In an exclusive interview for the October 9 issue of Radio Ink Magazine, Cumulus CEO Mary Berner says morale at the company is superb and that’s a far cry, she says, from how it was when she took over the company two years ago when there was constant turnover. She also says the company, operationally, has turned the corner due to the changes she’s made over the past two years. Here’s our second excerpt from that upcoming interview.
Radio Ink: What has been your biggest challenge to the turnaround?
Mary Berner: For me it is speed. The path is clear, but it just takes time and being patient is not my strength. As one of our board members always says, “It took years to get the company into the precarious position it was in, so it will take time to turn it around.”
Also the systems are generally so bad that they are literally road blocks for us every day. We have systems that can’t do basic things and because of that we leave money on the table because of our infrastructure. That’s really frustrating and we are working fast and hard to address that. We just announced that we are going to replace our home-grown traffic system with a best-in-class system, WideOrbit, and also that we have signed a deal with another company to build a new data infrastructure across both the Radio Station Group and Westwood One. The lack of basic systems and tools had been a huge frustration. We had to fix some of the core foundational issues before we could reasonably take on the execution of major systems changes, but we are doing that now, which is exciting.
Radio Ink: How is morale?
Mary Berner: I think morale is superb but that is a hard thing to measure. In our last employee survey, 92% of our employees said they are proud to work at Cumulus. Ninety-one percent believe we are changing for the better. Both these stats have remained consistent over the past 18 months. I think morale is really good now because we are able to say we turned the corner. Nothing like a business success to fuel morale. Winning always helps. I also think that they believe in what we are doing more than they did before. We said what we would do and how we would do it. We said what the impact would be and why that mattered to employees. And that’s exactly what happened. So our employees are very engaged. They believe in what we’re doing and that we can win because we are winning. That is night and day from what it was when we started this turnaround effort.
Radio Ink: How are you feeling about the Cumulus debt issue?
Mary Berner: We continue to look at options. It doesn’t affect our employees, it doesn’t affect our strategy, or what we do day to day, or our optimism about the fact we have turned the corner. It’s something however that we need to fix and we need to do that with minimal disruption and so that is what we are doing.
To subscribe to Radio Ink Magazine in time to receive our October 9 issue GO HERE. This issue also features Shark Tank’s Daymond John on the cover and our list of Radio’s Best Managers. Daymond John will be on of our keynote speakers at Forecast November 15.
92% of employees are proud to work for Cumulus and everyone outside of Mary’s inner circle is looking for another job. 40% employee turnover in 18 months says all that needs to be said about Cumulus.
I’m shitting you. None of this is true.