Sandy Thomas, Production Director, WXDJ-FM, Miami, Florida, and Owner of Sandy Thomas Production
He's not a twenty year veteran of radio, but he's in the 11th rated Miami market. Outside of college radio, his experience barely spans five years, yet he has already left the DJ's chair for the full time production gig and has started his own freelance sweeper/ID company. Our interview with Sandy Thomas didn't reveal a story about high tech studios, top rated radio, and a six figure income. Instead, we got a good glimpse of radio production in the trenches and a story about how passion and determination have carved a bright future for one of our colleagues.
Sandy: I went to school in Gainesville at the University of Florida starting in 1982. That's where I took my first broadcasting course, so you might say my radio career started there. From that point on, I knew what I would be doing for the rest of my life.
R.A.P.: After going the college station route, would you recommend it to someone wanting to get into radio?
Sandy: I suggest to anybody wanting to get into radio to go to a college where you have a radio station. You can acquire three or four years of experience before you're even out in the job market. Then you can walk into a medium or small market, get a job, and be solid. That's the problem with a lot of people that go to a broadcast school. Even after six months at a broadcast school, you still don't have the fundamentals to get a job.
I was fortunate to be in a situation at the university where I was around a commercial station. The university owns it, but it's run like any other commercial station. You have a Traffic Director, a Program Director, salespeople, and so on. The only part of the station that's run by college students is the announcing staff. Everybody else is on salary. Usually a college station is some 200 watt FM playing whatever you want to play. WRUF is formatted. It pumps a hundred thousand watts. There are spots and promotions, and the FM is the number one radio station in Gainesville. When you're in that environment for 3 years, you come out with some pretty solid experience.
R.A.P.: What did you do at WRUF?
Sandy: The AM was a beautiful music station and the FM was rock. I could never get on the FM because I had a heavy New York drawl, so I was on the AM. I could never convince the Program Director to put me on the FM, but I did production for him. I wound up doing production for both the AM and the FM, and did middays on the AM for about two years.
I stayed in that production studio every single night making air checks. I'd get home at about four in the morning. I think people starting in the business need to know that it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of time to grow. You probably improve about one notch every six months.
R.A.P.: What happened after college?
Sandy: I left Gainesville in 1984 and went to Miami to try and get a job. I couldn't find one. I got a few offers in some small towns, but I wasn't ready to do that. I was determined to try and break into the Miami market. I went back home to New York and started sending tapes out.
Getting my first job was a real long process. I bought a little Radio Shack mixer and made a little disc-jockey booth in my room. I would practice for about five hours a day, every day. I wasn't a nut or anything like that. I had my friends, I hung out, and I had my side jobs at restaurants or whatever, but I couldn't get a job -- I sucked. So, I just sat in that room every day and played disc-jockey. I'd do breaks and listen to radio a lot.
I think the best education in radio you can get is to just listen. Listen to the TV. Listen to national commercials. Listen to the inflections. Listen to radio. Listen to how disc-jockeys speak and be conversational. It's so ironic that we strive, in this profession, to just be who we are. What you want to achieve on the radio is just to be conversational, just to be yourself; but once you get in front of that mike, it's Mr. Disc-Jockey. If you just relax and talk, you're fine, but we get so uptight in the beginning that it takes a career to get to who we are anyway.
My parents would say, "Go out!" I'd tell them there was no way I was going to make it if I didn't practice. I'm going to have to practice. Finally, I got a little hit up in West Palm Beach. It was at WSBR, a little AM station just outside the Miami market. I interned at a couple of major stations in Miami, but as far as my first real job offer at a commercial station, it was WSBR in 1985.
R.A.P.: Tell us about your internships.
Sandy: I had one internship at Magic 102 helping out the morning guy. While I was interning, I would constantly try to get on the air. The PD at that time was Bob McNeal who is a big time country consultant now.
My other internship was at WSHE in Miami. I was like a production assistant there. I was filing tapes and stuff like that, but I started to progress. I started doing tags and even some full spots. Their morning guy was Jim McBean, and I think I attribute my mike technique to him. "Eat the mike," he used to say. I asked him how he got that nice delivery on the air, and he'd say, "Just get up on it and eat the mike." Watching and listening to him definitely affected my style.
R.A.P.: Can you recall any special thing you learned during your internships that has stayed with you?
Sandy: I really learned about being thorough and checking my work while I was at WSHE. Rick Peters, the Vice-President of Programming for Sconnix, was the Vice-President of Programming for TK Communications at the time. TK owned SHE and Rick officed there. I definitely owe a lot of my success in my career to Rick because of the help and the recommendations that he gave me. He also gave me my first real scare, you might say, in radio. I can't remember what I did exactly. I think I had put some test tones on a cart with a commercial, and that fired another cart... Whatever it was, it was really stupid. Rick heard this on the air and came in with this look on his face and said, "If you ever do that again, you'll never work in radio in this market again!" He wouldn't let me do production for about 2 weeks. It teaches you that in this profession you have to be really thorough. You can make a little mistake as a secretary, not to play down the job of a secretary, but mistakes on our part show more than a mistake that you might make on a piece of paper, like a grammatical mistake.
Everything in production has to be a hundred percent. If you give ninety percent, that other ten percent isn't going to do it. You always have to be almost perfect in what you're doing. I think there's a great demand in our jobs to be very alert at all times. You never hear about your work when you're running at 100% perfection, you only hear about it when you're at 99%. When you do everything right, everything is just normal. Nobody notices. It's when you make that one mistake that everybody notices. That can be a pretty stressful thing if you're not ready to tackle that as a responsibility from day to day.
R.A.P.: So did you go directly from internships to WSBR?
Sandy: No. There was a duration of about a year and a half between SHE and WSBR. I spent about a year and a half in my room. That was a gig. I should put that on my resume'. It should read something like, "From 1982 to 1983 -- ROOM!" What did you do in your room? I was like Production Director, Program Director...
Eventually I got the gig at WSBR. I was there for close to a year and ended up doing middays. Then I decided to send an air check to Hot 105, using their call letters and playing their music. I sent it to Duff Lindsey, who was the PD after Bill Tanner. The station was pretty hot at that time. I got home one day and got a call from Duff saying he wanted to talk to me. That really was my first break.
R.A.P.: What was the production situation at Hot 105 when you got there?
Sandy: Bob McKay was the Production Director. I was hired to do overnights. It was in July of 1986 when I got hired. As over-night jock, I was called on to do production when the Production Director was out. I did overnights for about two and a half years. Towards my last seven months, I came off overnights and went to production. I always had a strong desire to do production. At Hot 105, I had all this equipment around me and had a chance to really try to perfect my skills and improve. I would come into work a couple of hours before my air shift and sit in the production room and do my production, and then I'd do more. I'd practice doing sweepers and drops and all that stuff. They were terrible back then. I wanted to have a sweeper company back then, but my skills weren't there. It just wasn't happening. We're talking 1986, so I was about 23.
R.A.P.: How did the move to WXDJ happen?
Sandy: I was hired at Hot 105 by a guy named Chuck Goldmark who was the GM at the time. He left about a year and a half after I got there to buy WXDJ. When I was let go at Hot 105, I called Goldmark. After a week, I crossed the street to WXDJ. I started in February of 1988 as Production Director.
R.A.P.: WXDJ, at that time, was on the Wave satellite format. How did that affect your position as Production Director?
Sandy: There were no jocks. We were live in the morning and had a news guy and one production guy. It's a really unique situation, being at a station that is on the satellite. You don't have any jocks to do production. There's just you. So you're really pressed to be diverse in your styles.
They gave me a little budget to bring in outside voice talent, but the station was brand new and there wasn't a lot of money. That was a difficult time, from a creative standpoint. It was also difficult to do contesting because you didn't have jocks to give things away live. They wanted the station to have a yuppie image, and they didn't want it to be like your typical radio station. They still wanted to do contests, but they wanted to do them in a way that seemed like you weren't doing a contest! They wanted to give away prizes, but they didn't want to say, "Be caller number ten right now!" They wanted to do it in a classy way. So there was that constant creative pressure to be thinking of ways to do things that would appeal to these yuppie guys listening to the station.
R.A.P.: When did WXDJ dump the satellite?
Sandy: We abandoned the Wave format in September of '88. I started doing middays as well as production. You talk about responsibility -- I was responsible for my airshift, I wrote all the copy, I wrote all the promos, and I produced them. I was there until about 10 o'clock every night. I had no assistant and no Continuity Director.
R.A.P.: When did you come off the air?
Sandy: I came off the air about seven months ago. It stung in the beginning, but I do swing. I go on the air when someone's out. If I really wanted to go back on the air, I could; but man, they pay you a lot of money to do spots! I can't believe how much.
I did a commercial once for Burdines. They're a lot like a Macy's. The first session I did for Burdines took me about a half hour. They were TV spots. I did these different tags, and it came out to about seven TV spots, but I only laid down about twenty seconds of copy. So afterwards, I asked the person that set me up with the gig, "How much am I gonna make on these spots?" She said, "You'll make fourteen hundred." I said, "Fourteen hundred??!! Do you know how many hours I've got to work to make that kind of money at the radio station taking bullshit from Account Executives?" So, I decided it would be worth my while to perfect that end of the business from a logical and a financial standpoint. I asked myself, "What do you want to do? Do you want to travel around the country being a disc-jockey, or do you want a little more stability?"
I think if you want to get the most out of something, you've got to give it 100%. To give 50% on the air and 50% in production is going to get me 50% in return. I'm going to try to get into a national arena, and the only way I'm going to do that is to put 100% into my production. I definitely miss being on the air though. I'll always have that in my blood.
R.A.P.: What help do you have now that WXDJ is off the satellite?
Sandy: I've got the jocks, and I have a girl that comes in and writes, but she's only part-time. Still, she's a tremendous help. She writes a lot of the specs. I was doing all the writing, but now she writes and I edit. Anything that's substantial, that's definitely going on the air, I'll do completely; but as far as specs go, I'll get the copy back from her and go over it. If there's a problem, I'll edit it. Because of the ratings, the agency side of the business is at a low point, so we're doing a heavy blitz locally and, in turn, that means a lot of specs. We do about fifteen specs a week.
R.A.P.: That's a bunch!
Sandy: It's too much, but I think you've got to be humble about it. You can't be stomping your foot and going into the GM's office saying, "This is bullshit." I think in our job, there are a lot of things you've got to swallow. There are times when you're justified to stamp your hand, but you're the only guy that really understands most of the time. You have to work in production to understand it. So, it's difficult to go to the GM and tell him it isn't right for salespeople to come to me five minutes before air time with a tape or whatever, and expect the GM to understand. He doesn't really know what it feels like. Even though you're telling him, he'll never know unless he's a Production Director for five years. I can tell another Production Director, and he'll know, but it's the same with the Sales Manager -- All he knows is that he's dealing with a budget, and he doesn't want to hear what you've got to say, even though you might be right. There are a lot of things you have to swallow. Of course, there are times when you've got to put your foot down and say, "Hey, it's got to go this way, and this is the way it's gotta go," but there are going to be times when you're going to go home and have a couple of cocktails.
R.A.P.: What's the studio situation?
Sandy: There are two studios. One studio has an 8-track Otari, the MX-70. Then there's a 2-track, an MTR-10. We have a Yamaha graphic EQ, Yamaha reverberator, Yamaha SPX-90 and so on. That's the studio I work out of. The other one just has two 2-tracks. We use that one primarily for dubbing.
R.A.P.: Any keyboards or samplers?
Sandy: Not yet, but I'm purchasing a sampler for my company this week, now that you mention it. I'll be using it for the station's production, also.
R.A.P.: What have you got in the way of production libraries?
Sandy: We're using Sound Ideas sound effects and Production Gardens out of Texas. There's no doubt about it, Production Gardens has got to be the best buy-out library I've ever had. There are eight CD's, and I think it's a total of 350 bucks. One CD has all kinds of stingers and stagers and whatnot, and then there are 30 and 60 second music beds. It's definitely the best buy out I've ever had. That's not our primary library, though. We also use Vortex out of Nashville. This company primarily does jingles. It's the Patrick Creative Group in Nashville. They did the "Heartbeat of America" jingle.
R.A.P.: Do you see a trend in using several small libraries over one large one that you lease for several years?
Sandy: I think so. That's what we're doing. My preference is to go for more than one library. If the station is budgeted for it, I would go for having a couple of libraries.
R.A.P.: Any thoughts on stretching the life of a library?
Sandy: Sometimes, we think the listener is thinking like us, and they're not. I think I could probably use the same music bed on two commercials on the air, and the listener might not even notice. I would notice, and the PD would notice, but I think the listener wouldn't notice. Of course, we still want to do what sounds right, and we know that isn't right because you want to set each advertiser apart.
I think sometimes you can also use the same music for a long time. We'd get sick of it after a year, but your listeners wouldn't notice that. They wouldn't say, "God, they've been using that bed on that commercial now for about a year!" There's no way because they're not listening the same way. Take a record on your playlist, for example. You're playing that record every single day, and I remember when I was a jock I'd say, "Get this song out of here. I've heard this song every day!!!" Just when you're starting to get sick of it, the listener is just starting to hear it.
R.A.P: Do you have a studio at home?
Sandy: No, and I don't have any overhead either. I get the job done, though. I'm in a situation where I like the environment I'm in. I'm comfortable, I'm making decent money at the radio station, and I'm doing a lot of outside voice work. I could do it tomorrow, though. I could get the backing and have a studio in downtown Miami tomorrow, but I'm in a situation that's working. I have an agreement with the General Manager, and he lets me run the company as long as I get the job done. It would be different if he told me, "Listen, when you're at this radio station, it's this radio station and not Sandy Thomas Productions." Then I'd have no choice, but he makes it easy for me. He's great. His name is Tony Novia. He's 28 years old and he's got to be one of the youngest GM's in a major market ever.
Tony is a good example of never knowing where someone is going to turn up. You should try to get along with the people you work with. It's a real small industry, and you never know when someone is going to show up. This guy was a van driver at Y-100 about five years ago. Now think about it: You could have been a jock at this station at the same time he was the van driver in the promotions department. It could have been like, "Hey, you $#&@! idiot, get me the T-Shirts!" or whatever. All of a sudden, you're a disc-jockey at XDJ, and here comes your General Manager who used to be that van driver five years ago. You never know where guys will turn up. He progressed to Vice-President at Y-100 and then came over to XDJ.
Anyway, he gives me the freedom and latitude to work my company and the radio station. I can't do it during business hours, but I can do it as long as I get the job done (at WXDJ). So, I'm not really pressed to go out and get my own studio and leave the station.
R.A.P.: When did you start doing sweepers for stations?
Sandy: Like I said, I started with the idea back in 1986, but it was about two and a half months ago when I said, "OK, I'm gonna start doing this. I'm going to get a logo, and I'm going to really go after this." The first station I sent my demo to was the first station I got a call from. That was WDVE in Pittsburgh. I've been getting a lot of response to the demo. I've just recently expanded it. I was doing just AOR, but I've expanded the demo to include CHR and A/C format presentations as well. There's a different approach to each format as far as your attitude and inflections go. It's an art. It really is an art. That's why there are only so many guys doing it.
R.A.P.: Two months into the sweeper business, what markets have you landed?
Sandy: I'm on WZEW in Mobile, Alabama. I'm in Muncie, Indiana, and I'm going to be doing a station in Austin, Texas. After this week I'll have about seven stations. I mailed out to 41 stations, and I've had a lot of stations call me back saying they wanted to use me but couldn't do it right now because of budgets. I approached a guy in Canada that wanted to use me, but I'm going to have to wait until later in the fall to do it.
R.A.P.: That's a remarkable ratio considering the number of demos you mailed out! The demo itself is short, sweet, and to the point. Was that your intention?
Sandy: Yes. I don't think you should put all of a one minute commercial on a demo. You should build a collage of just five or ten seconds of each spot. Let 'em want a little more -- That's the way I feel.
Also, I think you've got to pull yourself away from your demo a bit when you're producing it. You get sick of your demo. After hearing it a hundred times, you start to get picky -- that inflection isn't right or this sounded too forced. I played the demo for a guy over the phone yesterday and pretty much sold the package over the phone. I listened as I played it and said to myself, "This thing is starting to sound like shit." After it was done, the guy loved it! He said, "Man, that was great. Send me a rate card. We're going to be working together!" That's when you've got to set yourself away from the demo and say, "Hey, this guy's hearing this for the first time; I've heard it a hundred times." If you don't pull yourself away, you might change the demo when it's just fine as it is.
R.A.P.: What have you learned about being a Production Director in these first few years of your career?
Sandy: Nowadays, I don't think Production Directors can limit themselves to just worrying about the copy and producing a good commercial. Production is now such an integral part of the radio station that the Production Director has to be able to think like a programmer, too. We play too big of a part in the programming and the sound of the radio station. I think there should be a really tight bond between the Production Director and the Program Director, maybe lunch once a week or whatever.
I also believe the Production Director's position is one of the most stressful jobs at a station. Think about it. As the Production Director, you touch every department. In a way, you're almost the nucleus of the radio station. You extend to more departments than any other department. The Production Director is responsible for the jocks, making sure the jocks do their production. He's responsible to the Program Director, making sure the promos are done. He's responsible to the General Manager -- why is there a discrepancy on the log? He's responsible to the account executives, each and every one of them. What I really think is that each radio station should have a therapist for the Production Director!
R.A.P.: What do you contribute your early success to?
Sandy: I feel natural in the studio. I feel like I've always belonged there. I have such a love and a passion for it. I believe that is where success is.
Some of the jocks at the station hate production. They hate it! I'd give them a spot, they'd do it, drop it on my desk, and it would be a half ass job. I'd go into the PD's office and she'd say, "Well, you've got to motivate them." I just looked in her eyes and said, "Listen. You can't put passion in a man's heart if it's not there to begin with. If it's not there, it's not there." I think it's the same with jocking, sports, or anything else you do. If it's from your heart and there's a passion there, and you have a little bit of talent and want to do it, you're going to be successful. I've got a deep, deep passion that has never once left since I took that class in college. I've been at my work for five years now, and the passion is still the same. The fire is still burning... it roars.
Our thanks to Sandy for this month's interview and best wishes to him and Sandy Thomas Productions for a prosperous future!