Well, this is still fun

David Lloyd and I set off on an adventure last July, to build a radio station for us - Baby Boomers - as our gut feel suggested there was a gap in the market for such a thing. We are each 40 year radio veterans, so this is no ego trip - we’ve both done our bit, paid our dues, and have the gongs on the mantelpiece to prove it. Instead, we both feel this is our one shot, maybe our last, best chance to seize an opportunity (thanks Eminem) to do the thing we both know we are great at - launching and running radio stations.

I had to laugh at some nay sayer on social media yesterday who said we were one of many Baby Boomer stations out there:) If you can point to another station broadcasting properly across the U.K. which sounds musically anything like Boom Radio and has a line-up one tenth as good I’d love to hear it. We think we identified a huge lack of provision in U.K. radio almost as soon as we started discussing Boom last July, and the station sounds almost identical in real life to how I imagined it in my head seven months ago.

We’ve both written and talked a lot during the journey from emailed idea last Summer to our launch this week, including my launch blog which our Boom Radio site hosted and which you can find here

https://www.boomradiouk.com/blogs/getting-ready/post/well-this-is-fun/

I thought a more industry focussed blog might be of interest now we’ve launched, hence this appearing on my RadioRiley site. So here goes.

First - this simply couldn’t have been achieved without David. To begin with it was his, long nurtured, idea in the first place, which he had to nudge/bludgeon me into seriously contemplating (although I claim dibs on creating the name). Sorting out research is not my strong point; I’ve little knowledge of, or interest in, playout systems; I couldn’t “load a track” to save my life and can’t claim to be completely objective in my music choices; and the prospect of having to deal with daily calls from presenters fills me with dread (I love you guys really:)); and - despite my degree in computer studies (Loughborough, 1980, lots of stats!) - I can now hardly use a mouse without crashing my MacBook, so sorting out a remote technical operations system would have been stretching for me. David just took charge of all of that and made it happen. And it’s mostly his vision (and that of his husband Paul (thanks Paul)) that you hear on air. Thanks David.

Equally though, I’d hope he would acknowledge the flip side - I built the plan which allowed us both to believe the venture was a possibility, I figured out how much money we’d need, picked up the fund raising and raised it, dealt with the lawyers and the accountants and the banks, sorted out the commercial side of the business, and created the company, did most of the deals and sorted out most of the paperwork. 

We just naturally fell into our respective roles across the business, and little has fallen through the cracks. The one area where we’ve worked most closely has been on marketing. Selling any product (even a creative venture such as this) is both science and art - so getting the “feel” of any public messaging is critical, but so too is getting that messaging made and placed in front of the public efficiently. I think our logo (thanks Kris), TV Ad (thanks Daniel and James), and poster/social campaign (we mainly created those ourselves) really capture the essence of our brand. Our static work is scattered across social media by now - and our TV work is here if you haven’t seen the ad yet.

And I’m very pleased with our coverage. Here is not the place to go into detail on the arrangements we made, but to get our TV ad on Talking Pictures TV, the Local TV network, London Live and Now 70s TV; our outdoor across the Ocean OOH estate in London (thanks Tim)  and the Alight estate nationwide (thanks Ged); and our press ads into Metro, Evening Standard, Mail and MoS (thanks Ken) is quite an achievement given the budget we had. 40 years of marketing nous needed there! David and I are now grappling with online and social media ad buying too, where a lot of our remaining cash will be spent over the coming months. It’s quite weird - you get rewarded if your ads are good, and penalised if they’re bad - that doesn’t happen on radio or TV for sure! And our PR has been fantastic (thanks Sophie). Wow, we’ve had some column inches - in hindsight not surprisingly - a Baby Boomer station, backed, launched and staffed by Baby Boomers, being created in the middle of a pandemic, in what an outsider might feel is a slightly ossified, monopolistic, mature industry, is a story worth writing about. I think there’s more to come too. The sheer size of R2, and its claim to serve everyone from 35 upwards, just invites a Sampson vs Goliath narrative. The fact our annual budget is around 1% of their £45m p.a. further cements that story. Watch this space.

There have been two other people crucial to getting us to air. 

One is Quentin Howard. I’d approached Q simply as an investor last Autumn - but his enthusiasm for the idea shone through, and it was an easy call for us to ask him to take on the technical challenge of getting us on air with a bunch of technophobic 60 and 70 year old DJs, and with no money. This was a challenge he overcame with honour. We really, really couldn’t have done it without him. Thanks Q. And I got some money off him too:)

The other key helper was my old Commercial Director from Chrysalis days, Don Thomson. For almost 30 years we’ve been mates as well as colleagues. I’ve spent some of the happiest moments of my life with him too (thanks Teddy and Ole). He was top of my list to call for a few quid to invest - but as the days and weeks went by, even though he calls himself an ex-media bod, I knew we needed his expert guidance to help pull the commercial side together. He’s been a rock. Thanks Don.

I guess this in microcosm is what we’ve done - pulled together people we have known from our days stretching right back to West Midlands radio in my case and East Midlands radio in David’s, then Chrysalis (from which so many good things have sprung) together with David, through Orion, again together with David, ending up here, at Boom, together again (it’s the radio equivalent of “old married couple” syndrome - it’s simply too late to look elsewhere:))

There’s something special about the team behind Boom Radio. One of my golden rules of management is to try and lay the foundations that make people truly want to work with you - it’s not always possible for everyone, everywhere - but when it does come off it’s magical. I had it just over 30 years ago at Xtra; caught it again at Chrysalis; and at Orion too - and reckon once again, a little late in the day, we’ve captured some magic in a bottle here at Boom. And that magic will work miracles if you let it. 

In case you are wondering what those foundations are, they begin with a good strategic vision and plan, well communicated; hiring the right people (easier said than done of course), lots of delegation and empowerment; fairness and the absence of petty politics in the treatment of folk; no paperwork (well, as little as possible); some laughter every day; saying thank you a lot; not nickel & dimeing every last thing; and setting some pace from the top, knowing people will keep up if encouraged. Although David and I are dissimilar in many ways, we both share many of these fundamental beliefs, which is why we’ve been lucky enough to cajole so many people into working with us time and again (thanks Les, Ali, Sarah, Jules, Don, Roger, Andy, GT and so many others). You only ever need to ask one question in a staff survey to know if you are world-class, and if we asked it today of the Boom team we’d easily score top marks (and if you want to know what that question is, my consulting day rate is quite reasonable:))

We’ve also been blown away by the listener response. One industry chief I was sharing our streaming data with said he’d never seen launch figures as good as ours. Our digital guru is simply amazed at the click through rates to our ad campaign - again, numbers he’s never seen before. And the anecdotal response via email and social media is phenomenal. We’ve never seen anything like it either. Maybe older people are more demonstrative now online - though I doubt it - more likely we’ve just hit a nerve, a disaffected generation feeling a bit unloved, undervalued, taken for granted, who just wanted to be told “you’re still here - and so are we - so let’s have some fun, all of us “Still Busy Living””.

And “Still Busy Living” is our mantra - both for the brand and for the business - and it’s a collective call to action which already many, many tens of thousands of people seem to have taken to their hearts.

Still, it’s early days though, and as I said to an old friend yesterday “don’t judge us on day 1, judge us on day 1,000”. According to my spreadsheet,  that’s Saturday November 11th 2023. I’ll do another blog then - see how we are going.