Call Them Krazy

Mar 1, 2010  

A young couple starts an independent radio business, with a little help from Taco Time

by Lindsey Norris

Four years ago, Troy Stevens and Sonia Sawyer started a radio station in Lacombe.

This is amazing.

Not because they sold their Red Deer home and left their jobs. Those garden-variety gambles we expect of entrepreneurs. Nor is it amazing because they’re a young, married couple who decided to place all their hopes in a form of old-school media in a small town at a time when other young entrepreneurs seem to be flocking to the big cities. Radio was a natural fit; they had years of experience in the business. Stevens had been a radio DJ since he was 18, Sawyer a creative writer and TV producer.

They were well aware that radio, like most media in Canada, is dominated by conglomerates. Even if enterprising types should possess the chutzpah to tangle with those conglomerates, they have to make it past the industry regulator, the Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). Just to apply for a broadcasting licence can involve thousands of dollars in costs, and that’s before hopefuls have any idea if the CRTC is going to laugh in their face.

So here you have a bona fide David and Goliath story: a young couple (she is 37, he is 36) with two children risk it all for a pipe dream. All the more amazing is that, when you think about it, the whole concept of commercial radio is kind of insane.

For one, it’s free. It was free long before everyone under 50 began to expect everything to be free, and began reading their newspapers online and downloading movies instead of going to the Cineplex. The “free” concept makes old-media types like record execs and Rupert Murdoch froth at the mouth, but radio makes it work, perhaps even better than the pay-for-service model. When satellite radio companies Sirius and XM announced a merger in 2007, they had lost, between them, nearly $7 billion.

The other reason radio is batty is it relies on the premise that people will put up with 20-second spiels from some schmo hawking used cars in hopes of hearing something worthwhile, even though listeners can pack hundreds, even thousands of songs they like onto portable devices free of commercials. Take Stevens, a fan of ’80s metal. More specifically, he is a fan of the Mötley Crüe, circa 1985, which has sold more than 80 million albums but sometimes sounds (at least to this writer) like a helicopter ricocheting off the sides of a steel drum. Stevens does not expect to hear the Mötley Crüe on the radio, yet he continues to listen and believe he will discover something comparable or better.

That, in part, is why radio still works: a stranger is operating a computer somewhere that may just select a song that will rock your world. You could surf YouTube for years and never find such an epiphany on your own.

It was just such an epiphany that led, in a roundabout way, to the start of L.A. Radio Group Inc. Stevens was in Calgary one Saturday, feeling the five-year itch. He’d been co-hosting the morning show on Zed 99 in Red Deer and wanting to do something different. Then, on the radio, he heard three songs in a row that he liked. Imagine – three songs in a row. “I recognized that no stations in Red Deer were playing those songs,” he said. Why couldn’t he play those songs?

He had an enthusiastic supporter in Sawyer. After working in half the cities in Saskatchewan and Alberta for various television companies, she got into tourism, and then became the director of the Red Deer Downtown Business Association. By 1996, Sawyer and Stevens were married and happily settled in Red Deer.

That’s where they wanted to stay, though they knew Red Deer, with four radio stations owned by two companies, would be a tough market in which to get a broadcasting licence. But Lacombe “was an underserved market, and part of your application must prove that there is a need,” Sawyer says.

Stevens’ enthusiasm was momentarily daunted by the $12,000 in costs associated with the application process. “I was a radio DJ, and I didn’t have that kind of money,” he says. What they did have was a house, and plenty of optimism – a necessary trait for the perpetually upbeat morning DJ. (Their Lacombe station is called Sunny 94.) “You need to be personable, happy, friendly and very positive [to be a DJ],” he says. “There is nothing worse than turning on the radio and hearing someone who is glass-half-empty.

“We took $50,000 out of our house – that was all we had – and put that aside in case we were approved. We called four other investors, family, and asked if we could borrow $50,000 and pay them back with interest,” Stevens said.

Meanwhile, Stevens continued to host the morning show at Zed 99, until Sept. 15, 2005, when the CRTC posted L.A. Radio’s application on its website. Stevens was promptly fired, so for the next six months, he scoured the streets of Lacombe, Ponoka and surrounding areas seeking letters of support. Then, finally, “On March 14 at 8:06, they phoned to say we were approved,” he says.

Thus Lacombe’s first radio station, playing classics from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, went on air in June 2006. Six months later, L.A. Radio was ready for Red Deer, and Sawyer, the company’s CFO, believed being an underdog would benefit them.

“We’re going up against huge corporations with really deep pockets, and we have to be incredibly efficient,” Sawyer says. “When you have this much money sunk into something, you have to be there. No one works harder than the ones whose money is in it… and I think our competitors are probably a little surprised at how well the radio stations have done.”

Particularly since Kraze 101.3, L.A. Radio’s modern hit music station, was launched in Red Deer during the recession. “We knew we could save a bit on capital costs, and we knew there were two other stations entering the market,” Stevens said. “We wanted to get Kraze on the air because we knew there was a void and it would be an immediate hit.”

His job today as CEO is a long way from his DJ days. Though he initially hosted Sunny’s morning show, other aspects of the business quickly took up his time and now he fills in on sick days and vacations. That’s OK – it’s not like being a DJ was his life’s calling. Funny story: he actually got into radio because of a liking for Taco Time. When he was 17, he moved from his hometown of Unity, Sask., to a friend’s house in North Battleford to play hockey. They didn’t have a Taco Time in North Battleford. So when this friend was going to a radio open house and asked if he wanted to come, he did, because they would pass a Taco Time. He also discovered it was only a four-month course to become a radio DJ. The rest is history.

Stevens and Sawyer don’t have plans to add another station to L.A. Radio in the immediate future. Thanks to their 31 employees, they no longer work 60-hour weeks, and with the greatest startup hurdles over with, they’re concentrating on increasing the audience of their existing stations.

One day they would like to have more stations. Why not? At one point people predicted television would kill radio. Instead, it has proven to be one industry that can make free work.

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