emotions, realities and financial responsibility (and cancer ain’t free even with great health insurance) – it wasn’t making business sense for me or happiness sense for me anymore.
My vision wasn’t being enacted.
And after deep soul-searching in my personal life and given what I want to accomplish for the rest of my life – most of it dreamed and worked up in late nights next to my struggling wife – I needed to make some difficult changes and weigh my future.
Last Friday, I wished all of my former employees well. I told them I’d do my best to help them and I meant it. And I thanked them for their immense contributions.
I searched high and low…everywhere looking for the “next Nestor” and I’ve decided to just go back and do it myself and love it and have fun with every second of it moving forward. I loved doing radio in 1998 when I found WNST. That’s why I did this. I didn’t like managing people and attempting to motivate people who were motivated by different goals than the ones I thought necessary for survival.
And I’ve dealt with a torrent of ruthless, mindless abuse in some circles surrounding the folks who’ve departed over the years and their social media communities. But, that’s the price of being me. That’s the sad fallout of giving people a chance to make their lives better and yours, too. When you’re an employer, you bet on people. You have to in order to be successful.
I’m a pretty direct individual. I’ve been doing this a long time. I have a very good sense of what I want and how I want it and how it needs to be for our community and how it needs to be for our sponsors (because they tell me). Quite frankly, it’s why I’m still here 23 years later and you’re reading this blog. I stay up late and get up quite early trying to make my company great.
And that’s not about to change. As a matter of fact, you’ll see it on full display beginning Tuesday.
Like Sirius XM, that has a whole channel hosted by Howard Stern or Mad Dog Russo, WNST.net will be hosted 24 hours a day by its owner.
Yes, I’ll be on WNST AM 1570 almost 24 hours a day (along with Luke Jones, Chris Pika, Peter DiLutis and a bevy of my usual sports pals and experts and players and coaches, etc.) We’ll have many reports from Ravens and Orioles events and updates and news and interviews and conversation and social media interaction and video and whatever cool thing we think of next that might be fun.
Our Text Service and Morning Newspaper will remain awesome. We’re focusing on a mobile app and updates to the main WNST.net platform on the web and on mobile. And we’re still doing road trips, live Ravens player shows with Steve Smith and others this fall.
(Our first show with No. 89 is at Greenmount Station in Hampstead on Wednesday night. Please join us for Carroll County’s best crab cake and a nice family-owned restaurant and bar.)
So why is Nestor putting himself back onto his own radio station all day and night?
For nine years, and through various struggles in the economy and a paradigm shift in the way media has been presented, the same question arose in virtually every sales meeting: “Why aren’t you on the radio anymore? If you went back on the radio, we’d sponsor you.”
After a lot of soul-searching and months of evaluation, I went back on the radio on April 1 and we’ve signed 17 new sponsors and I’m really enjoying chatting with people and learning things on the radio again.
Let’s call 2005-2014 a “working sabbatical.” I’ve traveled the world, run a business, watched my mother age, my son grow, my wife battle and I’ve learned a lot.
And I’m ready to come back and have an intelligent, ongoing dialogue with my favorite people every day. Smart people. Funny people. Witty people. Worldly people. Conversations. Life lessons. Advice – giving it and getting it from experts. Social Media.
And sports. Oh, yeah, there’ll be plenty of that every day.
But we’re going to do this a new way. It’ll be on video. It’ll be on audio. It’ll be in social media and it’ll be a learning experience. I’m not coming back to “do a neverending radio show.” I’m coming back because it’s in my soul to want to participate, be an activist for good things, peace and Baltimore and to fulfill my dharma.
We will exist to serve people, which, incidentally I’ve always felt like we’ve done from our
