Pod Insights How I Built This with Guy Raz Radio One: Cathy Hughes About this episode As a kid, Cathy Hughes practiced her DJ routine while her siblings banged on the bathroom door. As an adult, she founded Radio One, the country's largest African-American owned broadcasting company.
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0:00 Guy Raz? Hey, it's Guy here. Just before we get to our next episode, a quick request. Please do subscribe to How I Built This. However you get your podcasts, whether it's iTunes or Google Play or Stitcher or wherever, please click Subscribe. And then every Monday, you'll get the new episode right to your smartphone. Thanks.
0:23 Speaker 01 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.
0:48 Guy Raz? From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
1:01 Guy Raz? I'm Guy Raz. And on today's show, why Cathy 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.
1:21 Guy Raz? So you might have never heard of Cathy Hughes, but the company she started, Radio One, it's the largest African-American-owned broadcaster in the US. And it now has more than 50 radio stations and media outlets all across the US. 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.
1:51 Speaker 01 I wanted to be the first African-American to have a syndicated radio show. I've had that desire since I was eight, nine, 10 years old.
2:01 Guy Raz? Wow. But this is what you wanted to do from an early age?
2:04 Speaker 01 From childhood. It's so interesting, when I go back to the high school that I graduated from, that every single solitary week, send a note home to my mother saying she talks too much. Like, I'm practicing for my future career.
2:21 Speaker 01 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 sister would heap upon my head when I finally opened the bathroom door so they could get ready for school.
2:40 Guy Raz? Yeah.
2:41 Speaker 01 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.
2:57 Guy Raz? In the 1950s.
2:58 Speaker 01 In the 1950s, exactly. And so they thought I had a pipe dream. My nuns at my school described it as delusions of grandeur. Okay. Told my mother that she perhaps should seek counseling for me.
3:12 Guy Raz? Wow.
3:12 Speaker 01 Because I had this vision of being on the radio and people hearing me from coast to coast.
3:18 Guy Raz? Yeah.
3:23 Guy Raz? 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.
3:33 Speaker 01 First sexual experience, I'm in the doctor's office. He tells me I'm pregnant. I said, I couldn't be, I've only had sex one time. He said, I hate to surprise you, Kathy, but it only takes one time. God arranged it that way.
3:45 Guy Raz? Were you shocked when you found out?
3:46 Speaker 01 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 while I was still a young teenager, a child myself.
4:18 Guy Raz? But it's still pretty hard to try to support yourself and your child.
4:22 Speaker 01 Yes, but I'm a 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 upon me to come to work.
5:05 Guy Raz? Yeah.
5:06 Speaker 01 So even though, you know, pregnant at 16, a mother at 17, sounds like, how did you do it financially?
5:13 Guy Raz? Yeah.
5:14 Speaker 01 Well, I was already working and I was very blessed. And I say this to young mothers, it's 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.
5:34 Guy Raz? Huh. So you actually, when you enrolled, you enrolled at university?
5:37 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm. And I took him along to University of Nebraska at Omaha.
5:41 Guy Raz? And you would take him to class with you?
5:42 Speaker 01 Yeah. I put him, he'd be right in a carriage on the floor. But it became a problem once he got up and start walking.
5:48 Guy Raz? And did you, did you work at like the college radio station?
5:50 Speaker 01 Yes, I volunteered at that radio station. It provided a voice for us in Omaha, in a city that was severely segregated.
5:58 Guy Raz? Yeah. I read that, that while you were there, you met someone who, at the university, who basically like changed the course of your life.
6:08 Speaker 01 Yes, Tony Brown, an African American host of Tony Brown's Journal, comes to town.
6:14 Guy Raz? Yeah.
6:15 Speaker 01 And said 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 he knew was radio.
6:26 Guy Raz? Yeah.
6:27 Speaker 01 And 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.
6:41 Guy Raz? So you move halfway across the country with your, I guess, four or five year old son at that point, and you just like you find an apartment and you start working in the city that you did not know.
6:51 Speaker 01 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'd been up in Virginia some more and he's trying to get to Howard.
7:03 Guy Raz? What did Washington feel like to you? I mean, you come from Omaha, Nebraska, which was-
7:07 Speaker 01 I want to tell you about a letter I wrote my mother.
7:09 Guy Raz? Yeah.
7:09 Speaker 01 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.
7:16 Guy Raz? Wow.
7:16 Speaker 01 I had never seen so many wonderful people of color-
7:20 Guy Raz? Yeah.
7:20 Speaker 01 -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. It was, I was in awe, still am, to be very honest with you. I mean, there's no city like Washington DC in the whole wide world.
7:37 Guy Raz? You had come to the city in the 70s from a predominantly white city to a city that was-
7:41 Speaker 01 Thank you.
7:41 Guy Raz? -run by-
7:42 Speaker 01 Thank you, with black people in charge.
7:45 Guy Raz? In charge, yeah.
7:46 Speaker 01 I mean, total, and wait, during my whole duration in the nation's capital, it's only gotten better. I've gone from watching a black mayor get elected to watching a black president get elected.
8:01 Guy Raz? Okay, so you're, you get to Howard and DC and you're working at the radio station there, right?
8:08 Speaker 01 I was the sales manager.
8:09 Guy Raz? Yeah, at the station. And what was the station like? What kind of, would it play music at that time? Like, what was it doing?
8:14 Speaker 01 It played jazz.
8:19 Speaker 01 One night, they did an 18-minute-long piece of Pharoah Saunders, and I think he held the note the entire time. Okay, all right. 18-minute jazz song. All you heard was this one- And I was like, I can't sell this.
8:35 Guy Raz? So your job was to find advertisers to advertise on the Howard.
8:39 Speaker 01 Yes, but also to help define how the radio station should be structured.
8:43 Guy Raz? And the station at the time was just a mess.
8:45 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
8:46 Guy Raz? It was a total mess.
8:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:47 Guy Raz? So it was, it sounds like it was the kind of place that because it was a mess, a young person like you
8:52 Speaker 01 An opportunity.
8:53 Guy Raz? in your twenties.
8:54 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
8:55 Guy Raz? Could take it over.
8:56 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And the fact that the then dean was a big fan of my work ethic. He said, you need to see, can you teach these kids how to work like you folks from Nebraska work? I always believed that rising at 4:00 a.m. and then getting dressed and leaving by 5:15, 5:30 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.
9:31 Guy Raz? You, so you're in DC with your son. By the way, how are you doing all of this as a single mom?
9:38 Speaker 01 Well, you know, it's, oftentimes people ask me if I had anything to do over, what would it be, it would be to have more children. It was easy with him. Remember, I told you, I started off taking him to college with me. So he had his first little tuxedo before he was out of grade school because he was my date. I took him everywhere.
9:56 Guy Raz? Huh.
9:57 Speaker 01 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.
10:09 Guy Raz? So what, what were you able to do at the station at that time? I mean, you get there in the early 70s.
10:14 Speaker 01 So many things, so many things. 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.
10:25 Guy Raz? So how were you able to grow it?
10:27 Speaker 01 The Quiet Storm.
10:28 Guy Raz? Tell me about the Quiet Storm. What is it?
10:30 Speaker 01 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, you know, the entertainment. So I structured a format called The Quiet Storm.
10:54 Speaker 01 That basically was a five-hour presentation of entertaining you at home by yourself.
11:01 Guy Raz? And how did you do that?
11:04 Speaker 01 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.
11:17 Guy Raz? What were you playing?
11:18 Speaker 01 Oh, Sam Cooke.
11:25 Speaker 01 Carmen McCray, The Balloteers, basically.
11:33 Guy Raz? How did that show take off? How did it become popular?
11:36 Speaker 01 Well, I hit the right target demo.
11:39 Guy Raz? And I guess we should mention that the audience was predominantly African-American.
11:43 Speaker 01 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.
12:01 Guy Raz? So people just started tuning in?
12:03 Speaker 01 Oh, yes, absolutely. It was strictly word of mouth. And it went from like number 36 in the ratings to like top five. And then when I left, we were number three.
12:13 Guy Raz? 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?
12:21 Speaker 01 No, not at all, 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.
12:49 Guy Raz? They wanted to revive a radio station.
12:51 Speaker 01 Yes, they wanted this dark signal. They had, okay, 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.
13:10 Guy Raz? So these owners, they bought this station and they hired you to run it?
13:13 Speaker 01 Yes. They hired me to get it on the air.
13:16 Guy Raz? OK.
13:16 Speaker 01 Then they hired me to run it. Then they ran out of money.
13:19 Guy Raz? OK.
13:20 Speaker 01 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 being 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 multimillionaire, who I've admired, who's
14:03 Speaker 01 now probably in their 70s, is saying to me, here I'm, you know, 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 say, thank you, Lord. I hear you. I hear you.
14:18 Guy Raz? Wow.
14:19 Speaker 01 I literally, literally put all my papers in my case and skipped, not walked, skipped down the hallway from the board meeting. And they're like, what just happened? Did she have a nervous breakdown or something? I knew what I was destined to do.
14:39 Guy Raz? 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.
15:05 Guy Raz? It's How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the late 1970s, and Cathy 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, a black AM station in Washington DC, that had fallen on hard times. So she decides to buy it. What were they asking for it?
15:30 Speaker 01 $1 million.
15:32 Guy Raz? Wow. And this is like 1980?
15:34 Speaker 01 No, this is 1978. We didn't get it till 1980.
15:38 Guy Raz? So 1978, to buy the license for this station, you had to come up with $1 million. How much money did you have in your bank account at the time?
15:45 Speaker 01 $10,000.
15:46 Guy Raz? $10,000.
15:47 Speaker 01 It was $10,000.
15:48 Guy Raz? So that's what you had, more or less?
15:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's what I had.
15:50 Guy Raz? Was anyone else bidding for the station?
15:52 Speaker 01 There was everyone. At that time, Senator Edward Brooke had just left the United States Senate, the first time since, you know, Reconstruction Day.
15:59 Guy Raz? He was a black senator from Massachusetts.
16:01 Speaker 01 That's right. He was a bidder. Muhammad Ali was bidding for it. Everybody wanted it. It was the nation's capital.
16:07 Guy Raz? Wow. Well, you were bidding for this station against a former senator and Muhammad Ali?
16:11 Speaker 01 Yes.
16:12 Guy Raz? So how did you get it?
16:14 Speaker 01 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 this station," he said, "Where in the world are you going to get the money?"
16:29 Guy Raz? Yeah. So where did you get the money? Like, did you go to banks and like ask for loans?
16:34 Speaker 01 Yes. 32 of them.
16:35 Guy Raz? 32 banks?
16:36 Speaker 01 No. 32 lending institutions.
16:39 Guy Raz? And all of them said, "No. We're not going to give you the $1 million."
16:42 Speaker 01 And you showed them a business plan? Because none of them had.
16:44 Guy Raz? You showed them like exactly how you were going to make money?
16:46 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
16:47 Guy Raz? And all of them said, "No. We're not going to give you the $1 million."
16:49 Speaker 01 They asked me questions like, "Did I plan to have any more children?"
16:52 Guy Raz? Wow.
16:53 Speaker 01 They asked me if, "Didn't I 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.
17:05 Guy Raz? How did you go to 32 banks, get rejected, rejection after rejection?
17:11 Speaker 01 Remember I told you that my father was a CPA? I knew the law of averages. I knew that if I kept asking, a yes had to come up.
17:19 Guy Raz? So how did you get the yes?
17:21 Speaker 01 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 my salespeople. She said, "Please, don't sell past the clothes." And I never forgot that, because that was another one of those slap in the faces. I was like, "Wow, she's absolutely correct.
18:06 Speaker 01 She said yes." I couldn't believe she had said yes.
18:09 Guy Raz? When she said yes, you kept selling her on it?
18:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, I kept convincing her, right. Exactly. That's correct. I kept trying to convince her.
18:20 Guy Raz? So you get the money, and you buy this station. And where was it, by the way, in DC? What part of the city was it?
18:26 Speaker 01 1680 Wisconsin Avenue.
18:27 Guy Raz? And you walk in there...
18:28 Speaker 01 In the heart of Georgetown, in the highest rent district of the city. So that's why I moved into it.
18:34 Guy Raz? Wait, sorry.
18:35 Speaker 01 I moved into the radio...
18:37 Guy Raz? You moved in...
18:38 Speaker 01 I lived in the radio station.
18:39 Guy Raz? You moved in to live there?
18:40 Speaker 01 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 it real convenient to go to work in the morning. I walked down the hall.
18:55 Guy Raz? Wait, so you moved in there with your son and husband?
18:58 Speaker 01 No, I moved in there with my son. By then, my husband was like, "Enough. I don't want to do this."
19:03 Guy Raz? So your marriage fell apart?
19:05 Speaker 01 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.
19:16 Guy Raz? How many years did you guys, you and your son, live there?
19:19 Speaker 01 Almost three.
19:20 Guy Raz? Wow. That must have been hard.
19:22 Speaker 01 No. Number one, again, remember the part of the story I told you that I was just in 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.
19:40 Guy Raz? But I mean, you must have been under a lot of financial pressure, right? So how did you deal with that?
19:45 Speaker 01 When you have overwhelming financial obligations, the first natural human impulse is to hide.
19:51 Guy Raz? Yeah.
19:52 Speaker 01 To recoil.
19:52 Guy Raz? Yeah.
19:53 Speaker 01 Not return the call. Well, what I had 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 their payment. 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.
20:37 Guy Raz? Wow.
20:37 Speaker 01 Nor a personal check bounce. Because I try to stay ahead of the issue of not being able to pay the debt.
20:46 Guy Raz? But I mean, you had people like who were depending on you for salaries, right?
20:50 Speaker 01 I was running a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week broadcasting facility with 14 full and part-time employees. Total, 14 of us.
21:00 Guy Raz? And you were one of the people who went on the air?
21:02 Speaker 01 The only thing I don't know how to do is fire up the transmitter.
21:04 Guy Raz? You had to go on the air?
21:06 Speaker 01 I had to.
21:06 Guy Raz? Because you didn't have enough people you could pay?
21:08 Speaker 01 Correct.
21:09 Guy Raz? And what did you do? You just opened up the mics and started talking?
21:12 Speaker 01 Well, it started off because we did what they call a format search. And we found out that what was missing in Washington DC was news talk from a black perspective.
21:22 Guy Raz? Huh.
21:23 Speaker 01 What that research did not tell us, as you well know here at NPR, it's the most expensive format that you can do.
21:29 Guy Raz? Yes, it is.
21:30 Speaker 01 All right, music is, one person can play the music, read the news, do everything. It's a one-person show in music.
21:38 Guy Raz? Yeah.
21:39 Speaker 01 When you talk about news and our talk and information,
21:44 Speaker 01 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.
21:58 Guy Raz? 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 of the show, by the way?
22:09 Speaker 01 Four hours.
22:10 Guy Raz? Four-hour show every day?
22:11 Speaker 01 Six to 10 a.m.
22:12 Guy Raz? How were you able to do all of that?
22:15 Speaker 01 Because it was exciting.
22:17 Guy Raz? But that's how?
22:19 Speaker 01 And when you said the stress of the debt, it wasn't stress. I had no doubt that I was going to pay them.
22:23 Guy Raz? You knew you were.
22:24 Speaker 01 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. And now, this is when I'm also telling them, now, 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
23:07 Speaker 01 money to pay everyone, that's what you have to see in your mind's eye. That's what you have to believe. And I saw that.
23:14 Guy Raz? Yeah.
23:15 Speaker 01 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 felt it. I knew it.
23:27 Guy Raz? Wow.
23:27 Speaker 01 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?
24:00 Guy Raz? Kathy, was the station profitable pretty quickly?
24:05 Speaker 01 Seven years.
24:06 Guy Raz? So what was it that made you guys profitable? How did you get to profitability?
24:11 Speaker 01 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 the floor better than her."
24:23 Guy Raz? So is that when you started to expand?
24:25 Speaker 01 Yes. I realized that I could not survive with just a little 1,000-watt AM. That I had to grow. I either had to grow or I had to go.
24:36 Guy Raz? And which meant buying more stations?
24:38 Speaker 01 Yes. Because our specialty is we're turnaround artists.
24:42 Guy Raz? So you were taking over distressed stations?
24:45 Speaker 01 You got it. We took distressed properties and turned them around because we could afford them.
24:49 Guy Raz? How did you get the money to buy them?
24:51 Speaker 01 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.
25:10 Guy Raz? How many stations did you eventually buy?
25:15 Speaker 01 I think that we were up to, think, 35.
25:17 Guy Raz? So what was the point where you said, "Let's go public? Let's make this into..." You have 35-plus stations?
25:25 Speaker 01 I didn't. My son went to Wharton and got his MBA. And walking across the campus of UPenn, 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 or go." 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. Well, it's kind of hard to compete when you're 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.
26:08 Guy Raz? So you had to go public?
26:09 Speaker 01 And so, 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, tried to discourage us. We had a couple of false starts, but it was the best thing that could have happened. And the other thing that we have done in our company is we stay in 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.
26:41 Guy Raz? So at the height of Radio 1, how many stations did you guys actually have?
26:47 Speaker 01 Seventy-five stations, which was the height when we bought a package of stations from Clear Channel. Seventy-five. That had never been done in urban broadcasting before.
26:56 Guy Raz? Were you able to retain a significant share of the ownership after you went public?
27:01 Speaker 01 Yes. Not just owned, 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.
27:19 Guy Raz? Wow. You know, one of the things that you haven't really talked about is discrimination because, I mean, you must have faced a lot of it, not only as a woman, but as an African-American woman in this business.
27:31 Speaker 01 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, Riggs, 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 would loan her $15,000 to buy a car, but you won't loan her $10,000 to make her payroll." And yet she has the contracts showing that the money will be coming in.
28:16 Speaker 01 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.
28:30 Guy Raz? You know, here's the thing that I was just like, I still, I'm still trying to wrap my head around, which is, you faced all of these challenges and you kept going. Like, what was it that kept you going?
28:42 Speaker 01 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 where I didn't first thank God, and I still do. But back then, when I first started, they said to me, "Ain't nobody's interested in all that religion." I said, "That's not religion. That's spirituality.
29:24 Speaker 01 There's a big difference," in my book, "between being loyal and understanding yourself in relationship to creation."
29:32 Guy Raz? 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?
29:54 Speaker 01 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.
30:23 Guy Raz? Cathy Hughes, the founder and chairman of the board of Radio One. The company now has more than 50 radio stations across the country. And Kathy Sun Alfred, that little kid in the baby tuxedo who went on to Wharton, he is now the CEO.
30:44 Guy Raz? Hey, thanks for listening to the show this week. If you want to find out more or listen to previous episodes, you can go to howibuiltthis.npr.org. And 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 at howibuiltthis. Our show this week is co-produced by Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei, who also compose the music. Thanks also to Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkhanpour, and Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.
31:32 Guy Raz? 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. It figures out 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.
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