MIDWAY THROUGH her first year as president and CEO of Fisher Communications, Colleen Brown gave each of her senior executives a new pair of running shoes. Her message for the management team: “We have to get fit, be focused, move quickly.”

Brown arrived in October 2005 at a crucial time for Fisher, the last homegrown broadcasting company to own a Seattle television network affiliate (KOMO). Founded nearly a century ago as a family-owned flour mill,

Fisher Communications had struggled over the past decade, as viewers drifted away to cable and Internet competitors. Fisher had not turned a profit since 2000, and its advertising revenue and stock price tumbled sharply during the post-dotcom, post-Sept. 11 recession. It spurned buyout offers and repeatedly promised a turnaround for shareholders, even as national companies financed its primary competitors, KING and KIRO. But it didn’t work. The previous CEO, Bill Krippaehne, who held the post since 1993, was dumped in 2004, and the company desperately needed new leadership.

Enter Brown, 48, who embarked on a mission to focus Fisher on its home turf – Northwest broadcasting properties – and shed holdings that no longer fit a slimmer, potentially richer company profile.

“Fisher is moving to a pure-play broadcast company,” Brown explains in her modest office at Fisher Plaza, across the street from the Space Needle. “Our focus has been on strengthening the core, like Pilates.”

Before Brown was hired, Fisher had already started dieting. It sold two TV stations in Georgia, two dozen small radio stations in eastern Washington and Montana and all of its Seattle real estate holdings except Fisher Plaza. Still, Brown wasn’t kidding about those running shoes.

Under her direction, Fisher has begun building a mini-empire of Spanish-language television stations in Portland, Boise, Yakima and, starting this month, in Seattle – all cities where Fisher also owns English-language stations. In the past year, to launch this plan, Fisher announced the purchase of stations in Idaho, Oregon and Bellevue, Wash., as well as low-power Spanish-language stations in Yakima, Pasco, Richland and Kennewick.

Brown believes Fisher can boost audiences on these channels with programming from the popular Univision network and, she hopes, an eventual Spanish-language newscast attractive to young, Hispanic families. This is a “community service” for a new audience, she explains, which reinforces her personal belief that “local television is one of the things that knits this country together.”

WAITING TO BEGIN

Brown is a newcomer to Seattle but not to television. As a child, she remembers waiting in her family’s home in rural Iowa for the color bars on the local channel to switch to programming at 7 a.m.

Her family’s circumstances heavily influenced her approach to leadership and management. Her mother died in a car accident when she was 4, leaving Brown and four siblings mainly in the care of their grandmother.

A few years later, her father, a country and western music promoter who traveled constantly, married a Hispanic woman who brought five of her own children into the house (and taught Brown colloquial Spanish). As the oldest daughter in a family of 10 children – with the laundry, child care and cooking that this entailed – she learned a few things about time and task management.

“It was all about keeping it together,” says Brown, who, on a gray morning, wore a cheerful red jacket by St. John, the label favored by Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.

Brown graduated summa cum laude from the University of Dubuque and within two years married her college sweetheart and earned an MBA at the University of Colorado. Her first broadcasting job, with a $13,000 salary, was in the finance department at a Denver station owned by Gannett Co. Inc. Brown rose to become the station manager there, as KUSA dominated news ratings in the region.