Date: Wed 13th May, 2009
Venue:
Number of Guests Attended: 70
A loyal and committed workforce has been the key to growth at one of the south's most successful commercial radio stations, said its co-founder.
Speaking at Insider's South East Dealmakers breakfast in Southampton, Martin Ball, managing director of Hampshire-based Wave 105, said such stability had been crucial in the face of several changes of company ownership since it was launched in 1998.
Ball said the business, which transmits across the south coast from Dorset to West Sussex, had grown by 22 per cent this year. Its audience has doubled in the past eight years to just under 400,000 listeners a week.
Today Wave is owned by German media giant Bauer, following its acquisition of EMAP's radio interests in December 2007, and has previously been owned by The Wireless Group and Scottish Radio Holdings. Yet Ball said a third of his workforce had been with the station since its formation.
"We had to create a compelling message that excited people to join us. It was important to raise the game and set new standards," he said.
"There is a real openness in the business and that culture also enables us to respond quickly to competitors. We firmly believed that if we got the foundations right then the money would follow and that has proved the case."
Ball admitted that Wave faced considerable challenges when it was launched. "One of the biggest was that we straddled the South East and South West as opposed to being based in one city," he said. "Rivals didn't give us much hope and dubbed us ‘Grave 105'.
"But we set out our stall and I had a dream and vision to destabilise the market, which is exactly what we did. Admittedly the survival phase was quite traumatic and we had to hold our nerve while we were burning cash.
"But we stuck to our guns and tried to ensure we weren't obsessed with the here and now, and that there was a constant pipeline of opportunities."
In terms of the market, Ball said Wave chose to become a hybrid of Radio 1 and Radio 2, appealing to people from their 20s to the 50-somethings.
"It was a clear BC1 social demographic, with our content 70 per cent music and 30 per cent speech. A lot of our listeners were Radio 1 or 2 listeners, too, and advertisers liked that," he said.
Ball, who prior to Wave worked for Hampshire's Ocean Radio Group, London's LBC, and was a launch director of London's Xfm, said his biggest challenge now was probably how to grow a mature business.
Asked
about the impact of the internet, he said he saw the internet as quite
complementary to radio. "Radio has a very strong future but it will
need to reinvent itself," he said.
