Sit Down With Success is a feature of the Huntsville Business Journal on entrepreneurs and their keys to success. This month’s individual is Penny Nielsen and his success with Mix 96.9.

If you’ve lived here for any amount of time, chances are you’ve heard Mix 96.9 (WRSA-FM). Featuring a variety of music from the 80s-now, it’s been part of the Huntsville-area soundscape since 1965.

Founded by Redstone Arsenal chemical engineer Paul Nielsen because there weren’t any radio stations on base that he liked, he chose the callsign WRSA as a nod to Redstone Arsenal. Using a telephone pole as its first tower, it ultimately became the first Class C 100,000 watt radio station in the city. Its transmitter now sits in the middle of a 128-acre farm at the highest point in Morgan County, broadcasting from its office at 8402 Memorial Parkway SW in Huntsville.

WRSA began as an easy listening station (Beautiful 97) in November 1965. It shifted to soft rock (Lite 96.9) in 2000, then adult contemporary as Mix 96.9 in 2015. One thing remained the same throughout, however: it was, and is, a family business.

After moving here from Wyoming, Penny Nielsen joined the station in 1978, beginning by scheduling commercials and later moving into billing and other roles. She and Paul later married. After Paul Nielsen passed away in 2001, Penny took the helm as station owner. Under her guidance, it continues to thrive. She and General Manager Nate Adams Cholevik sat down with me in the control room for a discussion about her experience in the business.

D: Tell me a little about the history of your business.

P: My husband built it and it went on the air in 1965. It was built in his garage and he used an old transmitter that he bought from, I believe, Redstone Arsenal at one time…he was a chemical engineer, so he had no idea what he was doing (laughs). It’s been in the family since then.

He passed away in 2001, so it just kind of fell in my lap. But I was used to everything everyday. D: What’s your favorite thing about being a business owner?

P: Being able to hire people that are creative and love radio…impacting people’s lives and having fun while we’re doing it. I will say this…we’ve had longevity with people that we hire–they seem to stay. They don’t go away, and that’s good. It’s wonderful when you’ve got salespeople that stay 35 years-plus. Of course, most of them have retired by now. Even the on-air people [have been] here 12-13 years. Nate, he started when he was just a kid out of college and he’s been here 25 years. That speaks a lot to how we deal with people here. We love having people stay…it’s a family. It’s another extension of my family, I should say.

D: How do you balance your personal and professional life?

P: [Laughs] I’m raising two granddaughters, and having a family like this, it’s easy because if somebody is sick, somebody’s not feeling well, we kind of juggle around–everybody pitches in to help each other.

D: Did you encounter any significant obstacles starting out when you took over the business?

P: Not really, other than people just saying “what’s going to happen now? You’re going to have to sell.” And we didn’t do that. We kept it.

D: What would you consider to be the greatest challenge of owning a business and how do you manage that?

P: Just making sure everybody’s happy and making sure everybody’s got what they need…if we’re happy and we’re doing what we need to do, we’re gonna make the client happy. And we’ve done a good job with that. We’ve got a lot of longevity with clients too.

Q: What advice would you give to someone considering starting their own business, radio or otherwise?

P: Just be willing to put what needs to be done into it. Be aware that it’s not going to be 9-5 or 8-6 or whatever. It’s a 24/7 thing if you own your business.

You know, they say broadcasting school is good, Nate came from broadcasting school. But there’s a lot of people who work here who’ve never been in a radio station before, didn’t go to a broadcasting school. They kind of learned on their own. It’s what you put into it. The people here are creative and that’s what it takes to be in the radio business. You have to be creative, you have to have a good voice obviously to be on the air, you have to be able to ad lib, which is something I’m not very good at. But there [are] certain traits you must have if you’re on the air. Other than that, just be willing to work and be willing to pitch in when needed, and this team here is very much that way. If somebody needs something, somebody else can always help.

D: What would you say is the secret to your success?

P: Just trying to make your employees happy and give a good product, making sure our clients are happy. Nate, anything else?

N: Being able to have people and yourself adapt to the changes. Things change. The music changes, the equipment changes, you know, and [you need to] have people on hand that can adapt to new things and be accepting of new things…I think that’s a big key, at least it has been over the last ten years. Technology has changed so much.

D: Your station plays in a lot of business. Did the pandemic impact your business noticeably?

P: Oh, definitely. We are known as the ‘At-Work Station.’ So that made a big difference and you couldn’t blame the advertisers because they were having trouble keeping their doors open. Yes, it had a big impact on us but it’s coming back.

N: [Referring to the previous question about challenges] Everybody says Covid is the answer now, but how does Covid affect radio? That’s exactly how Covid affected us, when restaurants and furniture stores and all that were closed during the pandemic and they’re going “well, I’m not going to advertise right now because I can’t even open my doors.”

So that’s how it impacted radio, and the other side of that was your at-work listeners. You know, alright, now going to the doctor’s office was…you’re sitting in your car waiting to be called in and there [were] no waiting rooms, and no furniture stores open, that was huge for us with our listeners and office spaces. That was probably one of our biggest challenges, I would say, over the past three years.

Looking back over my 25 years I can’t think of anything that was that much of a struggle…we’re having a hard time reaching our listeners because they’re not going to work and we’re having a hard time with our advertisers because they’re not advertising because their doors are closed right now. Well, that’s two big problems in the radio world.

D: Did you use the PPP program to stay afloat?

P: We had some PPP. It was a godsend.

N: It helped us big time because we saw a significant hit in revenue.

P: But we kept everybody working.