We’ve known them for years as some of Nashville’s top record promotion executives. In recent months, however, a number of them have moved up to new jobs as label presidents, with responsibilities well beyond the scope of promotion. They include Kevin Herring, now president of Skyville Records, Tom Baldrica, now president of Average Joes Entertainment, and Gator Michaels, now GM of Davis Music Group. All three started their careers in radio.

There’s also John Ettinger, now a co-principal in Quarterback Records and Jon Loba, now senior VP/label group for the parent company of Broken Bow Records and Stoney Creek Records. Both recently assumed those jobs, and joined several other promotion veterans who were already running or helping run labels, including Republic Nashville president Jimmy Harnen, Stroudavarious Records president Bill Catino and, of course, Big Machine Label Group founder and CEO Scott Borchetta. Other promotion veterans now running their own operations include Nine North Records and Turnpike Music president/owner Larry Pareigis, and Bigger Picture Group partners Michael Powers and Jeff Solima.

These executives say the skill sets they learned in their years doing promotion—and working in radio before that in some cases—prepared them well for their new roles, although most admit they still have much to learn. They also say the relationships they’ve spent their whole careers building with country radio increases their value at the helm of a label.

Interestingly, there’s also a marked determination among this group not to stop working records to radio themselves, even though each of the new label heads has his own promotion team. Harnen (pictured), for example, answered our questions from the Denver airport while he was out visiting stations this week. “I still travel a lot to visit radio and I am still involved at the promotion level simply because I absolutely love it,” he says.

And Herring told Stark Country point blank, “I have the title of president, but I’m still a promotion guy… I was brought in for my promotion expertise, not my running a label expertise.”

“It’s certainly no secret that country radio is hugely important in the breaking and making of an artist’s career,” says Harnen, “so whoever runs the company better have a thorough understanding of how it works.”

Perhaps because of their background, these execs all believe a label can’t put too much emphasis on radio. Says Herring, “Look at Scott [Borchetta]. The thing I always hear from an outside perspective is how much Scott works radio. He runs a big record label, but he’s a great promotion guy. That’s where the rubber meets the road, getting great product on the radio. It’s still where we make our living.

“The most important thing is having great music,” Herring continues. “But if you don’t have promotion to go with great music, that’s where you stop. A lot of great music falls by the wayside because it doesn’t get into the conversation with the right people.

“We’ve spent our careers building our relationships with radio,” adds Herring. “Those relationships are very important. Those guys [mentioned above] can pick up a phone and call most major programmers and at least have a conversation. Not a lot of people can do that.”

Baldrica did promotion for 13 years before moving over the head up the marketing department at Sony Music Nashville more recently. But even during his years working in marketing, he kept up his relationships with key country programmers, something he is likely to benefit from as a label president. He thinks promotion execs make great leaders because they have a clear “understanding of the importance of the relationship between the artist and the label and radio and the management company,” a relationship he refers to as “a square.”

“In our format specifically, so much of the marketing and the business part of our world revolves around radio,” says Michaels. “It’s not necessarily true in the pop world and other formats,” he says, basing that assessment on his interaction with promotion colleagues from other formats during his time at Warner Bros. Records. “Promotion and radio are still important [in other formats], but publicity has a much larger role because they have more access to mainstream media earlier in the life of an artist than we do. We are still driven primarily by country radio. Radio is more important to us than any other format. Because of that, the promotion guys are involved in so much more of the business than they are in other formats.”

Michaels also thinks so many former promotion execs are ascending to the top spot largely based on the key relationships they’ve made through the years even beyond radio.

“As a promotion guy, especially in the country format, you’re kind of the face of the company in a lot of ways,” he says. “If you’re the VP of marketing at Universal, you may not know all the radio guys. You may not know a lot of publishers. You may not know a lot of different artists. But the promotion guys are out there on the front lines with radio, they’re in marketing meetings, they’re in meetings with publishers, they’re at shows with other artists, and you just become kind of the natural face of the company.”

The bottom line, says Baldrica, is that, “This is still a promotion-based town. It [all] still radiates from the music and being able to get that music exposed. We’ve all been doing that our entire lives. But we’ve all had these other experiences, and we’ve all grown up to watch… how the game has changed and how the exposure mechanisms have changed and how he marketing elements have changed.

“You still have to have a great song, but there’s a lot more stuff you need to do with it,” he adds. “If you were running a promotion staff, you learned how to incorporate all those different pieces. Making this move [to president], it’s a lot of the same skills, just with a little broader responsibility.”

In next Tuesday’s Stark Country, we’ll continue our conversation with Baldrica, Harnen, Herring and Michaels. We’ll delve into some of the key skill sets they learned in record promotion and in radio that are helping them now lead labels, find out what some of the hardest things have been that they’ve had to learn or adjust to, what talents former promotion execs bring to the label president role, and whether they’ve had to fight a natural tendency to micro-manage their promotion teams as a result of their background in that area.