by Paul Henry
I had mortgaged my house, putting every cent I had into this activity and I was working as many shifts as I could, reading news and filling in for people to keep the cash flowing. There was also the matter of a wife plus two children under five and one on the way to worry about. Rachael had no idea how much money I was hocking myself up for.
There were so many technical things that I hadn’t thought of, like processing. It was all very well to have a state-of-the-art Italian transmitter, but I had to decide what kind of processing I would do to beef up the sound. Actually, first I had to find out what processing was, then decide what kind to have.
One day I got a call from one of the BSL technicians.
‘We’re up at the transmission site now,’ he said, ‘and we’ve just gone to fire up your transmitter and it’s slightly interfering with the Concert Programme.’
‘Yes?’
‘So we’re going to need to get a blocker to put on the line — an isolator.’
‘Mmmm.’
‘Well, we can rent you one for $600 a month or you can buy one for $40,000.’
‘Hang on,’ I suggested. ‘You’re renting me the spot for my transmitter. Surely if it’s interfering with another transmitter you’re renting to someone in an area you’re renting, it’s your responsibility to isolate the bloody things.’ They eventually conceded I had a point but I still had to find the money to fix it. It’s not like I had the choice of taking my business elsewhere.
I was bluffing my way through, but at the same time I did not believe it could possibly fail. With my drive and passion and energy it was bound to succeed. My dream was only to start it. I hadn’t actually imagined myself running the station day to day.
I had been keeping things reasonably quiet but there came a point where I had to let everyone know that this was happening, if only because I needed to start booking ads. I got my sales team together and held a press conference at the Solway Park Hotel and announced that Today FM was going to be launched. The poor quality of local journalism meant that came as a complete surprise to the other organisations. The Radio New Zealand station had known but hoped it was never going to happen so had been pretending I didn’t exist.
But I had to keep the fact that I had only six months of operation guaranteed a secret or nobody would have taken me seriously. I was terrified the local paper, the Wairarapa Times-Age, which had taken a slight stand against me, might find out. They didn’t.
I worked out how much we would need to bring in to cover operating costs and put together some ad packages that would cover it. They went down well and we soon had enough revenue to keep going.
I made sure we were part of the community. I wanted to get Mitre 10 in Masterton to advertise but knew my competition would say to them, ‘Oh they’re a Carterton station. They’re based in Carterton.’ To counter that, I did a noon news broadcast from Mitre 10’s shop window. I got Ricky Long, the local butcher, doing a talkback hour every morning. We had great giveaways and competitions, which had never been done locally.
Some people may have resented me. They saw me as someone who had ridden into town to suck all the money out of it. I would have been happy to do that, but the opportunity never arose.
One big advertiser had a car yard in Masterton. When we were up and running successfully, he called me into his office and implied that I was a carpetbagger and told me advertising was being discounted now — by the other station — but my prices had gone up. He just wanted to tell me off. I didn’t need this but I didn’t want to alienate an advertiser either so I sat there and let him.
‘Don’t you give five-year warranties on your cars now?’ I said as I was leaving.
‘Yes.’
‘Didn’t it used to be a three-year warranty? What if I brought the car in and it was a three-year warranty? Should I come in here and say you’re a bit of an arsehole because now you’re giving five-year warranties and I’ve been ripped off?’
He accepted that there was some truth in what I was saying and allowed me to leave his office.
Break-even point was about $13,000 a week, which was a lot for a little operation in the Wairarapa, and every month we had to toil to get there. In my head I was two different people: I was the person who was planning to sell the station or to buy other stations for the future, and I was another person who was trying to work out how I was going to handle absolute oblivion and humiliation in four months’ time, then three months’ time, then two …
But my biggest problem in the early days was what to do at six o’clock in the evening when I was completely wrung out and had no more money to pay staff but still had to keep broadcasting 24 hours a day.
I phoned Doug Gold, who had got several frequencies in the first round in Wellington and created More FM. He was a brilliant radio person and a brilliant salesman. I would go to visit prospective clients only to be told, ‘We’ve spent our entire radio budget with More FM because I got a holiday in Spain.’
‘Look, Doug,’ I said, ‘here’s the thing. You’ve got no frequency in the Wairarapa. Here’s what I’ll do for you. I will give you the opportunity to tell all of your advertisers in Wellington that if they advertise in the evening their adverts will go on in the Wairarapa. Here’s what I want in return. I want to put an FM radio in my control room and I want to switch it onto More FM at six o’clock in the evening and switch it off at six o’clock in the morning.’
‘Yeah, good as gold.’
‘Do we need to write something? Do we need a letter of understanding or something?’
‘This conversation is our understanding. My proviso is that you don’t interfere with that transmission once it’s on, so all of our ads are played there.’
‘Absolutely.’
I had a car radio installed into my rack in the control room and at six o’clock we switched on More FM. There were a couple of problems when one of the neighbours was doing chores and his lawn got mowed in stereo throughout the Wairarapa, but generally it worked like a charm.
My staff was a combination of cheap newbies who just wanted to do anything to get into radio and experienced old-timers who weren’t being paid as much as they were worth. When I needed a local newsroom, I phoned up the Broadcasting School in Christchurch.
‘Who are your best people?’ I asked, because I knew they’d all be cheap.
‘I’ve got two good people who could instantly come out of there and take a sole charge position on a radio station,’ I was told. ‘The best of the two is Hilary Pankhurst’ — who is now Hilary Barry and a network TV news presenter.
‘Right, I’ll employ her.’ She moved to the Wairarapa and all of a sudden she was a one-woman news team, starting her morning with briefings at the police station. She was an object of total contempt to the Radio New Zealand station, who soon decided she was so terrible they needed to poach her from me. I needed to lock her in for six months and decided a company car would be the thing. But I couldn’t afford to buy a car. Fortunately, it was the time of the Film Archive’s Last Film Search where people were out looking for any old film tucked away around the country. One of their number came into the station to promote the hunt and I took him aside.
‘You know what we need to do?’ I said. ‘We need to get a car, sign write it with “The Old Film Search” or something like that.’ I bought an old Vauxhall Viva at a car auction and they helped pay for it. So not only was Hilary struggling with a new job, new town and new place names, working on a WordFirst programme on an old Compaq 64, but she was also having to struggle with a company car which was (1) a total embarrassment, and (2) a Vauxhall Viva, so it hardly ever worked. She had to get the police to push start her after the press conferences.
And always in the back of my mind was the fact that my day of judgement was getting ever closer. I thought the government would advertise that the frequency was being put up for tender. Surely the Times-Age would find out about it when it was advertised in their paper. They could hardly overlook that.
I
called the staff — who were all on six-month ‘trial’ contracts — and explained everything to them.
‘There’s no obligation on me to keep going beyond the six month period,’ I said, and in fact I could have legally just walked away. ‘But we’re going okay, and I’d like to be sitting down with all of you in a couple of months and negotiating your employment from here on in. We can only do that if we win this tender. So I’m just keeping you in touch so that you will know.’
Then I called a small group of these people to my house with a couple of the others. One was a young salesman whose girlfriend worked at the Times-Age.
‘I need you all to help me disseminate misinformation,’ I said. ‘I have just stopped paying all my bills. We need the word to be out there that things are financially shaky for us and we can’t even afford to pay our bills. If that gets out, then people will think either I’m not going to put in a tender or that if I do it’s going to be really low.’
When the tender was advertised I thought there would be quite a juicy front-page story about how the new radio station, which had made such an impact in the area, was on its last legs. But no one rang. The only people who really expressed concern were some of our advertisers because they were getting such good value from advertising with us.
The tendering system had changed so that the highest tender won the contract and paid what they had bid — not the second-highest price. I tendered quite low and Radio New Zealand tender ed lower. I can only assume the misinformation plan worked because I got the frequency for what was in reality quite a reasonable price.
Then, for the first time, the prospect of running myself ragged and operating my own radio station that needed to make $13,000 a week to break even started to hit home.
I had succeeded and the Radio New Zealand station was panicked. They were selling $65 spots for something like $8. I wrote to Jim Bolger complaining that my income tax was obviously being used to subsidise what was supposed to be a commercial station. I didn’t get a reply. I’m not the first businessman that’s had the government undercut him.
Having secured the station, I wanted to get rid of it. I couldn’t manage the pace. There was a particular time where dollar for dollar we were earning more money than any other radio station in the country, so I was hopeful of selling quickly and for a good price.
Around this time I was in Wellington when I heard an ad for Bernadino sparkling wine. It was a brilliant ad, just a musical 30 seconds, but I wanted it on our station because I liked the sound of it so much. I rang Bernadino with an offer.
‘If you back up a truck to my radio station with a hundred cartons of Bernadino on board,’ I said, ‘I’ll give you a $5000 spend in the month.’ They said yes straight away. The weekend it started playing I had Brent Birchfield from Port FM visiting. He was interested in buying my station. I picked him up with Today FM playing in the car and every second ad was this fantastic Bernadino one.
‘You’ve got some big clients,’ he said.
I was in full-on sales mode. The books were in good shape. It was a good purchase for him, because it would make a key link in a small network. I didn’t downplay how hard I found the work but I thought his structure meant that wouldn’t be such a problem. He met the staff, who all behaved beautifully.
We arranged a meeting with my accountant, Darren Quirk, at the Solway Park Hotel.
‘Darren, what you’ve got to know is this guy is going to walk away owning my radio station lock, stock and barrel,’ I said on the way in. ‘I don’t want an interest left in there. I don’t want to be part of this radio station any more. So if the figures appear to be not quite good enough to you, we’ll settle for not quite good enough. You’ve got to go in there knowing this.’
Brent was of the view that he got a very, very good deal, and so he did, but I don’t think he fully appreciated how much work was involved in making the station money. I also let him have all my debtors, which is not usual with a sale like this. They were worth about $30,000 but I knew they consisted of people who owed small amounts that they were never going to pay. He bought it and walked away thinking, ‘I have stolen this radio station from this person’, but I think a few months later it became obvious to him that he had paid a fair price.
I took the profit from the station sale and immediately reinvested it, which is what I had been doing since I discovered my natural entrepreneurial instincts as a kid. My father used to say to me ‘You have to speculate to accumulate’ and obviously he was right. I would buy a business or property, add value and turn it over at a profit, then borrow more and invest in something else, all the while working in broadcasting as my day job. Anyone can do this and it’s how you make serious money — not by just making money but by making your money make money for you.
“I ONCE SPENT AN HOUR TALKING ABOUT SOLAR-POWERED, GLOW-IN-THE-DARK CRUCIFIXES. YOU MIGHT THINK IT’S EASY TO SPEND AN HOUR TALKING ABOUT SOLAR-POWERED GLOW-IN-THE-DARK CRUCIFIXES. IT IS NOT. YOU BOUGHT ONE OF THESE AND CEMENTED IT ONTO YOUR LOVED ONE’S GRAVESTONE.”
* * *
ALL OF A SUDDEN I was cashed up and out of work. We continued to live in the old presbytery in Carterton and I went straight to Radio New Zealand as a newsreader. I had done them over in the Wairarapa ratings wars, but they were generous enough to welcome me back. They didn’t even complain when I started doing shifts for Radio Pacific as well.
The thought that this was any kind of step back — from owning a successful station to being a fill-in host — never entered my head. If I had been an ambitious person it might have niggled at me, but I am not and never have been ambitious in that way.
I realised having a lot of cash was not a good thing for a person like me. I would just have seen things I wanted and bought them until the money ran out. So I spent most of the funds on a lodge up in the hills.
It wasn’t a goer. It had been half-finished by someone who ran out of money, so I got it for an excellent price. There was a big four-bedroom cedar lodge with a giant fireplace and big deck on it which was designed as accommodation. There were about 500 acres of native bush, a kilometre of roading, a dirt track and waterfalls. There were swimming holes and fantastic walks. It was very beautiful but I could see it still needed a lot of money invested in it to bring things up to standard. I knew that and I knew I was not that person.
I had someone living in a campervan up there who sort of ran it, but really Jesus was in charge and it seemed to bring out the worst in him. He was always slipping rocks onto my road or knocking over trees so cars couldn’t get through. I had fun there and the kids enjoyed it, but when there was heavy rain the road got bogged and access was a nightmare.
It had been built as a hunting lodge, but I know nothing about hunting and I don’t like men with guns. The first thing I did was erect big signs saying ‘No Hunting’ and put big padlocks on the gate, because people would drive in to hunt the wild deer and pigs. So the most obvious way of making money was never going to be open to me because I didn’t want hunters on the property. I did what I usually did: sold it at a profit and put the money into something else.
But that was a sideshow. Radio occupied most of my work hours. A brilliant radio salesman called Errol Wilkinson, who had helped me a lot with Today FM, had started working at Radio Pacific and got me in to fill in on an infomercial hour which played to Wellington. Errol sold me hard to Radio Pacific’s manager Derek Lowe, once I had my foot in the door. With its racing coverage, Pacific had now been a network for a while, courtesy of the TAB and Derek’s good management.
The infomercial hour was devoted to one person who came in to talk about often very bizarre products. I did so well that they took me up to Auckland to fill in for the guy who did the network infomercials. This was the beginning of what would be a very long relationship with Radio Pacific. I also filled in on the all-nighter, doing talkback from Wellington.
I once spent an hour talking about solar-powered glow-in-the-dark crucifixes. You might think it’s easy to spend
an hour talking about solar-powered glow-in-the-dark crucifixes. It is not. You bought one of these and cemented it onto your loved one’s gravestone. Ideally, everyone would buy one and our cemeteries would look like Hilda Ogden’s living room. I don’t know exactly how good these things were but I knew they were durable. We threw one around in the studio to prove it. That took care of three minutes. It was tough because it had to be vandal-proof to a degree, though I imagine their appeal to random burglars would be quite low. The crucifix person and in fact, all the people I had in that hour were very sincere. They had to be. Their money was on the line and this was costing them.
Around this time, in furtherance of my dream of sailing around the world on my own boat, I bought an old fishing vessel called the Clio which I kept in Wellington. It was the sort of boat that should only be owned by a diesel mechanic who can keep it seaworthy.
One Saturday morning I set out on a fishing trip with Don Rood, who is now head of news at Radio New Zealand. Conditions were not too bad — a little swell, a cold winter’s day. I had owned the boat long enough by now to recognise the exceptionally odd noises that would sometimes interfere with the usual odd noises its engine made. We were off the Wairarapa coast when we came upon a huge school of fish I couldn’t identify but that looked well worth catching. Don had his rod over the back and I was in the pilot house preparing to circle when there was an enormous explosion under the floor beneath me. It was evident from the fact that all the hatches had blown off and black smoke was coiling out of every fissure in the boat’s structure that we were in some trouble.
