And yeah, I’ve worked with every kind of salesperson, hundreds of them by now in major markets and smaller markets too, and there are always conflicts. But basically it’s just trying to get along with people. For me, that’s been what I enjoy. I love the personal interaction. In radio, we have so many personalities — I mean big personalities, oversize personalities and egos. I’ve worked with huge ones, and we’ve had our conflicts. I’ve worked with major radio stars in LA, I mean heavy hitters, and I’ve put them in their place. I just say, “Don’t pull that.” When the people fly off on their ego trips, I just get down to let’s do the work and let’s do a good job and do the best we can.
So I would just say to people with ten years working towards a long-term career, just try to enjoy each day as much as you can when you’re at work and just give as much as you can. And don’t worry about the money because the money always comes; if you do a good job and really work hard, the doors open for you. We all go through formats changing and losing jobs or leaving for whatever reasons; but if you treat people well at radio stations, you will have a good rep and you will find other doors will open. Door after door after door will open for you if you just do the work, do the best job you can, and keep a positive attitude when you’re there. Don’t gossip on the job. Don’t get involved with other people’s lives. Just go into work and do a good job each day.
I’ve talked to people, even just recently, about personality conflicts. My counsel is don’t get engaged with it. Just come in each day and do the best job you can. If you have problems with certain people, yeah, you want to communicate about it and work that out, but in general, just do your best to get along with people and work hard because after working hard each day, you go home feeling like you’ve done something, like you’ve gained something. Go in, get along with people, and work hard. That’s my credo.