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.