In the first part of his conversation with Radio Ink, Kevin LeGrett described the “war room cadence” he brought to Beasley Media Group as its first Chief Business Officer and the weekly rhythm of shared data, stripped-down accountability, and decisions made fast.
In the second half, the conversation turns to harder questions. Why radio keeps losing the national narrative despite numbers that should win any room, what Beasley’s reset year actually has to deliver before December 31st, and what LeGrett discovered when he walked into the markets and saw, up close, the distance between what the company has and what it has captured.
Radio Ink: Both you and Caroline Beasley have both called this a reset year for Beasley. This is, admittedly, a phrase we’ve heard from multiple companies across the industry at multiple points. What does a successful reset year look like by December 31st for Beasley in particular?
Kevin LeGrett: Let me be clear about what a reset is. It’s not a retreat. It’s a repositioning. By December, success is measured on four fronts: business, audience, capability, and culture.
On business, it’s the discipline I’ve built my career around—meaningful EBITDA and margin improvement, tightening pricing and forecasting, and real movement on our digital mix. We’re driving hard toward digital becoming 35 percent of our overall revenue. These aren’t slogans. They’re KPIs we manage every week—going back to your question on the war room.
On audience, the audience is there, but we’re not delivering it yet. As we continue to grow our audience, we need to ask whether we’re delivering on their expectations and really growing the relationship. We have so many ways to touch and connect with our audience. I always challenge our talent and our programming and digital teams to develop and execute meaningful engagement through all the technology—whether it’s over the air, digital, social, or video—because having that flywheel deepens the hold you have on that individual. If you’re thinking about that one person and how you can affect them and continue to build upon that relationship, success usually follows.
On capability, a sales force that’s been trained and certified on a modern tool set and operates as a true 360-degree marketing team. We want our sellers to be local marketing experts who sell audiences and integrated solutions with real attribution behind them—not spot sellers. By year’s end, those tools should be deployed and producing in all of our markets, with forecasting sharp enough that we can manage the business in real time rather than in the rearview mirror.
The reset I care most about is the mindset. By December, I want this organization to think like an integrated marketing company that owns extraordinary audio assets, not a radio company bolting on digital. With Caroline’s backing from the top, my job is simple: point the team in the right direction and give it room to run. The team running with one clear game plan can really make a difference.
Radio Ink: How has the team responded? Have you been to all the clusters by now?
LeGrett: I have, though there are a few I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with. My position is connective tissue that aligns sales, finance, content, technology, and corporate strategy so the whole company performs as one.
Day to day, that means I’m equally accountable for revenue, performance, pricing, profitability, and new business as I am for the operational rhythm that delivers it across digital, programming, and all of the great personalities we have here at Beasley. That’s what I was looking for on my listening tour through all of the markets.
What surprised me most inside the building was the size of the gap between what we have and what we’ve captured. The talent is exceptional. The connection our personalities have with their communities is even more powerful up close than it looks from the outside—and remember, during the back half of last year I was looking at Beasley from the outside. What Preston and Steve mean to Philadelphia, what Dave and Chuck the Freak mean to Detroit: these aren’t just shows people listen to. They’re relationships people protect.
That kind of trust is the most valuable asset in media. And yet a meaningful amount of that value was still sitting unmonetized—not because the assets weren’t relevant, but because we hadn’t yet aligned the team and the tools to convert across our flywheel: over the air, streaming, events, podcasting, social. That was the best news I could have gotten. Execution is exactly what I know how to fix. That’s what I’ve been doing my whole career.
Radio Ink: You’ve spent time in media outside of radio and in advertising. We’ve seen tons of data in the headlines about how radio is relevant, but the industry keeps having to keep selling that case, particularly at the national level. With national revenue as such a pressure point, if there’s one thing you could change about the way the radio industry talks about itself to advertisers what would it be?
LeGrett: Stop apologizing and stop selling reach. Sell real results.
For decades, our industry has led with faith while digital has led with data. We let a perception gap open that the facts simply do not support. Ask an agency what percentage of Americans radio reaches in a week, and they’ll say somewhere between 45 and 48 percent. The reality is roughly 80 percent weekly and 93 percent monthly: nine out of ten Americans.
That’s not a reach problem. It’s a storytelling problem. And it’s on us as leaders and as salespeople. We’ve been the best-kept secret in media for far too long. There is some great work going on behind the scenes by Amazon; by Katz Media Group, led by Mark Ray and Christine Travolini; and the work iHeart is doing with AudioGraph, that will propel our industry forward.
Here’s what I’d change: radio has always delivered unmatched scale and genuine human connection. Our talent are true companions; the trusted best friend in someone’s day. That audience isn’t being reached. They’re being accompanied. You can’t scroll past that, and you can’t replicate it with a programmatic banner or an algorithm.
Now that we’ve finally closed the gap on measurement and precision, radio is no longer a black box. We can prove foot traffic, web lift, and real outcomes with the accountability advertisers demand. Nielsen’s own data shows that radio delivers some of the highest ROAS of any medium, which is key. So the pitch is simple and confident: you can have the trust and scale of radio and the precision of digital. After 106 years and counting, this medium isn’t just surviving, it’s getting stronger.
It’s time we told that story with the confidence the data has earned us.
