I was on the phone with Scott Meyers, and for the first time in a long time he was nearly speechless.
“You’re going to be the affiliate relations guy on this,” I told him.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Well, you’re already calling stations to promote my music,” I said. “Just call them and tell them we’ve got this new radio show that we are launching.”
“What’s the show called?” he asked.
“It’s called Intelligence for Your Life.”
“Seriously? Wow, that’s a very long title,” he said. “What’s it about?”
“It’s the 411 so your life never becomes a 911. It’s home improvement for your brain!” I was spitting out slogans like a madman. I was on fire.
“Wait, John? This is a radio show? Intelligence for your life? It sounds like a seminar or something.”
Scotty and I had been working together for nearly three years. During that time he had been doing a masterful job of promoting my music on radio stations. Scotty had grown up in the radio business. He had strong connections with stations around the country and across the dial. His specialty was getting artists’ songs played on the radio. Promoting my songs was one of his more difficult tasks. And now I was asking him to do the radio version of the impossible.
Just think about the landscape from his perspective: First, the host of Entertainment Tonight declares to the world that he’s really a songwriter and performer at heart. Then he announces that he is leaving the program and giving up his seven-figure salary to pursue a music career. And now he’s decided he’s going to launch a syndicated radio program . . . without a corporate syndication partner.
“You want to do this as an independent? You know that’s impossible, right? Do you have a demo?” asked Scotty.
“Uh, no. No demo. Is that a problem?”
“If stations are even going to consider putting a radio show on the air, they need to know what it will sound like. That’s the way this works.”
“Scotty, I don’t have a demo but you can just tell programmers about the concept. We can get on the phone together and pitch the idea.”
“Also, John, delivering a weekly radio show is a huge amount of work and a lot of these programmers have become wary of celebrities catching the radio bug, launching a show, and then losing interest and quitting after a few months. It’s going to be a hard sell, but you know me: I’m in if you’re in. Let’s give it a shot!”
I’m certain Scott Meyers had his fingers crossed behind his back when he committed himself, and I wouldn’t have blamed him, as in that moment only one of us should have been committed.
My vision for the Intelligence for Your Life radio show was birthed in 1997 when Connie and I were retiring for the evening. I’m a maker of messes. I like to be surrounded by my creative stuff. Often times where I surround myself is wholly inappropriate.
“John, this is our bedroom. Your side of the bed looks like the clearance aisle at Radio Shack!”
She was right, of course. Connie was looking at a stack of wires and chargers and a plastic music keyboard and two dead iPods. It looked like someone had emptied their junk drawer by the side of my bed. Then, like a good spouse, I looked to her side of the bed, trying to find something to cross-complain about. I had it!
“Oh yeah, what’s all of this on your side of the bed?”
Neatly stacked on the floor beside Connie’s bedside table were dozens of magazines including Prevention, O (Oprah’s magazine), Reader’s Digest, and more. Poking out of each issue were yellow sticky notes. It was all very organized, but it was all I had if I was going to get some complaint-parity.
Connie smiled. “These are some of my favorite magazines. The sticky notes mark the articles that I want to read.” I do have to admit they were all in alphabetical order and collated according to release date. The disorganized should never challenge the organized. Why? Because they’re already prepared for what you’re going to say.
That was the end of my feeble complaint. It was also, however, the nexus of an idea that started to germinate in my mind and would eventually grow into a global media brand.
Make stuff you love and talk about stuff you love and you’ll attract people who love that kind of stuff. It’s that simple.
—Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!1
This was a familiar feeling. It had been years since I had felt it. It was the “light bulb over the head” feeling that is often spoken of by entrepreneurs who have developed ideas that they know are going to work before they’ve even tested them out in the market.
When you know that you know that you know, you have only two choices. One of them is to take action. Knowing what I now know about the Spirit world, I am fully aware that nudges like this are a gift from the Holy Spirit. We ignore them at our peril.
However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth . . . He will tell you things to come.
—John 16:13
At the moment I faced my bleak future in that pup tent in 1973, I knew that I knew that I knew that my only way out was to create that crazy demo tape and beg my way onto a radio station.
In 1991, when I destroyed a huge opportunity at the hands of my gross insecurities, I knew that I knew that I had to hatch an inventive strategy to sweep the girl of my dreams off her feet.
I knew that I knew in 1994 that only an epic PBS concert event in the legendary Red Rocks Amphitheatre could give me the foundational event from which to launch the music career I had only seen in my dreams. And so now, in 1997, the knowing was upon me once again.
To this day I believe that one of the big reasons for the success of the Intelligence for Your Life radio show is that I knew very little about the business of radio. Connie, Scotty, and I had dozens of people trying to warn us. We were told that self-syndication was suicide. Launching a show without the support of one of the big radio station conglomerates—Cumulus, Clear Channel, Westwood One—was considered impossible.
We were told the show would be too expensive. The idea that was birthed from Connie’s stack of magazines would require eight to ten researchers as well as pricey satellite time to feed the show and a computer audio infrastructure to distribute it. Syndicating a show is expensive; it’s important to realize that syndicating to five stations costs as much as it does syndicating to 305. The economies of scale happen quickly. Still, if we wanted to take the leap, Connie and I would once again have to self-finance the venture like we did with Red Rocks, which more than a few people believed was way too risky. I believe the words “dumb move” were uttered by someone at some point.
Twenty years later, I had to smile as I read author Steven Pressfield’s Do the Work:
Stay Stupid! The three dumbest guys I can think of are Charles Lindbergh, Steve Jobs and Winston Churchill. Why? Because any smart person who understood how impossibly arduous were the tasks they had set themselves would have pulled the plug before he even began.2
At my request, Scotty, a man who never sees the torpedoes in the water, dutifully started calling stations and promising “the next big thing” on the radio. This would not be a fast-paced-comedy morning show. This would not be love songs at night. Scotty promised program directors “purpose-driven radio.” When they were unsure of my commitment to the idea, Scotty would put them on hold, call me wherever I was, and then conference me in to complete our dog-and-pony show. (We still perform that rodeo at least twice a week when pitching new stations.)
Now, keep in mind that in the beginning we were selling a show that did not exist. There was more of a radio show on Connie’s sticky notes than there was in the conversations Scotty and I had with programmers. It became clear after enough of these calls that it was time for a demo. I had to create something, anything, so station managers could get a flavor for what we were up to. And this time it had to be a little more involved than faking helicopter traffic reports by pounding my chest into a microphone. I figured I would start at the source: the sticky-noted articles. The articles Connie had marked were, as usual, just what I was looking for:
The latest study on weight loss and interval training.
How probiotics can improve your gut health and cure depression.
The three signs that he or she is “The One.”
In preparation for recording the demo, Scotty told me that the music-intensive stations we were targeting would not like content that was any longer than two minutes. That posed a bit of a problem. The magazine pieces I was pulling from were long, some as long as three thousand words. I would have to condense them down and rewrite them into three-hundred-word capsules to stay under two minutes and still leave room for my comments and ad libs. To give program directors a sense of what the show would feel like on their airwaves, the demo would also include snippets of the songs their stations had in regular rotation. To add a special touch (Scotty’s idea) we customized each demo to include the station’s call letters as well.
This was twice as much work, but it paid off. Within a week, Scotty had signed up six stations. Within a month, stations were getting phone calls from listeners asking about the segments they had heard. In six months, the stations were getting feedback from listeners who were pulling over during their commute to jot down the tips. Scotty was still burning up the phone lines, but this time he was recruiting help from stations that had signed on early. Program directors who were seeing positive ratings from our show were calling other stations to help Scotty pitch Intelligence for Your Life.
In the middle of all of this I was still going out and performing live concerts. I needed help with the research. That’s when producer/writer Betsy Chase joined us. I had met Betsy at Westwood One Radio when I did a guest appearance for the vacationing Casey Kasem. Betsy was an experienced radio producer (she had also been on staff at the Rick Dees morning show). I knew if I could talk her into coming to work with us we could create even more great content. When she came on board we worked together to build our research team. We also added Christina Rasch as our head of production.
As it turned out, this little sticky-note light bulb of an idea was made for this exact time in radio, for two main reasons.
One, in 1998 we had begun living in the internet age. We began choking on information. Twenty percent of Americans were getting their news from the internet at least once a week already by 1998.3 By 2002, that number had grown to 58.5 percent of the US population. There was more information available than ever before in history. There was also plenty of dangerous and false information at our fingertips. Our business model was curation. We vetted research studies from hundreds of sources. Our focus was health and longevity, relationships, finances, workplace, pets, and travel. Our researchers verified the information and then I broadcast it in two-minute bursts between pop songs.
Two, we were a safe bet for big brands. We were delivering a radio program into a radio environment that had become risky for many advertisers. You had controversial, profane morning shows on the FM dial, and you had screaming liberals and conservatives on AM-talk radio. There were very few places a multinational consumer brand could make a big ad spend and not have to worry about turning off a major portion of the public simply by virtue of advertising there. For years, advertisers had specified “No Howard Stern,” for example. But now Howard was not the only controversial personality on national radio. The proliferation of politically charged programs in a growing PC environment was giving big brands heartburn.
I remember marveling at the early success of the show and asking Scotty, “I don’t get it. How is it that no one else has done a show like this?”
His answer? “Probably because it’s way too expensive to produce and it’s too much **** work.”
He was right.
As we started to get real traction in the marketplace, we hired a respected radio consultant named Mike McVay. Mike suggested right away that we expand our three-hour weekend show to a daily five-hour show. He insisted that there was nothing like what we were doing on the radio and that it was a great fit for female listeners—the key advertiser demographic on the stations most likely to syndicate our show. I’ll never forget the look on Betsy’s face when I told her we’d be generating five times the weekly content. Even with powerhouses Betsy, Scotty, and Christina we didn’t have the personnel or enough manpower to launch the daily show. Those were some seriously sleep-deprived days and nights.
The next step was line extension. Our most popular pieces were health related, so that was the obvious choice. Intelligence for Your Health with Connie Sellecca was launched in June of 2002 as a three-hour weekend radio show. Connie always jokes that I asked her to be the host because she was “the closest warm body with a voice.” In reality, it was because she had always carried a fascination for the latest wellness and longevity intelligence—a curiosity that would prove to be a lifesaver for her husband fifteen years later.
If you had told me at any point during the 1980s or 1990s that the story of my professional life as a broadcaster would begin and end in radio, I’m not sure what my response would have been, because back then it might have felt like I had gone backward, rather than come full circle, which is how I feel today. Because of my family, because of technology, because of my music—and my persistent, purpose-driven faith in all three—radio was my evolution, not my devolution.
Together, the Intelligence for Your Life/Health radio shows have prospered greatly over the last twenty-two years. Ten million people each week listen to the programs on three hundred stations across North America and on Armed Forces Radio. Like me, the show has evolved and grown. Gib has now joined me for special segments on the show and the three of us—me, Connie, and Gib—host the video version of Intelligence for Your Life on Facebook.
Thankfully, though, at least one thing has not changed at all: Connie still uses sticky notes . . . on just about everything.