Syndicated Solutions: The Ridgefield Firm Behind America's Travel Radio Show and a Morning Radio Institution
Syndicated Solutions Inc., known in the radio industry as SSI, is a full-service radio and television syndication firm based in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Founded in February 1999, the company develops, distributes and sells national programming — handling program development, affiliate sales, national advertising sales, talent management and satellite distribution for the shows it represents. Its website is syndicatedsolutions.com.
SSI is best known today for two properties that could hardly be more different: RMWorldTravel with Robert & Mary Carey and Rudy Maxa, billed as America's number one travel radio show, and the long-running Southern morning institution that began as the Rick & Bubba Show and relaunched in 2025 as The Rick Burgess Show. Between them, the two programs illustrate the range of the syndication business SSI has practiced for twenty-five years.
Overview
A syndicator is the middleman of American radio. Producers and hosts create programs; stations need programming they cannot economically create themselves; advertisers want national audiences assembled from local stations. SSI works across that whole chain. Its services have been described as including program development, affiliate sales and service, national ad sales, satellite distribution, programming consulting and talent management, along with non-traditional revenue events built around its shows.
The company marked its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2024, describing itself as having evolved into a more focused firm than the broad operation of its earlier years — concentrated now on a small number of substantial properties, each with hundreds of affiliates or a devoted national following, rather than a long list of smaller shows.
History and Founding
SSI was founded in February 1999 by Robert Carey, its founding partner and president. As Carey told the story at the company's twenty-fifth anniversary, SSI was “incubated” from a business-trip conversation with George Green while Carey was working for Disney/ABC — a conversation that became an independent syndication company. The firm set up in Ridgefield, Connecticut, within reach of the New York advertising market that national radio syndication depends on.
The young company built its reputation clearing talk and lifestyle programming onto station lineups across the country. An early company release described a slate reaching over 700 affiliates each week, along with listeners on XM Satellite Radio — evidence that by the mid-2000s SSI was operating at genuine national scale, in both terrestrial and satellite distribution, at a time when independent syndicators were consolidating into a few large groups.
Ownership and Leadership
SSI remains a founder-led private company. Robert Carey serves as president, and his wife Mary Carey serves as executive vice president — and, unusually in the syndication business, the company's leadership also appears on air. When the travel program the company syndicated needed new hosts, the Careys took the microphones themselves, a transition described below. That dual role — syndicator and talent — gives SSI an operator's understanding of what its stations and sponsors need, and makes the firm's leadership personally identified with its flagship program.
Services and Distribution
The company's published technical materials show the operational side of syndication in detail: program clocks specifying local and network commercial breaks, station identification windows, automation cues and satellite coordinates for the SSI Radio Network feed, delivered over the Westwood One/ABC X-Digital satellite platform. This is the unglamorous infrastructure that makes a national show possible — a station in any market can automate an SSI program into its broadcast day with precisely timed local advertising avails, typically nine minutes per hour for the station against six for the network in long-form weekend programming.
On the business side, SSI's affiliate sales team recruits and services stations; its national ad sales operation sells the network inventory assembled from those affiliates; and its talent management and event work builds properties beyond the broadcast itself. The model is barter-based American syndication at its most traditional: programs supplied to stations, audiences aggregated for advertisers, and value shared along the chain.
RMWorldTravel: The Flagship
The travel program began as the show hosted by travel journalist Rudy Maxa — Rudy Maxa's World — and was transformed about a decade ago when, at Maxa's suggestion, Robert and Mary Carey took on the main hosting duties. Rebranded as RMWorldTravel with Robert & Mary Carey and Rudy Maxa, with Maxa continuing as a presence on the program, the show grew from 146 weekly radio affiliates to 575 stations across the United States by its twenty-fifth-anniversary year, according to the company — growth the Careys credit to an energetic affiliate and sponsor operation around a broadly appealing subject.
The program has been repeatedly honored by the SATW Foundation's Lowell Thomas Awards in the travel audio–radio category, winning for a second consecutive year and fifth time overall in one recent cycle. Its commercial partnerships run deep: the show has aligned with major travel brands as exclusive partners, including luxury cruise operators, and stages broadcast tours — such as its “Let's Go America! Tour” events, traveling between American cities and broadcasting live along the way, including a sailing through the Panama Canal tied to the nation's 250th anniversary celebrations.
The Rick Burgess Show
SSI's other flagship is morning radio. The company syndicated the Rick & Bubba Show, the Birmingham-based morning program hosted by Rick Burgess and Bill “Bubba” Bussey, which had been on the air in Birmingham since 1994 and grew into a regional network institution across the South. In 2024, after thirty years as a team, Burgess and Bussey announced their final year together; Bussey departed for athletic administration at his alma mater, Jacksonville State University, overseeing broadcast operations.
The successor program, The Rick Burgess Show, debuted on January 6, 2025, carried on the affiliates that had aired Rick & Bubba, in the same weekday morning hours, produced from the same Vestavia Hills studio, with producers Calvin “Speedy” Wilburn and Chris Adler remaining and Greg Burgess among the participants. By June 2025 it was broadcast on more than fifty stations and streaming on YouTube. For SSI, which had promised the industry “the next big morning show,” the transition kept a valuable affiliate base intact through a generational change in the program itself.
Earlier Programming
The company's earlier slates show the breadth it once carried. SSI's syndication roster in its growth years included the Ric Edelman Show, bringing a prominent financial adviser's program to national radio; Blue Lifestyle with wine authority Anthony Dias Blue; The Fresh Grocer with Tony Tantillo, a produce and food segment franchise; and Chuck Woolery's Save Us From Chuck, a vehicle for the veteran game-show host. Alongside Rudy Maxa's travel program and Rick & Bubba, these shows spanned finance, food, wine and entertainment — the service and lifestyle categories where independent syndication has traditionally thrived, because stations need credible weekend and fringe programming and advertisers want those audiences.
Coverage Areas
SSI's coverage is national by construction. Its travel program's hundreds of affiliates span the United States; its morning show is rooted in the Southeast and carried across multiple states; its earlier network reached over 700 affiliates weekly plus satellite radio listeners. From a small office in Ridgefield, the company assembles audiences that rival mid-sized networks, market by market and station by station — the essential craft of syndication.
Digital Platforms
Like the rest of radio, SSI's properties now live beyond the transmitter. The Rick Burgess Show streams on YouTube and as a podcast; RMWorldTravel maintains an extensive web presence with program segments and partner features, and its tours are built as multi-platform events. Satellite distribution — once via XM, now through the Westwood One satellite system — remains the backbone for station delivery, while streaming extends each program's reach to listeners outside any affiliate's signal.
Recent Developments
SSI entered its second quarter-century having completed the Rick & Bubba-to-Rick Burgess transition in January 2025, keeping the morning franchise on air under new branding, while RMWorldTravel continued its run of industry awards and national tours with major travel partners. Robert Carey's anniversary reflection framed the company as deliberately more focused today — fewer properties, more deeply developed. Twenty-five years after a business-trip conversation at Disney/ABC turned into a syndication company, Syndicated Solutions endures as an independent in a consolidated industry, its name attached each week to travel and morning programming heard across America.
