The reinvention of Molly Grantham: ‘We don’t care whether you’re with WBTV or not’
“But I wonder what would happen if you say what you wanna say,
And let the words fall out,
Honestly,
I wanna see you be brave ...”
As the DJ cranked Sara Bareilles’ peppiest, poppiest anthem, the almost-entirely female crowd hooted, hollered and clapped an energetic greeting to a woman whom they once loved on TV in Charlotte — and whom they arguably are loving even more now that she’s off the air.
The room was The Panthers Den inside Bank of America Stadium. The time was 9 o’clock on a Tuesday morning in mid-September. The event was designed, like Bareilles’ “Brave,” to encourage and empower.
And the star of the show? Molly Grantham, who strode onto the stage and kicked things off by saying, “I love that song.”
Then, proudly: “Welcome to the inaugural Bet On Yourself Summit, and congratulations on being in the room where it’s gonna happen.” More specifically, she said, “Congrats on being one of the 340 people in this room. As of this morning, there were 1,659 women on the wait list who want to be in your seat. ...”
She knew the impact that statistic would have.
It’s something that comes naturally to her, the ability to make people, especially women, feel special, feel important, feel fortunate. But it was working both ways that morning. You could tell that, in turn, this predominantly female gathering — just by being there and being so enthusiastic — was making Grantham feel special, important, and fortunate, too.
“From TV news, we get used to pace, and fast, and go, and go, and ‘fill it with content.’ So that is really how we designed the next six hours. But I am gonna take a minute here to just take a pause and look at all of you and take this in.
“Because it has been a remarkable six months.”
A little more than six months prior to the summit — and more than eight months ago as of today — the 47-year-old mother of three walked into work at WBTV’s newsroom in Charlotte intent on making a graceful exit from her long career as a powerhouse news anchor.
To her surprise, however, it went pretty awfully. So awfully that the normally confident Grantham couldn’t help but wonder:
Is this maybe not going to work out the way I had hoped?
‘It truly, to me, started to sound like my dad’
For the better part of 20 years, Grantham quite literally lived her dream at WBTV — one she’d had when she was 12, then as a student at UNC-Chapel Hill, then as the newest member of Channel 3’s news team when she joined it in her mid-20s. She also had long been the station’s most recognizable, most marketable face, as co-anchor of its 5, 5:30 and 6 p.m. shows and solo anchor of the 11 o’clock.
But over the final few months of last year, with the end of her contract looming on March 31, 2024, a feeling started gnawing at her.
By mid-winter, she told The Charlotte Observer recently, that feeling “started having a voice — which sounds totally bananas, I know, and crazy. But it truly, to me, started to sound like my dad.”
While raising Molly and her three younger brothers, Joseph Grantham often repeated this motto to each of them: Bet on yourself.
In other words, Take chances and invest in your own power. It’s something Molly Grantham had been doing for years as she built a brand that transcended her TV persona, whether it was engaging with the community as a moderator and emcee, often at charity events (including those supporting the fight against colon cancer, which claimed her dad’s life in 2006, and the fight against breast cancer, which took her mom in 2017); or through her #MollysKids concept, which highlights stories of children struggling with cancer and other disorders; or through authoring books about her adventures as a working mom.
It’s not something that had fully crystallized for her, though. Not until the new contract was offered to her late last winter. By that point, her dad’s voice — his three-word mantra — was running in a continuous loop inside her head.
Bet on yourself. Bet on yourself. BET ON YOURSELF.
So on March 5, with no other job lined up but an overwhelming urge to take a leap related to this burgeoning personal brand of hers, Grantham told her bosses she planned to leave the station at the end of the month after fulfilling the remainder of her contract.
Then, as she prepared to go on-air that afternoon, she wrote a Facebook post to her 150,000-plus followers that announced her decision and mentioned her dad’s saying. Shortly thereafter — just minutes before she was to lead the 5 o’clock newscast — she said she was abruptly told to pack up and leave the newsroom, with no explanation.
WBTV’s management has not responded to repeated inquiries from the Observer.
But general reaction was and continues to be overwhelmingly one-sided, and most of it has been along the lines of this: “The way that her departure from WBTV was handled was absolutely the wrong move,” said Morgan Fogarty, the WCCB-TV news anchor who is one of Grantham’s best friends. “They had an opportunity to have a really great, deserving farewell from Molly to the community ... and they chose to go a much different path that made them look really bad. ...
“Unfortunately for WBTV, they suffered for the way that the management handled it — and Molly soared.”
The five strangers in T-shirts who made her cry
It did take a minute, though, for her to really feel her feet leaving the ground. Or, more accurately, it took three days.
Her dismissal came on a Tuesday, and Wednesday and Thursday of that week were disorienting for Grantham. She’d made the decision, she felt, on her own terms. But then once things happened the way they happened, she felt like she’d lost control. There was lots of speculation, lots of concern, lots of “What in the heck is going on, Molly??”
Meanwhile, she had commitments she’d made prior to all of this that suddenly seemed in her mind to be up in the air, since they were made when she was a WBTV star — and since she now no longer worked for WBTV.
One of those commitments was a motivational speech for childcare workers about early learning at an event hosted by Caldwell County Smart Start. It wasn’t to be until April, but she had a meeting scheduled for that Friday to go over the game plan with a representative of the program.
Caldwell County Smart Start program specialist Vicki Jetton couldn’t help but wonder if Grantham was still up for the meeting. Still up for being a part of their event, period.
So she asked. And Grantham replied by admitting, “I didn’t know if you would still want me ... because I’m not with WBTV anymore.”
“Yes,” Jetton messaged back. “We don’t care whether you’re with WBTV or not.”
“It wasn’t about being with a TV station,” Jetton told the Observer. “It was more about the person and what she was willing to share with our group. We thought she could be the motivation that some of the childcare workers could benefit from hearing in our county. I mean, we just really felt that she was much more than WBTV, and we wanted to hear what she had to share as a person, not as a news anchor.”
That Friday, Grantham arrived at Honeycomb Cafe in Belmont and requested a table for two. But Jetton actually showed up to surprise her with four colleagues, the entire crew wearing custom-made T-shirts with the words “Bet On Yourself” in all-caps.
As soon as she saw them, Grantham started to cry.
“This was not anything yet,” she said, referring to the tagline they’d turned into a T-shirt. “I just put out a post (announcing my departure) that said, ‘Bet on yourself. I’m channeling my dad. He always said that; I’m doing it now. I wish everybody the best, and I’ve had a great 20 years.’ And when these people who I’d never met walked in with these T-shirts that said, ‘Bet On Yourself,’ I knew right then it was gonna be OK.”
What she didn’t quite yet know is that she was going to turn the phrase into an entire movement.
‘Genuine passion for wanting to inspire others’
It wasn’t just the T-shirts, or the pair of friendship bracelets the daughter of Caldwell County Smart Start’s executive director had made for her — one with beads that spelled “Bet On,” the other “Yourself.” Grantham’s fans were reaching out and sharing their own stories of how, and when, and why they had bet on themselves, or to say her decision to bet on herself was inspiring them to consider doing the same.
“It instantly became apparent to me,” Grantham said, “that (‘Bet On Yourself’) not only was in my head and what I was doing with an uncertain future, but it was very relatable to a lot of people. ... So I just kept responding to people, posting some of their stories about bet on yourself as they would send them to me, started hash-tagging things ‘betonyourself.’
“And it started to grow, very organically.”
Maybe she should have seen this coming. She’s always liked speaking, liked keynotes, liked emceeing and moderating and interview-style conversations and fireside-type chats in live-studio-audience-type settings. She also always liked being the bridge-builder in a room, being a connector, a unifier.
But, she insists, she really didn’t see it coming.
Grantham said she just woke up one day, a few weeks after her departure from WBTV, and out of the blue decided: “I think I should do a women’s event. I think my future is wrapped up, possibly, in helping people — maybe specifically women — learn how to bet on yourself.”
Within two weeks after that, she’d booked the Panthers Den at Bank of America Stadium, with no sponsors at the outset, with all of the money initially coming out of her own pocket.
“In watching her build the event and put the event together,” said Riley Fields, the Carolina Panthers director of community relations, “(I was struck by) the genuine passion that she has for wanting to inspire others.
“And I think what really was interesting to me about the inaugural Bet On Yourself Summit was that she could have easily moved to a larger venue to accommodate the demand, because the waiting list to get tickets was substantial, but she was really focused on the experience for each of the attendees. Going bigger in her mind wasn’t necessarily better.”
All 340 tickets sold out on Eventbrite in 59 minutes, Grantham said. $79 for a six-hour program that included featured guests like Donna Julian, executive vice president & chief venues operator for Hornets Sports & Entertainment; Cathy Bessant, CEO of Foundation for the Carolinas; and Emmy-winning WSOC-TV News anchor Erica Bryant; as well as an array of professional-development and high-end networking opportunities, swag bags, and lunch.
Several hours into the Sept. 17 event, a local PR and marketing executive who was stopped and asked what she thought so far — and who had nothing to gain or lose from an answer that leaned either way — replied, matter-of-factly: “This is f------ amazing.”
But would she consider a return to television?
That woman wasn’t alone in her opinion.
“I’ve been to other conferences, and you’re looking at your phone, and you’re like, Gosh, when is this gonna be over?” said Susan Evren, executive director of the Go Jen Go Foundation, a Charlotte-based nonprofit that supports breast cancer patients and frequently welcomes Grantham as an emcee at its events. “This one, I feel like people wanted to stay. They wanted another glass of champagne. They wanted it to keep going.”
“The vibe of it wasn’t stiff,” said Madison James, midday host on Charlotte radio station Mix 107.9, who interviewed Novant Health sports psychologist Joanne Perry on the summit stage. “It was, I feel like, just a group of girlfriends together supporting their friend.”
“I go to a lot of music concerts,” said Kim Burns, who as community outreach coordinator for Caldwell County Smart Start was with the group that made Grantham cry three days after she departed WBTV, “and the only thing that I can compare it to is a Taylor Swift concert. It’s the unity and the empowerment you get with a group of women, just being together ... without all the barriers.”
It was so successful that Grantham started planning a second Summit before the first one had even taken place. Set for April 29, 2025 at new event venue The Casey on North Tryon Street, the 2.0 Summit also sold out shortly after tickets went on sale.
But despite its overnight success, this flagship event is far from the only thing she’s focused on.
Her speaking agent, Daniel Hennes of Denver, Colo., said she’s currently working multiple events a week and in recent months has done speaking engagements as far north as Boston and as far south as New Orleans — while continuing to remain in high demand in Charlotte. He’s fielding “at least one legitimate request a day” for opportunities, some of which are pretty far off on the calendar. “We had someone just reach out about something in 2026 this morning,” Hennes said.
Grantham also has taken up charity auctioneering, has loved it, has excelled at it, and now has a separate agent for those gigs: Lydia Fenet, a famed auctioneer formerly of Christie’s auction house, who has booked her for events in Chicago, New York City, and Greenwich, Conn.
Meanwhile — perhaps best of all, she said — she’s spending more time than ever with her husband Wes and their three kids (daughter Parker and sons Hutch and Hobie), having been liberated from the daily grind of her odd second-shift schedule as a TV broadcaster.
And if there’s spare time left in the day, Grantham spends it catching up with friends or networking with community members over coffees; or mulling books that could serve as follow-ups to her “The Off-Camera Life of an On-Camera Mom” parenting trilogy; or jumping on her Facebook page to pen mini-stories about people in need of help, about displays of human kindness, and, increasingly, about people who’ve bet on themselves.
As for her own story of betting on herself? Grantham has told it dozens if not hundreds of times publicly by now.
She takes care not to bad-mouth WBTV — she doesn’t need to, since pretty much anyone else in her corner will happily do it for her — instead reflexively pivoting to her second-favorite mantras when the topic arises.
You don’t make yourself look good by trying to make others look bad.
The messy end to something doesn’t ruin the journey you took to get there.
She even has a confession to make that might come as a mild surprise: Although the 2 p.m.-to-midnight shift would be a hard sell at this point, Grantham said she would consider getting behind an anchor desk again. Someday. “I love television. I think there’s a lot of magic in broadcast. So I’m not opposed to going back,” she said. “But I just never figured reinvention would feel so good. It feels so good. It really does. ...
“I just know I’m in the right place.”
