KELOWNA, B.C. – Independent radio station owners are a dying breed.
Okay, maybe that’s a little harsh. They’re not really dying, they’re more of a selling breed. Single-station owners often find the going too expensive – and the offers to buy their station too lucrative – to resist, most often selling to a larger radio group.
Not so with Silk FM and its president Nick Frost (right). The radio station celebrated its 20th anniversary on June 21st and the recent Spring ratings book places it at the top of the heap in the seven-
station Kelowna market (five private, two CBC).
In that 20 years, Silk has kept the same basic format, appealing to the gentler sex, dominating the 25-54 women market for all of its two decades. And Frost says he and Silk are not going anywhere. He does not plan to sell.
Getting the license and launching wasn’t easy in 1984-’85 (we still don’t know what a bridge rectifier is) but the 20 years since has been rewarding, Frost says. What follows is an edited transcript of last week’s chat between www.cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien and the president of 101.5 CILK-FM.
Greg O’Brien: Take me back to 20 years ago. How many tries did it take you to get a license?
Nick Frost: Three times. My first application was when I was 29 and didn’t really know what I was doing but I learned pretty quickly and then the second time, they said the market wasn’t big enough for an application like ours. The third time they granted it.
It all took about 10 years.
GOB: So you got the license in 1984?
NF: We got it on the 21st of September, 1984… and we launched the first day of summer, 1985, six months to the day later.
GOB: What were some of the challenges you had to overcome to get the thing launched?
NF: The hardest part really was to get the shareholders and investors to say they would support me – and that had to happen before we even went to the hearing. That was the big challenge because we had to raise what was a lot of money at the time for nothing more than really a dream.
Then of course after I got the license I had to make sure that all those who had said they would invest came through – and not everybody did. But I think I got about 90% of them to come through, so I would say the hardest part was to get the money, to get the support from the community because I was not the favorite going in. I had never owned or started a radio station before.
I think it took me about three years to gain all the confidence of the shareholders I would say.
GOB: How much did it cost to launch a radio station back then.
NF: Well, it cost about a half a million dollars, getting the transmitter and the studios and a little bit of operating cash. Of course nowadays, I guess that would be closer to a million I suppose.
GOB: What sort of background in radio did you have at the time?
NF: I was a radio announcer and I had managed an FM station in Kelowna for about eight years (CJOV-FM, formerly owned by the Brown family, which also owned CKOV-AM and since sold to Mel Cooper and then Cooper sold to Jim Pattison). 
GOB: Were there any sort of start-up headaches or problems that you can now look back at fondly or not-so-fondly?
NF: I never knew what a bridge rectifier was before we signed on, but apparently we had a faulty one and it kept going off in the summer heat. I’m looking up at my shelf now and I have what’s left of a bridge rectifier and I remember that it was a couple of days after we had signed on, I was at a party with one of our shareholders to celebrate and I came out to the car for some reason and… we were off the air.
I just about fell over. The bridge rectifier had gone – we didn’t know we had a problem at the time…
GOB: What is a bridge rectifier?
NF: I don’t know! I couldn’t tell you exactly what it is, but it’s something that could blow up in lightning.
So, I had to leave the party right away, grabbed a friend to come and I had to drive all the way up to the transmitter. We were up there for hours and I had to be talked through fixing the transmitter by long distance telephone.
And we had the normal challenges of starting a station from scratch. One of the lines I used in my press release was that everybody predicted we wouldn’t make it and they said that there weren’t enough elevators in town for a station like ours…
GOB: A shot at your music.
NF: I think so. And our competitors thought we would fail but what’s interesting is they’ve all gone. We’re the only ones left as an independent. The rest have all sold out – the TV, the newspaper, all the other radio stations, they’ve all sold out to larger companies. We’re kind of like where, among the high-rises in the big city there’s a little old lady in a house who hasn’t sold, that’s sort of us, I guess.
GOB: So what’s made you stick around then? I’m sure you’ve been approached to sell the place?
NF: I love the business. We have great staff and we’ve stuck with our format, adapted as we went along. The station is doing well, so my favorite line is ‘I’m going to keep doing it until I get it right and I don’t know how long that’s going to take.’
GOB: Describe the typical Silk FM listener.
NF: We’ve always skewed women. We’ve always been driven by women and that’s why we chose a name like Silk. We’ve always had a very strong female audience. Our core demo is 35-44 and women 25-54 has always been very strong – we usually do so well in that demo that we end up winning adults 25-54 often.
In fact, I went and looked at the ratings over the last 20 years and 18-plus, there’s no station that had a greater ratings average than Silk FM. If you take all the ratings for the ratings periods from the time we signed, on, 18-plus, Silk is ahead of any other station.
GOB: What have been some of the other things that stick out over your 20 years of running Silk? What about the fires from two years ago? The coverage of the huge fire had to have been a high point for you, if not for those in the community who lost their homes.
NF: It was a remarkable story. In fact, I live very close to the lake and I had a float plane come up every morning and pick me up and I’d fly over the fire and report with my cell phone and my digital camera every morning and we broadcast throughout. All of the stations did a great job in covering that fire but the staff here did an absolutely fantastic job.
GOB: What do you see in the future for Silk? Do you have any expansion plans?
NF: We applied for repeaters for Vernon and Penticton but the CRTC turned that down this time, but you never know. Sooner or later, Kelowna will be large enough for more stations probably, in about three to five years with any luck.
So, sure, we’ve always been interested in expanding. I think you know we have www.castanet.net and that’s been something we expanded.
GOB: Explain that a bit more – how castanet.net came about and what it does.
NF: It’s a web site, it’s a local portal… You could call it an online newspaper but it’s a remarkable source of news because it changes whenever its needs to.
For example, when we had a tragedy with a houseboat two weeks ago, we had 77,000 visitors that day because they could get the news when they needed it as opposed to television or one of the newspapers. At six o’clock we put video of the sinking on our site and that evening, we had 8,000 visits to the video.
(Castanet.net) was very very helpful during the fire because we could tell people exactly wh
ich houses needed to be evacuated because you did not have time to list all the houses on radio and that newsprint couldn’t do because it only comes out once a day.
So, on the radio, we referred to castanet whenever we had a bulletin and that way people could find it whenever they got to the web site.
The synergies between Silk FM and castanet.net has been very interesting and very positive.
