Those are fine points, and I've lived variants of your experience as both owner and manager.
The worst case was an AM / FM combo in a Top 15 market that had been bought by a flamboyant executive who filled the non-broadcast owner's head with big margins and quick profits. The owners were in a low margin business where 0.5% was a good margin, so hearing about 30% margins really got their attention.
By the time I got there, they had lost about $900,000 over a 5 year period and the stations were so degraded there was seldom a week that the FM could stay on for more than 4 days and the AM lost time almost daily. It took $400,000 to fix, including about $100,000 to redesign and re-tune the directional. A year later, the combo was cash flowing at around 40% and continued to grow, but it was very costly to get to a turn-around.
And you can't "go sell some ads" when you are last in the market and there is no response to advertising. Which brings up the issue of the proposed format on these Houston signals: Tejano stopped being a viable format in the market more than a decade ago; the lifestyle group is now very old and there is practically no new music. When I go fishing, I find better results if I put bait on the hook; this format has no "bait."
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