As a journalism student at UNC-Chapel Hill in the late ’80s, Hite left a $7-an-hour job for a part-time position at a radio station that paid half that.

It turned out to be a good move. Hite is still in radio today, writing and broadcasting “The Susan Hite Show,” which airs Sunday mornings here and in six other Clear Channel markets on the East Coast. For a while Hite worked for free — just to get on the airwaves.

“I’m not dumb,” laughs Hite, of Apex, who also owns Susan Hite Resources Inc. “I gave the radio station what it needed to justify letting me do what I do. It’s worth more than the dollars.”

So what does Hite do? In addition to the radio show, which shares stories and strategies for living a good life, corporations nationwide hire Hite to help their employees become more “personally grounded.”

Hite teaches strategies. Her “Train Your Brain” series helps employees deal with broken relationships, financial struggles, medical crises, career change and more.

“People say, ‘If you do good things, good comes back to you.’ But you’ve got to prove it in corporate America. They don’t hire me because I’m coming in to make their people feel good; they want results,” Hite said of clients that include Redken, Cisco, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, McDonald’s, Sylvan Learning Center and SCYNEXIS.

Reporting not enough
Years before Hite started her own company, the trained journalist spent time in both radio and television. In the early ’90s she worked for WRAL’s 24-hour News Source. She was working one night when big tornadoes came through Raleigh. As she reported on the destruction and then moved on to sports, it felt horribly wrong.

“I didn’t just want to inform; I wanted to encourage people,” Hite said.

“I wanted to be able to talk to the victims and say, ‘You’re going to be all right; here are three things you can do.’” Eventually, Hite ended up working as the marketing director of Mitchell’s Hairstyling. Almost by accident, she discovered that when employees were happy and settled in their personal lives, they were much more interested in work and revenues grew.

“What I learned was not everyone grew up like I grew up,” said Hite, whose father is a Methodist minister and mother is a nurse. “Not everybody knew how to be positive when things weren’t so positive. I’m not talking about spinning it; I’m talking about embracing the brutal facts with hope and with optimism. I saw people who didn’t know how to deal with change or with their personal relationships and that meant they didn’t perform well at work.”

“It’s kind of hard to be excited about the next promotion at work when you can’t balance your checkbook,” Hite continued. “I said, ‘What if we put together this personal development program that would enhance professional growth?’”

That’s how Hite’s “Train Your Brain” series was born in 1994. Hite began teaching the concepts at local vocational schools. She wasn’t promoting Mitchell’s, but when students found out Mitchell’s utilized the strategies, they wanted to work there. “Our retail per designer average tripled,” Hite said. In 2001, Hite left Mitchell’s to start her own company, with Mark Mitchell’s blessing. In fact, he became her first client. Word spread and Redken signed on, then others. By 2003, Hite had more work than she could handle.

“I had so much business I had to raise my rates because I couldn’t say yes to everything. The problem was, my family life was really starting to suffer,” said Hite, who has a son, 15, and a daughter, 12. “I didn’t want to say no, but I couldn’t work all the time for free either. I had to make a living. So I thought, ‘What do I know? I know radio.’”

Launching the show
Hite figured she could do an hour-long radio show for free and folks could get the information for free too. She figured local stations would love the idea. She was wrong.

“It was a lot harder than I thought. I knocked on many, many doors. No one wanted to take a risk,” Hite said. Finally, after “wearing out” the program director at 93.9, he told her to come in one Sunday morning in 2003 from 6 to 8 a.m. “He said, ‘We’ll flip a switch and you see what you can do for two hours,’” Hite recalled. Hite did her best job. After she left, the switchboard lit up with calls. But no one told Hite until months later. Finally, in 2004, Clear Channel gave Hite a Sunday morning slot. In 2006, Clear Channel executives decided to air her show in its other markets — Richmond, Delaware, Greensboro, Charlotte, and Philadelphia.

And Hite also started getting paid, in large part because radio executives put more value on the show once it followed conventional guidelines. Hite asked one of her clients to sponsor the show and others followed.

“Within a year’s time, this little one-hour show was making over $250,000 a year for Clear Channel,” Hite said. And she has a lot of big-name listeners, including Chuck Amato, former NCSU football coach, and Sylvia Hatchell, UNC-CH’s women’s basketball coach. Executives at Lenovo and Cisco are also avid listeners.

“The listeners are the whole reason I do the show,” Hite said. “Like Alba the single mom who went back to school and is graduating this year from community college, and Hong, who lives in Apex, who translates the show every week and has 300 people listening in China.”

Hite’s been doing the show for five years now, but still gets butterflies before going on-air. “There are plenty of times when I don’t believe in me, but I believe so much in the message that I get up there and just pray that I won’t get in the way of the message.” Hite’s goal is to return full-time to radio one day and scale back on her corporate business. “Here’s the vision for the show: I’d like for it to be Monday through Friday, three hours a day. I think we’ve pretty much put everything into place to make it happen.”

If it does happen, and Hite gives up much of her business, she’ll likely lose some income, but that’s OK. “I grew up watching my dad work in the church. I learned a long time ago that money’s not the most important thing.”