month and do this the right way.” I never heard from him again and didn’t see him until five years later at a Super Bowl.
I’ve been on both ends of the table. It’s never, ever easy and it never comes without hurt feelings, angst, misunderstandings and unintended consequences. Usually that’s how it got to that point in the first place. Different expectations, different needs, different people, different goals, different agendas.
In some ways, I think it’s human nature.
But I’ve truly loved or wanted to love every person who ever walked into the doors of my company. Some loved me, some hated me, some respected me, many didn’t.
But every one of them was given an honest chance to follow their dream. Like Paul McCartney asked, I opened the door and let ’em in.
There are as many ways to run a business as there are to run an NFL offense. Lots of systems, theories, schemes and playbooks to the best path to success. But all of them are designed to maximize profit, minimize risk and stay on a clear path to growth and prosperity. Or as Steve Bisciotti said in Purple Reign 2: “We have an obligation to be profitable.” If there’s no profit, there’s no business. You either have a bad habit or a costly hobby if you’re working 24 hours a day and not making enough money to thrive and see a brighter future.
Steve Bisciotti has proven far better at managing people and identifying talent than I have in many respects. I’m self-managed. I expect that from others. Like Rex Ryan, I don’t coach effort. Apparently, it’s an unreasonable request because I have failed miserably on that end and take full responsibility.
But moving forward, I want to simply have intelligent conversations with people who I’m interested in and topics that add value to my life and in turn will add value to the lives of those around me. Whether they’re folks who listened and supported me many years ago as “Nasty Nestor” or whether they’re someone who discovered me this year because of my wife’s fight with leukemia and her subsequent bone marrow transplant.
My wife and I want to “pay it forward.” I want to do good things and make good, shareable, thought-provoking media – on radio, the web, video, blogs, social media and books.
I just want to go back to my very, very happy 1998 life and do some great radio, write some great stuff, have some great interactions, learn some new things and help some people who might need it. I want to enjoy my life and have fun.
I have no interest in “dishing dirt” on any of my former employees. Sure, there were many differences over the years and it always came back to a few fundamental issues: revenue, sponsors and audience. Over and over and over and over and over again.
If you’re as significant as you think you are as a “host” or “radio personality” or “blogger,” then business and commerce must follow. Unless you’re MASN and getting $3 a month from every cable TV subscriber in six states, you have to have sponsors. And happy ones. And loyal ones. And ones that feel value. Because they have employees and obligations and bills to pay as well.
And it helped when I had folks on my team who shared my evolving vision for WNST.net and ways to make us successful.
It comes back to basic accountability. I have to look my sponsors in the eyes before, during and after an advertising buy. For the most part, my employees never had to do that.
Many craved the microphone and the ego boost that comes along with it. In the end, few wanted the accountability of finding a way to make that airtime valuable or truly profitable for me, for local sponsors or finding value in an audience large enough to measure in real financial terms for whoever would fund it.
It’s pretty basic Economics 101.
I loved all of the people I had to part ways with on Friday and every other time in the past. I hired them, believed in them, “sponsored” them, paid them and trusted them implicitly to execute my ideas, my soul and my passion for building an incredible Baltimore sports media brand. But in the end – weighing every circumstance in my life, and my wife’s illness brought on a wave of
