At 22, Oprah Winfrey got her big shot, anchoring the six o'clock news in Baltimore.

But she cried on the air, and after fires she brought families blankets. Management decided she was too emotional for news, took her off the desk, and buried her in a 5:30 a.m. slot while her contract ran out.

Sixteen months later a new manager gave her an hour of morning talk nobody wanted. The same instincts that got her demoted won her that show, and made her one of the most successful women entrepreneurs in history.

In today's issue, I share how Oprah owned that flaw and turned into a $3.4B brand along with:

Enjoy this story about the one thing worth owning …LG

Oprah Winfrey learned to read before she was three, on a farm in Kosciusko, Mississippi, in a house with no plumbing. Her grandmother taught her out of the Bible, because the Bible was what her grandmother could read, and soon she was standing up in church reciting it back. The other children sang. She talked.

Her grandmother was a maid, and so was her mother, and so were all of her aunts. Nobody around her imagined a different ending for a girl born where she was born. One afternoon she stood watching her grandmother hang the wash, clothespins held in her mouth, and heard the whole plan said out loud.

"You better watch me now cause one day you're going to have to learn how to do this for yourself."

She was four. Something in her said no.

THE SECOND CHANCE

She was sent north to her mother in Milwaukee at six. A cousin raped her at nine, the abuse continued by other hands until she was fourteen, and she carried it for twelve years without telling anyone.

At fourteen she got pregnant and told nobody about that either. She had been running away from home, and her mother had already decided to place her in a juvenile detention facility. They went, but the home was full, and the staff told her mother to try again in two weeks.

Her mother would not wait. She sent her to her father, Vernon, in Nashville instead.

She arrived still pregnant and still hiding it, in the house of a father who had not seen her in years. She gave birth to a boy who died in the hospital weeks later.

Vernon ran a strict house. He required book reports on a schedule and would not accept a C. When the baby died he told her she was getting a second chance. If he were her, he said, he would take it.

She did. She became an A student, and before long she was one of two students chosen to represent Tennessee at a national youth conference. A local radio station called to interview her about it.

THE ANSWER NOBODY HAD TAKEN

Later, the radio station needed a contestant for the Miss Fire Prevention pageant, and the DJ who had interviewed her suggested the kid they had talked to. No Black girl had ever entered, let alone won.

In the question round they asked every contestant what she wanted to be. The girl before her took nurse. Someone else took teacher, which was the answer Oprah had planned to give. That morning the television had happened to be on and she had seen Barbara Walters, so she said journalist, making it up on the spot.

She won. When she went back for the prize the DJ asked if she wanted to hear her voice on tape, tore a sheet off the AP wire, and handed it to her. He played it back, then got his boss, and his boss got his boss, until six people stood at the booth window watching a high school girl read the news. They hired her that day at $100 a week. She was 16.

Two years later the local CBS station started calling. She kept saying no, because her father wanted her to finish school, until a professor told her this was exactly why she went to school, so that CBS could call her.

At 19 she became the first Black woman to anchor the news in Nashville.

WHAT IS AN OPRAH

Years later, a Baltimore news director screened more than 100 audition tapes and picked hers. On August 16 she debuted at WJZ-TV co-anchoring the six o'clock news, at 22, for $22,000 a year.

The first thing they asked was that she change her name. Nobody would remember Oprah, they said, and it would make the promos easier. She had never really liked her name, but she was upset they asked her to change it just for the promos, so she said no.

So the station built the campaign around the question instead. “What's an Oprah” went up on billboards and buses across the city.

Anchoring did not work for her. She got too close to the people she covered, and management told her she was too emotional for news.

On April 1, the general manager called her upstairs to say they had bigger plans for her. The bigger plans turned out to be a 5:30 in the morning slot, reading brief news updates before dawn.

The way she read it, they wanted her gone but did not want to pay out the rest of her contract. So they left her down there and let the clock run.

THE HOUR THAT CHANGED IT ALL

Sixteen months later she was still reading those updates. Then a new general manager arrived, Bill Baker, whose wife had been watching Oprah and told him there was something magical about the way she wore her heart on her sleeve. He was building a morning talk show, and he wanted her to host it.

On August 14, People Are Talking premiered, an hour of guests and a small studio audience that the station handed to her and a co-host named Richard Sher. One of the first guests was Tom Carvel, the ice cream man, talking about his flavors.

Before the hour was over she knew this was the work she was supposed to be doing. It had felt like breathing. Everything that had disqualified her from the news desk, the crying, the meddling, the inability to stop feeling whatever the person across from her felt, was not a liability in this chair. It was the entire job.

Her job ended that day. And her calling began.

Before long the show was beating Phil Donahue in Baltimore. Donahue had invented the daytime talk show and dominated it nationally, and a local program with two hosts and a small audience was outdrawing him in his own slot.

Even so, she had been in Baltimore eight years by then, and she could feel she had stopped growing there.

BRIBING HER FIRST AUDIENCE

A producer she had worked with in Baltimore moved to Chicago and put Oprah on her own demo reel. Dennis Swanson, the general manager at WLS-TV, saw it and called her in to audition.

In his office she raised the objections before he could. She was Black. He told her he had figured that out. She was overweight. He told her so was he, and that he did not want her changing anything about how she looked. If he had wanted glamorous, he would have hired somebody else.

Everyone else told her she was walking into landmines. Chicago belonged to Phil Donahue, the biggest talk show host in America, who taped his show in that city. Beating him in Baltimore was not the same as beating him at home. Her boss in Baltimore called her upstairs, asked who she thought she was, and told her she was going to die on the vine.

For weeks they worked the sidewalk outside the station telling people there was coffee inside, it was warm, and they could sit down for an hour. A good share of the early audience was people with nowhere else to be on a January morning in Chicago who came in to get out of the cold.

The show went from last to first in its slot, and she was soon drawing about 100,000 more viewers than Donahue.

THE ONE WOMAN BOOK CLUB

Winning Chicago made her a local star. What made her a national one started with a book.

She finished it that day, went back before the store closed, and bought every copy on the shelf. Then she crossed the Wacker Drive bridge and handed them to strangers until she had given them all away. There was no book club yet. This was the only distribution she had.

Oprah had been looking for a way into acting. When she learned that Steven Spielberg was directing the film, she decided she was going to be in it somehow, and she started telling people so.

A casting agent called about a movie called Moon Song. She knew what it really was the moment she walked in. They had her read for Sofia, who is married to a man named Harpo. Harpo is Oprah spelled backwards.

Then months of nothing, and an agent telling her real actresses were auditioning and she had no experience. Then Spielberg called.

The Color Purple opened that December and drew eleven Academy Award nominations, one of them hers. An Oscar-nominated actress with the top show in Chicago is a national product, not a regional one.

OWNING THE BRAND

Given her expanded popularity, the station wanted to lock her in. WLS offered a new four-year contract with $30,000 annual raises. But something about it bothered her. Three separate ABC executives stopped her to say what a good guy her agent was, and praise for your agent from the people across the table is information.

So she asked around. Roger Ebert, the Chicago film critic, had a syndicated show of his own and understood the economics. He told her a fixed salary would hand away everything if the show went national.

She fired her agent and hired a Chicago entertainment lawyer named Jeffrey Jacobs, who told her to stop negotiating the raise. She should not take a salary at all. She should own the show.

Nobody had ever told her that was available to her.

Owning it meant her company would produce the show, carry the costs, pay a distributor to sell it to stations, and keep what was left. That is the reverse of how television ran, where the distributor owns the show and pays the talent. To finance it she pledged three years of the show's expected earnings, at a time when she was worth about $500,000.

Federal rules then barred networks from syndicating their own programming, which is how Jacobs got ABC to hand the rights to her. He took the show to King World, the company that had put Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy into stations across the country.

She named the company Harpo. Sofia's husband in the movie, her own name backwards, and the name a station had once told her nobody would remember.

On September 8, 1986, The Oprah Winfrey Show went national. That was the structure. The ownership itself took two more years.

SAYING THE UNSAYABLE

A few months later she was hosting a show on sexual abuse when she stopped and said it about herself.

"I speak from personal experience because I was raped by a relative."

She was nine. He was nineteen.

She had not planned it, and she had never said it in public before. She said it because a guest was sitting in front of her and she wanted that one person to know she was not alone. What came back was mail from people saying it had happened to them too.

Donahue could book the same guests and any network could buy the same slot. What none of them could copy was a host who had already told her audience the worst thing that ever happened to her, and the trust that created.

Within a year she had displaced Donahue as the top talk show in the country. The first two seasons of syndication grossed $115 million.

In July 1988 Jacobs closed the other half. Harpo bought ownership and all production responsibility for the show outright from Capital Cities/ABC, which made her the first woman in history to own and produce her own talk show.

THE OPRAH EFFECT

In September 1996 she started handing out books again, this time to a national audience.

Oprah's Book Club was the Wacker Drive bridge with 20 million people on the other end of it. Her first pick went from roughly 68,000 copies in print to 750,000 between the announcement and the broadcast. Across the original run, 70 selections sold about 55 million copies. Business Week estimated her power to sell a book at 20 to 100 times that of anyone else in media.

Earlier that same year she had found what the other edge of it cost. On an April 1996 show about mad cow disease she said a guest's testimony had stopped her cold from eating another burger.

Beef prices hit a ten-year low within two weeks, and Texas cattlemen sued her for about $11 million. She moved the show to Amarillo and taped there for five weeks while she sat in federal court, and on February 26, 1998, the jury cleared her.

One sentence from her was being blamed for moving a national commodity market.

By then the platform was making other people's careers. Phil McGraw, Mehmet Oz and Rachael Ray each went from guest on her show to a syndicated show of their own.

At its peak the show reached 48 million Americans a week across 150 countries and generated around $300 million a year. All of it hers.

TIME TO O.W.N. IT

What she did not own was the air it all ran on. She had put three other hosts into syndication, and every one of those shows, hers included, aired on channels that belonged to somebody else.

The OWN Network launched on January 1, 2011, a joint venture with Discovery that took over the Discovery Health channel and arrived with a full slate of new programming and enormous expectations.

Then the losses started. They reached roughly $330 million by May 2012, and USA Today ran a headline saying she was not quite standing on her OWN. She has called it the worst period of her professional life.

Harvard's president called during it to ask her to give the commencement address, which struck her as absurd given that she had just stopped succeeding. She chose a shower over a bag of Oreos, stood in it a long time, and got out having decided to turn the network around and then go to Harvard and say so. Tyler Perry brought scripted programming, and OWN was cash-flow positive by July 2013.

Today Oprah Winfrey is worth $3.4 billion, built across 25 seasons, more than 30,000 interviews and 47 Daytime Emmys. Forbes made her the first Black woman billionaire in America in 2003, and she got there on a show she was handed only because a Baltimore station could not afford to fire her.

Oprah Winfrey did not build a company by becoming someone else. She built it by taking the parts of herself that other people called a problem and putting them at the center of the business. Here are 3 lessons founders can take from how she did it.

#1. Lean Into Your Being

Baltimore pulled her off the evening news because she got too close to the people she covered and could not keep the feeling off her face. She did not fix any of it. She found the format where feeling everything was the job, and she knew inside one hour that she had found it. The trait that disqualified her from one chair made her the best in television in another.

ACTION: Stop sanding down the trait a boss, an investor, or your category calls a weakness. Go find the room where it is the entire point, and build there.

#2. Control the Narrative

A few months into national syndication she told a live audience she had been raped at nine, because one guest in front of her needed to hear it. It bought her a level of trust no competitor could buy or copy. It also took the secret off the market. When a relative sold the same story to a tabloid for $19,000 four years later, there was nothing left to sell.

ACTION: Name the fact about you or your company you are hoping nobody digs up. Tell it first, in your own words, on a stage you chose. Whoever says it first decides what it means.

#3. Share What Moves You

She read The Color Purple in a day, went back and bought every copy in the store, and handed them to strangers on a bridge. A decade later the same instinct, pointed at a national audience, moved 55 million books. Her product was never the set or the time slot. It was that whatever hit her, she had to go make other people feel it too.

ACTION: Notice what you cannot stop recommending. Build the part of your business that puts it in other people's hands. An audience can feel real conviction, and it can always tell when there is none.

Oprah Winfrey built one of the largest platforms in television history. The Oprah Winfrey Show ran for 25 seasons and 4,561 episodes, reaching an estimated 48 million Americans each week and airing in 150 countries. Along the way, the show earned 47 Daytime Emmys. And her influence extended far beyond television. Oprah's Book Club helped sell an estimated 55 million books, turning her recommendation into one of the most powerful forces in publishing.

Oprah sat down at Stanford Graduate School of Business in April 2014 and walked through the decisions rather than the highlights. She covers the Nashville job she almost turned down, the Atlanta offer she declined because a boss told her she did not yet know what she did not know, the meeting where a general manager explained why a man with a mortgage deserved more for the same job, and the interview that made her rewrite how the show got made. Love how it shows that can choose your craft over money and still make big money. Watch here:

Oprah Winfrey on Career, Life, and Leadership (Stanford GSB)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DlrqeWrczs

Need help with your story? I got you.

Send an email to [email protected] and someone from my team will circle back with you.