Upward Mobility
We take our industry for granted. It stresses us. It keeps us up at night. We bitch about it. We hate Google or Facebook. We wonder why a bird game can make one hundred million dollars. We wish people would stop talking about mobile social geo and telling us that performance marketing was on the decline. Through it all though we know we are still lucky. And we are lucky. We are lucky for so many reasons. We think we are lucky because of how well the best of the best do. We think we are lucky because of the hype and the exits. They contribute but the real difference is not the top but the bottom.
The bottom is the base. It is the people in the roles that are necessary but not always the first choice of jobs. Most of us have started there and the unexpected mobility is what separates us from other industries. Having started as a media buyer, I had hopes moving up but unlike a more traditional job there was no obvious path. If you are an attorney, you can join a firm, work your butt off and make partner. Then as Louie Armstrong said, "That’s when the big bucks start rolling in." As a media buyer that is not as clear. It is an entry level job. It doesn’t require truly specialized training. Businesses all over have a version of this person. I didn’t realize it at the time, but ours is different. The ride to the airport proved it.
Getting to the airport in NY sans subway happens one of two ways – yellow or black – yellow for taxi, black for town car. For those outside of New York, seeing a Lincoln town car is a rate occurrence. In Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs, you are almost as likely to see a black town car as you are a yellow cab. Unlike a yellow cab, you can’t flag down a town car. You have to call one. Who to call is another matter, and there a number of interesting lead gen opportunities and even a new app based business called uber. Since the cars can’t drive themselves, who picks you up is the lowely driver. The driver is a cog in a wheel. They are necessary but also replaceable. It is what every business wants and needs – a way to scale without worrying about specialized training. You need them to be good enough, not necessarily great.
A great driver is definitely better than an even a good one. A great driver doesn’t just make the logistics happen effectively, they make the experience worth the premium. You don’t have to be super smart to be a great driver. Being super smart as a driver can help, but the problem with being a great driver is the system does not reward greatness. The great driver does not necessarily get more business. In this system, the great driver operates exactly like a good enough one. They rely on dispatch for jobs and start the day in the same hole. When they wake up, they have the $2000 per month lease on the car (yes, $2k for a town car because the drivers are encouraged to use preferred providers), pay their $500 per month auto insurance, split 30% of their money to the house (more if credit cards) in order to just start making money. This routinely means 18 hour days or high stress, day after day after day. It’s just enough to live but rarely enough to break free. And, breaking free often comes with such a hurdle that the next step is not intuitive.
The smart driver, the one who should be doing something else but is driving because they often can’t is stuck. It’s good for the company, but the company doesn’t need them or leverage them. Were the person just content doing this job and only this job it can work. Some are. But, it is but one of many systems where talent can stagnate, and where the system has no incentive to see them move up. That is couldn’t be further from the nature of our industry. For an almost incalculable number of reasons, not the least of which include the accountability, near real-time feedback, and lower cost thresholds, our system does the opposite. It pushes you forward. It doesn’t want you in the same job day after day. It wants you to grow, to reach your potential, to become better and reward you for doing so. Ours is full of so many stories of people not just coming from other industries but people who were the equivalent of the smart car service driver becoming, if not millionaires, able to obtain a level that they surely dreamed of but probably didn’t ultimately expect.
Our industry has it. It has upward mobility even if it doesn’t have the typical track of success. The bottom jobs, the cogs in the wheels of the company, are never perfect and can suck a lot. But there is something to be said for not just sucking less but equipping us with transferable skill that allows us to take knowledge and apply it towards to bigger and better problems. People always say the view from the top is nice (thanks, Mr. Sheen), but the view from the bottom here is actually not that bad.
