Showing Up, or Five Lessons from Ride Sharing

Bodies in seats

Full disclousre: to make ends meet these days, because the Bay Area is crazy expensive and life hasn't quite worked out the way I'd like, I do ride share on nights and weekends. It basically boils down to minimum wage employment, but with the flexibility and non-compete that fits in with my career. Here's what I've learned from the experience.

> There are ways to make the gig more lucrative on an hourly basis -- work at odd hours, put up with drunk people, turn the app on and off to position yourself in more lucrative areas -- but for the most part, you just have to put in the hours. Even base rate rides can work out if they are long enough, or drop you in a position that sets up for chain work later. As the old saying goes, 90% of life is just showing up. I pretty much do this every day now, mostly so I don't have to do full days of it.

> I give my riders amenities that most other drivers do not -- water, mints, cough drops -- and a choice of in-flight entertainment options (music, NPR, conversation), because I treat passengers the way I'd like to be treated as a rider. Most just defer and ride without a lot of interaction, but the ones that don't make the gig kind of fun at times. More importantly, they tip, and those tips save me hours every week. I've even made some professional connections from it.

> The vast majority of riders pass without incident or comment, and don't make for very entertaining stories. But the ones that go beyond, either due to their position in life (I've picked up people from outside the bail bonds office, and others that work for extraordinarily wealthy individuals) or their eagerness to be very candid with a total stranger that they aren't very likely to ever meet again, make for the far better stories. I've got about a half dozen that are slowly but surely getting honed for use in stand-up comedy, because that's something else that I do. (Don't worry, riders, no names are used to protect the guilty.)

> While technology is always improving, it's far from foolproof, and when it fails you, it's utterly maddening. Network outages stop all revenue, mapping fails cause extraordinary frustration for all parties, and there are moments when the app sends you to chase passengers that are far too far away to be feasible for anyone. Cellular coverage isn't total, either. Things seem to be getting better, but I have to wonder if these issues are part of the reason why so many drivers don't make it past their first few months at the gig.

> It's really not for everyone. The hours are very erratic, since the driver doesn't know the passneger's final destination before they are in the car. It gets lonely, especially if your crop of passnegers aren't engaging, and you have to be pretty tolerant of a wide range of personalities. But the biggest problem with the gig is the difficulty of getting a true profit perspective, since you have to take into account the depreciation and advanced repair needs of your vehicle, along with higher insurance and gas costs. As with any business, gross and net are very different things, and if you don't do the math, you can get the wrong idea about how it's going.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Get Out Of Town

Tough Town!

Several decades ago, when I fronted a rock band, we'd gig at whatever venue would have us. The work made rehearsals more productive, because they gave us deadlines, and even the most ill-scheduled gig was, for the most part, better than not having it. This led to several hundred gigs, all told, in a wide range of settings and locations.

Where this is relevant to your life as a marketing and advertising pro is this simple piece of human psychology; if the band was from far away, the crowd was inevitably more interested in what they were doing. There's an ego-flattering point to this, in that if you know about bands from outside your area, it must make you a more discerning fan of music. It's also a tiny acid test for the band, in that audiences think you have more on the ball if you are from somewhere else, since the assumption is that it's your full time job, as opposed to a hobby.

Here's another data point that proves the practice. When my wife was pregnant with our first child, she had a standing gig at Caesar's Palace in Atlantic City, as she's a harpist. (Weddings, corporate events, hospice work, bookstores, specialty events. Book her early and often; you can reach her through me. End of product placement.) When patrons asked her where she was from and she replied trutthfully, there was a feeling of disappointment and a quicker end to the conversation. So she started adopting an Irish accent instead, created a small back story to match her persona, and watched her tips triple.

This is, of course, silly on its face. But the same thing occurs in business, honestly. Now that I live and work in the Bay Area, the people I run into during my day to day are inevitably more interested when I mention where I'm from (Philadelphia, originally), as opposed to where I work (a start up that most people haven't heard of yet, on the peninsula between San Jose and San Francisco).

There's no sign that this trend is slowing, even in the age of remote work and easy plane bookings. Travel broadens the mind -- and not just the mind of the traveler.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Football In the Time of California

He's Right

I admit that "Love in the time of . . ." is a great title, up to a point. You're reading along, you're happy, it's about love. I like the way the word time comes in - a nice, nice feeling. Then the morbid Cholera appears. I was happy till then. Why not "Love in the Time of the Blue, Blue, Bluebirds"? "Love in the Time of Oozing Sores and Pustules" is probably an earlier title the author used as he was writing in a rat-infested tree house on an old Smith Corona. This writer, whoever he is, could have used a couple of weeks in Pacific Daylight Time.” - Steve Martin, "Pure Drivel"

Martin's essay is always in the back of my mind when I get the chance to appreciate living in the Bay Area, and as it was the first week of NFL football, it rang in my brain once more today. I don't have cable anymore, as I'm living in temporary housing without a television while onboarding at a new startup, but going cold turkey on my football laundry (Eagles) isn't going to happen. So I headed up and out this morning, found a place with a good enough breakfast menu and enough televisions with a satellite dish, and got to watch my team at the utterly wonderful hour of 10am, rather than 1pm.

My laundry won, which always helps, but getting the football game out of the way before late afternoon makes the entire exercise seem like so much less of a vice, honestly. I caught the later game at the gym on a treadmill, took care of my errands, and still had daylight hours to spare. Back East, this would have required an unsightly wake up early in the morning while trying not to wake the sleeping family, not to mention the preparation of getting to bed early on Saturday. Full and total pass on all of that.

I suspect the NFL is getting wise to this on their own level, what with the increasing number of games in the UK on European time, but (a) those games are almost always terrible, seeing how they involve an inordinate amount of Jacksonville Jaguars, and (b) the games will likely always be terrible, because they are in front of crowds of mostly neutral fans, with players who resent the really big dumb plane flight in the middle of their year of big dumb plane flights.

Having the game wrap up early works whether your laundry wins or loses in California. A win, you are out in the sunshine afterward, getting stuff done, feeling virtuous. A loss, you are out in the sunshine afterward, remembering that the people who are really angry and bitter about this are three thousand miles away and won't be inflicting thier negativity upon you. The last time I was in California, my laundry had the best era of its history and went to its last Super Bowl. Maybe they just need me to be away from them. It's a sacfrifice I'm willing to make.

Final point that brings this all back to stuff a marketing person might want to think about: dayparting matters, and also shouldn't be a single set point. Something to keep in mind for the email professionals, as well as media planners who are resolute enough to price their banner buys on a clock basis. (Hint: you really should price your banner buys on a clock basis. If only because they work very differently, and to very different people, depending on the hour of the day.)

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Scale For Some

Unvisited Book

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” - George Eliot

My first gig in marketing was with a physical manufacturer of products, and by the end of my time there, something terrible happened: the marketing worked too well. We were up by a lot more than our people could handle, no one could take vacation time, and the challenge from a management perspective came from trying to find qualified personnel who would work second and third shift hours to try to keep up wih the demand. Rumors started of how we would cut the marketing budget for the upcoming year to try to throttle down the growth, and my belief in the long-term viability of the business, coupled with concerns about how I was valued by higher levels of management, made me very anxious. You don't do your best work when you're anxious. So when another company made me an offer, I gave notice and relocated.

That was nearly twenty years ago, and I don't regret the move in the least. I've learned a ton in the time since, and it's all led to the current gig, where I get to work with and shape the marketing of tools that pretty much fix every problem I've ever ran into as a marketing and advertising pro. Notably, also, this: none of the companies that I've worked at since gave as many people jobs as that first employer, mostly because I've never taken a gig since that didn't scale.

There's a significant article in the NY Times this week that has made me start to wonder if that stance didn't come with some costs, though. The article compares the impact of Apple to its home city (Cupertino, CA) to Kodak with its (Rochester, NY). The entire article is worth a read, but the gist of it is that by creating a contractor class to take care of aspects of the business that aren't seen as core competency (janitorial is the focus, but the movement also extends to security guards, food production, and so on), Apple has created more shareholder value at the cost of blue collar jobs. So while Rochester has traces of Kodak's benevolence striped through the community, Apple is a global company, with those dollars either on campus, or spread to the bank accounts of shareholders all over the world.

There's nothing particularly evil or unique about this, and had Kodak's management thought of it first (or, for that matter, how film was going to go away due to changing technology), perhaps they would have made different choices. But the end result is the same, and that's a marketplace where many workers, especially if they didn't start from a position of priviledge, have to pinball from company to company to reach economic goals, rather than work their way up.

That toothpaste is long gone from the tube, of course. Emulating Apple, one of the most successful companies in the world, is what will happen for decades to come. Innovation at the top levels drove their profit margins, rather than squeezing custodians. But I can't help but feel that this reading of the market isn't entirely accurate.

There's damage done when only the current highest achievers can get ahead. There's social stratification that happens when people can't work their way up, ambitions thwarted, motivations dulled. From the unpaid internships with amazing social networking opportunities that only young adults of priviledge can take, to the gig on top of gig economies that the working poor gravitate to, we create skepticism about capitalism itself... and when that occurs, the engine that creates people who can buy these wonderful goods and services dries up, becomes ripe for piracy, and accelerates income inequality to the point where a civil society is no longer a given.

The company that I left twenty years ago is still in business. It can't have been an easy ride for them, but they are privately held, and ownership always took pride in giving people jobs, rather than maximizing their own revenue. If every company were like them, we'd probably have more people working, a more stable economy, maybe even less extremism in our political climate. But we also might not have the tech and innovation that no one wants to live without.

I live in the Bay Area now, perhaps the least accomodating philosophical market for unvisited tombs. It's a great place to be, filled to bursting with ambitious and disruptive people, and to live here generally means you chose it, because so many people aren't native to the area.

If every area in America tried to be like this, we'd have astonishing problems. Probably even worse than what we have now.

But if you are faced with, as I was twenty years ago, no better option?

You make the change.

And deal with the ensuing challengs to the best of your ability.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.