Now THIS is the kind of promotion story radio needs to celebrate louder.
Cat Okegawa has been elevated to Vice President/General Manager of Ohana Media Group’s seven-station Anchorage operation, completing a remarkable climb inside the company that began only in March 2024 when she walked through the door as an Account Executive.
Not corporate executive.
Not market manager.
Account Executive.
Four months later, Okegawa was promoted into local sales leadership.
Now she’s running the market.
Read that again.
She went from selling radio to leading a seven-station cluster in a little over two years.
That isn’t simply a promotion.
That’s somebody putting her foot on the accelerator and apparently never taking it off.
And There’s Something Else We Really Like About This
Okegawa didn’t arrive in broadcasting for the first time in 2024.
She already knew radio.
Earlier in her career, she spent several years in broadcast sales with New Northwest Broadcasters, from 2007 through 2010, before taking her sales abilities into other industries.
Then radio got her back.
And apparently radio got her back at exactly the right moment.
Because sometimes leaving this business teaches you things that staying inside it cannot.
You see how other industries sell.
How other companies develop customers.
How different organizations manage people.
How businesses outside broadcasting measure success.
Then you return to radio with a much broader toolbox.
That’s valuable.
Especially when you’re about to be responsible for seven stations.
Don’t Overlook the Sales Background
Programmers sometimes don’t want to hear this, but we’re going to say it anyway:
Radio stations don’t operate on great segues alone.
Somebody has to generate revenue.
Somebody has to convince the furniture store, restaurant, car dealer, hospital, attorney, retailer and local entrepreneur that radio can move people through their doors.
Somebody has to build relationships.
Somebody has to understand what the client actually needs instead of simply selling them 30-second commercials and hoping something happens.
That’s why a sales background can be extraordinarily useful for a General Manager.
Okegawa has been on the front line.
She knows what it’s like to walk into a business and ask somebody to spend money with the station.
She knows what objections sound like.
She knows what clients expect.
And after moving into sales management, she learned the other side of the equation:
How to help other people succeed at doing it.
Now the responsibility expands dramatically.
Seven Stations Means Seven Different Promises to Listeners
This is where the job gets enormous.
A cluster isn’t one radio station multiplied seven times.
Every brand has its own audience.
Its own advertisers.
Its own personalities.
Its own programming challenges.
Its own competitive position.
Its own history.
And ideally, its own reason for existing.
The GM’s responsibility is to get all those pieces moving in the same business direction without turning every station into the same product wearing a different logo.
That’s leadership.
Sales needs programming.
Programming needs promotions.
Promotions needs digital.
Digital needs content.
Engineering needs everybody to please stop touching things they don’t understand.
And everybody needs revenue.
Welcome to the GM’s office.
Anchorage Makes This Even More Interesting
Alaska isn’t Anywhere, USA.
Anchorage radio has the opportunity — and responsibility — to sound like Anchorage.
The geography is different.
The lifestyle is different.
The weather is certainly different.
The community relationship is different.
And that makes local leadership particularly important.
A great local manager understands that the station isn’t simply distributing audio into a marketplace.
It’s participating in a community.
That’s where Okegawa’s sales experience may become especially powerful.
Salespeople who are genuinely good at their jobs don’t merely know rate cards.
They know people.
They know businesses.
They know which companies are growing.
They know who’s struggling.
They know who’s opening something.
They know who’s sponsoring the event.
They know what people around town are talking about.
That’s community intelligence.
And now Okegawa gets to apply it from the top.
An On The Dial Perspective: THIS Is What a Career Ladder Looks Like
Radio spends enormous amounts of time discussing its talent pipeline.
Where will tomorrow’s managers come from?
Where are the future market presidents?
Who will lead these stations ten years from now?
Here’s one answer:
Look around your own building.
Find the person absolutely crushing the job they already have.
Give them another responsibility.
Coach them.
Challenge them.
Give them room.
Watch what happens.
And when they’ve demonstrated that they’re ready?
PROMOTE THEM AGAIN.
That’s how organizations build leaders.
Cat Okegawa arrived as an Account Executive.
Ohana saw enough within months to move her into sales management.
Then it kept watching.
Now she’s VP/General Manager.
That progression sends a message far beyond one executive office in Anchorage.
It tells every ambitious employee inside a radio company:
The next chair might actually be attainable.
That matters.
And Now the Real Work Begins
Getting the title is the celebration.
What happens Monday morning is the job.
Seven stations.
Multiple departments.
Revenue goals.
Programming strategy.
Digital growth.
Recruiting.
Retention.
Budgets.
Clients.
Community relationships.
Competitive pressure.
And somewhere, inevitably, a transmitter will decide that today is the perfect day to become everybody’s problem.
That’s radio management.
But Okegawa arrives with one enormous advantage:
She’s already been in the trenches.
She knows what the sales staff experiences because she was selling alongside them not very long ago.
That’s something worth remembering as the responsibilities become bigger and the office potentially gets farther away from the sales floor.
Don’t lose that.
Don’t lose the connection to the people doing the work.
Don’t lose the urgency of earning the client’s business.
Don’t lose the understanding that every account matters.
And don’t lose sight of the fact that seven radio stations ultimately succeed because hundreds of individual relationships succeed first.
Listeners.
Advertisers.
Employees.
Community partners.
People.
That’s still the business.
Congratulations to Cat Okegawa and Ohana Media Group.
From Account Executive in March 2024…
to sales leadership months later…
to Vice President/General Manager of seven Anchorage stations.
That’s not climbing the corporate ladder.
Cat apparently grabbed the thing, skipped a few rungs and started running.
Now she gets the keys to the cluster.
Go make some great radio.
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