YouSaid · the spoken record

Cathy Hughes

lines on the record: 52
first: 2016-09-26
most recent: 2016-09-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Oh definitely an acquired Skeel. If you allow yourself to be bogged down and lose your enthusiasm, then you're dead in the water. But if you remain optimistic, cheerful and committed to your goal, there's nothing they can stop you.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A belief in God because when you really believe in God you can believe in yourself. As I said, that day I quit my job, not knowing where the next piece of money was going to come from, where the next check was going to come from, I knew that I would be sitting here today talking to you. I believed it because I believed in the power of the Creator. And I used to never, ever give a speech or accept an award where I didn't first thank God, and I still do, but back then when I first started, they said to me nobody's between being loyal and understanding yourself in relationship to creation.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, one of the issues that has always faced entrepreneurs of color. The window. Lack of available capital for them to go into business or to maintain their business, I remember there was a bank in DC Riggs, and I had a big contract, but the payment was coming in slow. And it was so interesting because a black banker of that bank said to me, you would loan her fifteen thousand dollars to buy a car, but you won't loan her ten thousand dollars to make her payroll, and yet she has the contract showing that the money will be coming in. So often it's been easier for an entrepreneur to buy a new flashy car than has been for them to meet payroll, which is a tragedy of us not having as many lending institutions in our community as we need and want.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not just own but also the voting stock, which has again been a blessing. The same syndicated communications thirty seven years ago who sat down and showed me how to write my first business plan. They're still in business with me.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“75 stations, which was the height when we bought a package of stations from Clear Channel. 75, that had never been done in urban broadcasting before.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you had to go. And so, yes, we had to go public. We had no choice. A lot of people told us that they didn't think that that would be a wise decision for us, try to discourage us. We had a couple false starts, but it was the best thing they could have happened. And the other thing that we have done. Our company as we stay in our lane. We are not trying to open a restaurant. We're not trying to go into concert promotion. We stay in the telecommunications industry.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. My son went to Wharton and got his MBA. And walking across the campus of Upin, my son says to me, do you still believe that we have to grow or go? And I said, Of course I believe we got to grow or go. He said, then we have to go public. Because we've got to take a leap. And with the deregulation, eleven percent of all radio stations in the United States of America were owned by one company. It's kind of hard to compete when you're over here with two or three. I mean, they would come into a market. They'd have five powerhouse radio stations with one format, eliminated all the competition. So we knew that we had to grow into scale. We had to get much larger.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, if your lenders know that their money is good with you, they give you more. All right, lenders don't invest in ideas. Everybody's got ideas. They invest in you. People loan money to the person, not to the business, not to the idea. They have to feel good about you.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I realized that I could not survive with just a little thousand watt AM, that I had to grow. I either had to grow or I had to go.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just keep profitability. That's what Dr. Martin Luther King said. You just keep sweeping the floor every day to the best of your ability in one day. The world is going to say nobody sweeps a floor better than her.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I knew it. I could feel it. And that's when I was in the sleeping bag cooking on a hot plate and washing up in the public bathroom in the radio station at sixteen eighty Wisconsin. I'd felt it. I knew it. I just knew I had to hold on and when you're starting off in business have to be so very careful about who you discuss your hard times with because those who love you and care for you the most like your mother, like your best friend, they'll give you the worst damn advice in the world. You need to get a job. You shouldn't be sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag. What type of environment is that for a child?”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I used to brag to my lead investor syndicated communications. I used to say, I will be the most profitable company in your portfolio one day. And they were like, yeah, Kathy, okay, good. Okay. Great. Keep that dream alive, Kathy. I used to tell them, you will make more money off me and my company than you've made off anyone. And now this is when I'm also telling them, now I can't make my payment this month. If you think, oh, it's overwhelming. I've got all this debt. I can't sell anything. I'm working 18, 20 hours a day. Then it's too hard. You can't do it. But when you know that the day is going to arrive, when you're going to have enough money to pay everyone, that's what you have to see in your mind's eye. That's what you have to believe. And I saw that.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it started off because we did what they call a format search and we found out that what was missing in Washington DC was news talk from a black perspective What that research did not tell us, as you well know here at NPR, is the most expensive format that you can do. All right, music is one person can play the music, read the news, do everything. It's a one-person show in music When you talk about news and our talk and information, research is critical, because there's always someone in your listening audience who knows more than you. You can't do it by yourself in this form”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was running a 24 hour seven-day a week broadcasting facility with fourteen full and part-time employees, total fourteen of us and”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All I have is twelve hundred fifty dollars. I'm sending it to you as a token of good faith that I will repay you every cent that I owe you but right now this is all I have, and most of them said that they had never ever interacted with anyone who let them know up front that they could not make the payment. I think that it's the reason I've never been foreclosed on. I've never had to file for bankruptcy. And thank God I have never had a paycheck bounce. I've never had a business check nor personal check bounce because I try to stay ahead. Of the issue of not being able to pay the debt.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you have overwhelming financial obligations, the first natural human impulse is to hide, to recoil, not return the call. Well, what I have been trained to do is play offense, not defense, so I would call my lenders, and I would say, I know I owe you ten thousand dollars this month.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No one again remembered the part of the story I told you that I was just in awe of Washington DC. I'm in Georgetown. I haven't been able to move back there yet. During my struggling days I had a prime corner. You would see the president having dinner at one of the restaurants.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely the station broke us up. The debt was just overwhelming for him. He had never been an entrepreneur, never having been in business before even. So it was just me and the kid.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I lived there because I had to pay rent in Georgetown. In 1680, Wisconsin was then and still is a beautiful, valuable diagonally set on the corner piece of property made it real convenient to go to work in the morning. I walked down the hall. Wait, so”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're part of Georgetown in the highest rent district of the city, so that's why I moved into it. Wait, sorry, sorry. I moved into the radio.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'd never forgot that because that was another one of those slap in the faces. I was like, wow, she's absolutely correct. She said, yes, I couldn't believe she had said yes.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A female banker first week on the job Lydia Cologne, Chemical Bank of New York, said that she thought that her first loan her first week would be to a Puerto Rican and she probably guessed that it would be a mail because she was Puerto Rican. She said yes, and I just kept by now My presentation should have been taught in colleges because it was flawless. I mean after thirty two times of perfecting it, okay, I mean I should have gotten an Academy Award. I was so good at it. I kept convincing her. And she said something to me that I teach all my salespeople. She said, please, don't sell past the clothes.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They asked me if didn't I think that I was too young to be doing this taking on that level of responsibility? They asked me questions that had nothing to do more often than not.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had an angel Dewey Hughes and I were married at that time and he had worked at the station. So when Dewey went to the owner and said my wife and I would like to buy the station, he said, where in the world are you going to get the money?”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's what I had. There was everyone at that time senator Edward Brook had just left the United States Senate the first time since, you know, Reconstruction Day. He was black senator from Massachusetts. That's right. He was a bitter Mohammed Ali was bidding for it. Everybody wanted it. It was the nation's.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not exaggerating. It was like a charge went through me. I said, oh my goodness, this person who's a multimillionaire who I've admired, who's now probably in their seventies, is saying to me, here I'm, you know, barely thirty, that I'm smart enough to do this for them, and he's challenging me if I think I should own part of their station do it for myself. I say, thank you, Lord. I hear you. I hear you. I literally. Literally put all my papers in my case and skipped, not walked, skipped down the hallway from the board meeting. And they're like, what just happened? Did she have a nervous breakdown or something? I knew what I was destined to do.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I said to them that that's not the responsibility of a general manager, that I will do that if you give me an equity position in your company. And one of the members said to me If you think that you're smart enough to own a radio station, you should do it for yourself. We're not giving you any equity in our station. He was being facetious, but I took it verbatim seriously. I was like, oh my goodness, he was right I should do it for myself.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. They hired me to get it on the air. Then they hired me to run it. Then they ran out of money. So they told me to shop a package for financing.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, they wanted this dark signal. But they had spent their money in all the wrong places. They approached me and offered me double what Howard University was paying me, but more importantly they offered me the opportunity to build a station from the ground up.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not at all. Not at all. There was a group of investors called the Washington Broadcasters and 32 board members and investors. They included some of the most distinguished black and white Washingtonians that had tried for well over a decade to get a signal that was dark back on the air. They had gone through millions of dollars and they could not get this signal on the air.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh yes, absolutely, but it was strictly word of mouth. And it went from like number thirty six in the ratings to like top five. And then when I left we were number three.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interestingly enough, my first audience was gay, predominantly gay. I put the first openly gay air personality on the air at Howard and almost lost the top of my head because of it. So the gay community absolutely loved the quiet storm, and then the black community migrated to it.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With the selection of music. Before hip hop, if you were going to be successful in the world of black music, you had to tell the story with your music. And so all I did was weave those stories together.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was simply recognition of the fact that the city had a sizable population of single unattached human beings who still wanted to feel good about a Friday night or a Saturday night. All they were missing was, you know, the entertainment. So I structured a format called the Quiet Storm.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first thing was to create structure. So I realized that the first thing they needed was an understanding of the entrepreneurial opportunity given them.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, oftentimes people ask me if I had anything to do over what would it be? It would be to have more children. It was easy with him. Remember, I told you I started off taking him to college with me. So he had his first little tuxedo before he was out of grade school because he was my date. I took him everywhere. I had a sleeping bag in my office. We'd have dinner together, we would do his homework, then I put him in the sleeping bag until it was time for me to take him home. I didn't know anybody, I didn't have anyone to leave him with.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely and the fact that the then Dean was a big fan of my work ethic. He said, you need to seek, can you teach these kids how to work like you folks from Nebraska work? I always believed that rising at 4 a.m. and then getting dressed and leaving by five fifteen, five thirty for the office, that was just my lifestyle. And staying late, I have been reared to believe which again so critical for entrepreneurs. That you don't stop based on what the clock says, you stop based on the accomplishment of the task.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the It played One night they did in 18 minute long piece of Pharaoh Saunders, and I think he held the note the entire time. Okay. All right. 18 minute jazz song. All you heard was this one. And I was like, I can't sell this.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, totally and wait, during my whole duration in the nation's capital, Italy gotten better. I've gone from watching a black mayor get elected to watching a black president get elected.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually put in a letter to my mother that my eyes were tired at the end of the day of just staring. It was I was in awe still am, to be very honest with you. I mean there's no city like Washington, DC in the whole wide world.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in it, I told her that my eyes actually were tired at the end of the day staring at the greatness of black people. I had never seen so many wonderful people of color doing so many wonderful things.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And got lost. I can't tell you how many times I would go out New York Avenue and get lost or I'd go out a street that's name changed. I ended up in Virginia some morning. He's trying to get to Howard.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, Tony Brown, an African American host of Tony Brown's journal, comes to town. And said to me, You're wasting your talents in Omaha, Nebraska. You need to be where you can really have an opportunity to do what you want to do, which you knew was radio. And years later, he was offered the opportunity to establish the Howard University School of Communications. He became the first dean. And he asked me if I was interested in coming to Washington, DC.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was very blessed, and I say this to young mothers, it's easy to be a teenage mama when the baby's still in infancy because all they do is eat, go to the bathroom and sleep. That's all they do and cry a little in between. And so I could take him to class with me. So”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, but I'm third generation entrepreneur. So I grew up having to work in a family business. A hundred and ten years ago my grandfather started a school after being the first black to get his ED comparable to a PhD, and then my father was the first African American to graduate from Creighton University with a degree in a counting. He opened up a tax service and I was in charge of the Prentiss Hall ledgers, which were all the tax regulations that changed every week. I was typing at ten years old, I was taking shorthand by the time I was twelve and having to be proficient at it because I was a staff person. My family kept imposing upon me to come to work, okay? So even though, you know, pregnant is sixteen, a mother at seventeen sounds like, how did you do it financially? Well, I was already working.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Arrested Development No question about it. I went into a state of shock, but I realized that I had a mission, I had an obligation to someone greater than myself. and I was determined that he wouldn't be a black statistic. I was determined that he and I would not grow up in the public housing that I had grown up in. I was determined that he was going to have an opportunity, which meant that I had to be very serious of purpose while I was still a young teenager, a child myself.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First sexual experience I'm in the doctor's office he tells me I'm pregnant. I said I couldn't be. I've only had sex one time. He said I hate to surprise you, Kathy, but it only takes one time. God arranged it that way.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the 1950s exactly. And so they thought I had a pipe dream. My nuns at my school described it as delusions of grandeur. Okay. Told my mother that she perhaps should seek counseling for me because I had this vision of being on the radio and people hearing me from coast to coast.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I grew up in a household where there were six of us, one bathroom, and I did my radio show every morning in the mirror with a toothbrush. And no matter how many blows my brothers and sister would, you know, heap upon my head when I finally opened the bathroom door so they could get ready for school. I never came out of that bathroom every morning until I finished my radio show. Everyone thought at that time there was something wrong with me. I mean there are no black people in radio, particularly no black women, because again, remember we're isolated in the middle of the United States.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From childhood. It's so interesting when I go back to the high school that I graduated from that every single solitary week send a note home to my mother saying she talks too much. I'm like, I'm practicing for my future career.”
2016-09-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Radio One: Cathy Hughes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT