I am a 30-year music industry veteran and an entrepreneur.
In 1995 I founded Radio Facts, a trade publication covering the Black music and radio industry, and I have run it continuously ever since — through the collapse of physical media, the arrival of streaming, and a long stretch where the industry pretended none of it was happening. Before that I was Rap Editor at Urban Network, worked in radio, and worked at a record store in Atlanta back when record stores still moved units.
Along the way I have run businesses online and offline, hired people, been hired, been paid what I was worth, and been paid a lot less than I was worth. All of that turns out to be relevant here.
Why this site exists
Thirty years of running my own businesses taught me to watch money closely. And the thing I have watched over and over — with my own money and with other people’s — is how much of it just LEAKS out.
Not big dramatic losses. Leaks. A subscription nobody canceled. A fee that showed up one month and never left. A price that went up three times and nobody said a word. Taxes overpaid because who has the time to go back and look?
Here is what I have come to believe: most people are not bad with money. Most people are BUSY. And a whole lot of companies count on exactly that. It is not a conspiracy and they are not hiding anything — they just know you are probably not going to check. Most people don’t. So the money stays with them.
I check. I have been checking for years, on my own accounts and for people who asked me to look at theirs, and I have hundreds of stories about what I found. People getting charged for things they canceled. People paying for services they forgot they had. People who never knew a fee was negotiable because nobody ever told them it was.
That is what this site is. Not theory, not somebody’s financial philosophy. Stories, as I go through them, about what I did, what I said, who I called, and what I got back. Some of it worked. Some of it didn’t. I will tell you which was which.
If there is one thing three decades in business taught me, it is this: if you don’t see your own value, somebody else will determine it for you, and it will always be a LOT less than it actually is. That applies to what you charge for your work. It also applies to what you let a company keep that was never theirs to begin with.
How I write here
Everything on this site is something I dealt with personally or something I could verify. When I name a company, I am describing my own experience with them on a specific date. Policies change and your results will be different from mine.
I don’t write about services I have never used, and I don’t publish anything I wouldn’t tell a friend across a kitchen table.
If I get something wrong, tell me. I will fix it and say what changed.