Kim Komando, Saturday 10:00am-1:00m

Kim’s weekly three-hour call-in talk radio show is heard (via her own national radio network called WestStar) on over 450 stations. In addition, she does a Digital Minute radio feature five days a week; has written nine books about life in the digital age; sends out 5 million e-mail newsletters weekly; and authors a widely syndicated newspaper column, which also runs in USA Today.com. She does all of this, while raising a son and operating a growing media empire, with her husband and associate, Barry Young.

“I am relentless in my pursuits,” says Kim. “It’s a lot of hard work, but when you dig what you do, it makes it a lot more fun.”

A pioneer in marketing and training for home computers, recently won the 2007 Gracie Award, voted by Talker’s Magazine “Woman of the Year” and the answer to a question in the game Trivial Pursuit, Kim has evolved into a national digital guru. “It’s not about techies and computer-troubleshooting anymore,” she says. “It’s now about a lifestyle – the lifestyle of a digital age.”

No overnight success

Kim has built a media legacy driven by her passion for “all things digital.” Born and raised in New Jersey, her father was a successful businessman. Her mother was part of the team that developed the UNIX operating system.

Business and computer technology were a staple at home. She fondly remembers: “When my father would ask me what I did in school, if I didn’t have anything noteworthy to tell him, he would make me read an article in the Wall Street Journal and then report back to him what I learned.”

It might not have been as much fun as playing with Ken and Barbie, but it made a lasting impression on Kim.

She graduated from high school at 16 and Arizona State University when she was 20. By then, she had set up a successful business, training people to use their computers.

“I’ll never forget one of my first classes. It had about 20 people in it, and in the front row was the president of a bank and next to him was an 8-year-old. I told the class to turn on their computers, and the kid leaned over to the bank president and said, ‘It’s that switch over there…’”

That business made Kim realize just how universal the computer age had become. She began envisioning her empire, which would come in less than 10 years.

After stints at IBM and AT&T in sales, Kim joined Unisys, selling mainframe systems to big clients, including Motorola, Hughes and, in particular, Honeywell. The latter was embroiled in a lawsuit with Unisys when Kim got the account.

“It was assumed I was going to die on the vine,” she remembers. But Kim sold Honeywell a system for $12 million, cash.

Setting sights on national radio

In the mid-1990s, as her show began to grow, she set up WestStar TalkRadio Network with Barry.

Says Kim: “In order to take a radio show national, you start with the big networks like ABC and CBS to see if it is what they want. It was 1994 and the guy at ABC told me a syndicated show with people talking about computers would never work. This was in 1994!”

Programmers at CBS Radio were even less enthusiastic. She laughs: “They told me computers and the Internet were a fad; it would never go. They said computers are like the pet rock.”

Convinced a national audience existed for her show, she and Barry forged onward–station by station, syndicating them with their firm, WestStar. Kim’s audience grew steadily. Today, it has over 425 radio outlets and close to 10 million weekly listeners. The company now also syndicates other national radio shows.

Kim and Barry built their first studio on a shoestring in 1994. Today, they operate from a 6,000-square-foot state-of-the-art facility in Phoenix, with six studios and 30 employees. The show airs weekends for three hours, receiving 50,000 calls per hour.

Among Kim’s pursuits has been a healthy balance of work and motherhood. In 2000, her son, Ian, was born. Until recently, he attended pre-school classes at the office with a state certified teacher.

“Being a mother is the greatest thing I have ever done,” says Kim, reflecting on her years of success. “It is better than anything I have done in business. Ian and I are very, very close. We spend a lot of time together. I had to figure out how to be a stay-at-home mom, and still be at work.”

Meanwhile, Kim and Barry are focusing on their growing business and their growing son.

“I know this stuff; I just do,” says Kim. “I have worked in computers all my life. I got my degree in computer information systems, and when I was in school, I learned to think like a computer. They would say, ‘If you do A and B, then C will happen,’ and you can figure it out from there. You learn to think in a linear way, and I do that in my real life. So, it just all makes sense to me.”

And by the looks of her success, it makes perfect sense to the rest of America, as well.

To contact Kim Komando, visit her website, click here.