The Wausonian interviewed The Wausau Business Show hosts on their own show
And in turn, they interviewed The Wausonian
This morning the Wausau Business Show will air the episode I appeared on. Much like the story about Northern Lights Sauna Wausau, I tried something creative and pitched interviewing the show’s runners, Ryan Gallagher and Paul Grinsel, while on the show itself.
Knowing it would be on radio, I tried to punch it up a little to make the show entertaining.
We spoke for an hour, and I know it needed to be edited down to roughly half that, so I have no idea what it will look like. But it was a lively conversation.
So feel free to tune your radio to 98.9 FM or wait a few hours for the podcast to appear on iTunes or Spotify.
I thought the Wausau Business Show was worth covering because they’re trying something different: long-form interviews with business leaders and others around the area.
It’s actually surprising to me that no one else has really pushed something like this. I did something similar in the late 2010s to early 2000s with the Keep it Wausome podcast. It ran for 56 episodes, and episodes ran for around 1-2 hours. I moved on, so I’m glad someone else took the mantle. (You can still find them on this publication, though I’m not sure there’s a good way to find them other than by searching Keep it Wausome on the main page. The video versions can be found on the Wausonian’s YouTube channel.)
The meantime, here is the story that resulted from the interview (I’ll link the podcast when it’s live):
Apparently I’ve been in a mood to change things up lately.
So when I reached out to the Wausau Business Show about doing a story, I pitched it like this: What if I came on the show and interviewed the new show’s hosts — Ryan Gallagher and Paul Grinsel — on the show itself? It would be a great way for the show’s audience to get to know Gallagher and Grinsel themselves, since they’re always interviewing other people. Luckily Gallagher and Grinsel are pretty creative themselves, and so they readily agreed.
The show has been making a splash since it launched its first episode in April, with Wausau native and Miss America winner Grace Stanke.
Since then, the duo organized a tour bus to take Wausonians to Red Lobster in the Fox Cities — for those not in the know, Wausonians have been clamoring for a Red Lobster since at least the 1990s (a ‘97 issue of City Pages questioned whether a Red Lobster was ever coming to town) and it’s become one of Wausau’s principal memes. And they organized the city’s first August Kickbusch event, which featured music from Brad Emanuel (who was also interviewed on the show) and a contest to kick cans of Busch.
The show hasn’t entirely focused on business leaders — long-time WAOW anchor Melissa Langbehn or Grand Theater Executive Director Sean Wright have appeared on the show, for instance. They’ve also taken a strong stance on keeping the Monk Botanical Gardens name (the gardens board had announced earlier this year they were changing the name to Wausau Botanical Gardens, which the board has since rescinded after wide community outcry).
And it represents a different kind of reporting than the community has seen before. Opening up a platform for long-form interviews with business and other area leaders in the city is a different model, and gives listeners a deeper look at some names Wausau area leaders are probably familiar with.
Gallagher is the CEO of Rocket Industrial, and Grinsel also works there as the Associate Director of Sales. How do they find the time to run a radio show on Bull Falls Radio? What motivated them to start the show? What are their plans for it? These are some of the questions I had in mind when I walked into the studio.
A new kind of show
Gallagher and Grinsel stepped out of the conference room from a business meeting, and that’s where we would be heading again. The Rocket Industrial conference room has become a makeshift radio space with a rack of audio equipment and three microphones set up around the table. The microphones have the Wausau Business Show local, a WBS that looks 80s retro.
Many of the interviews happen there in the studio/conference room but they also will take the show remote sometimes, Gallagher explains. Often it’s a matter of how cool it might sound. One episode was recorded on the top of the Dudley Tower, for instance. Another interview with a new clothing shop was done in the shop, with customers talking in the background. “We’re not just saying that, we actually go there,” Grinsel says.
The show started with Gallagher and Grinsel in Gallagher’s garage talking about economic development. Gallagher had a long career in radio, starting at WIFC around the same time as popular radio host and photographer Dave Kallaway. Gallagher produced all the audio that goes between the host and the commercials, and he put together Kallaway’s first audio package for the station.
Both the radio and podcast elements were important to the duo, Gallagher said, so partnering with Civic Media helps them get the podcast out while running the show on Bull Falls Radio at 8 am. “[The station] is right on the corner, it kind of reminds me a little of Northern Exposure,” Gallagher says. “It’s quaint to kind of be on that local station.”
Grinsel says they’re a little old school in that they wanted to be on the radio too, which has a higher barrier to entry than starting a podcast.
While it might seem like a lot to run a thriving business — Rocket Industrial is a packaging company that’s become a major employer in Wausau — Gallagher says they just wake up a little earlier in the morning and go to bed a little later at night to fit everything in. They try to record episodes and bank them so they have episodes available ahead of time to ensure they can meet the deadlines of radio.
The Why
Once Gallagher and Grinsel — who went to John Muir Middle School, Wausau West High School and even UW-Madison together — decided to start the Wausau Business Show, they spent about two months gathering equipment, setting up a studio and shopping the show around to radio stations.
Once they did that, they started booking interviews.
But why? Running a large company is generally stressful enough. Why start a radio show on top of that?
“One of the reasons we started the Wausau Business Show is we have a number of friends who don’t live here anymore,” Gallagher says, “and we wanted to give them a commercial for why they should move back to Wausau. Like Paul said, we’re involved in economic development, and we’re really passionate about that and attracting people to live in Wausau.”
The show covers that in a way that other publications don’t - by providing a long-form format for people to get to know the guests a little deeper than they might in other formats.
Are people responding to it? “We’ve never heard anything bad,” Gallagher says, then jokes “and that means either we’re doing a good job or no one is listening. Just kidding, we have millions of listeners,” he further jokes.
But that audience may actually be growing. Gallagher says they’ve already had people in the industry approach them about bringing the show to other markets.
“We’re exploring that, Gallagher says, “because if we can get the word out about about Wausau, great.”
Read next: