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One of the most excruciating decisions we'll make is the one that changes our life by moving on. When I made the decision to sell my first radio acquisition in beautiful Coastal Northwest Michigan, I felt a torrent of emotion for the great memories, and even greater performance of my incredible staff. Over the years we owned the station, the 100,000 watt CHR averaged a 19-share in a 21 station Arbitron market, exceeded even our wildest sales goals, and was personally visited by everyone from the CEO of Nobel Broadcasting San Diego, to Joe Parish at WPLJ New York. "106 KHQ" had been the subject of articles spanning from the Detroit News to Inside Radio and Radio & Records. Radio fans knew about the station across the Great Lakes region and beyond.
At 32 I had taken the plunge; leaving the embrace of a corporate job in Dallas, leaping into ownership where, to be frank, I was over-credited with our station's largess. In truth, what I had managed to accomplish was the collection of an incredible core team thatcame out of larger markets for the scenery and standards we built together on the shores of Lake Michigan. Most of that team went on to distinguished leadership positions and on the day I turned over the keys, I remembered the old biblical saying: "faith is the substance of things hoped-for, the evidence of things not seen." I was moving on because I knew there was little else we could accomplish together; I feared eventually my team could get bored with my leadership, and that going out at the very pinnacle of any young owner's dream, regardless of market size or company scope, was the only way to leave a halcyon era in one's life.
Today in the super-charged world of troubled companies and distressed practitioners of the unknown, we're hearing more questions about the uncertainty of "leaving" balanced in some instances with the false comfort of "staying." It's here where our advice is tenuously offered, since as an entrepreneurial outlier we must try extra hard to present advice as a peer resource from a peripheral contributor and not a peripheral opponent. Caution: when you make a major career change, there has to be some kind of connection. A guy we know tells the story of a Beverly Hills attorney who wanted to become a potato farmer in Oregon! Now there's a guy who was born to lose.
Sometimes "moving on" means literally moving on: following the right signs that will lead us to the next chapter where what we've known, what we've learned, will magnify our experience and success. I've often uttered this caveat when encouraging someone to move for the right reasons:
Never attach too much finality to any decision. The irrepressible Mae West once quipped, "Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before." The changes in our lives may not be the ones we've hoped for but they can usually help us grow. Yet others practice the delicate work of waiting and carefully doing nothing.
Each of us is the sum of his or her experiences, not in the Freudian sense that we are victims of them, but because we rely on our experiences as the primary source of our wisdom, unless of course we lead a life of self denial. Complexity implies meaning. Sometimes we're afraid of it.
Moving on is inevitable when there is only one real alternative. It's not a retreat from defeat but, done right, an exhilarating change that grows your heart and your spirit. Everyone who exits your life leaves you with at least one gift; a book, a CD, a cat, or a lesson-learned. And, for everything we take with us we leave a little bit of us behind.
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