Business Psychology | Finch Sells

The Night Owl vs. The Early Bird vs. The Office Chimp

Aug 28 2011

There are 8760 hours in a year, and the average employee spends exactly 2000 of them at work. I won’t scare you with the total number of hours you are expected to work in a lifetime but rest assured, it’s a lot of bloody hours.

Small business owners and self-employed professionals can rightly claim to lose many more hours outside of the set Monday to Friday 9-5 routine. Personally, I would bet that I spend up to 50% of my 8760 hours thinking about work. If I’m not brainstorming business concepts, I’m going over accounting figures in my head. And if I’m not daydreaming, I’m battering my keyboard as I speak.

This post is about stereotypes. That means understanding them, acknowledging them and hopefully becoming more productive by living up to them. I’d like to introduce you to my three furry friends, Mr Office Chimp, Mr Early Bird and Mr Night Owl.

Consider them your new messiahs.

There’s a question I get asked a lot – usually by my friends – that relates to staying productive while being my own boss, and it goes simply, “When do you find it easiest to work?” Usually followed by “Or do you not work?” Followed by the snap judgment of my unshaven face and pizza beard “Christ, show me how you make money. It can’t be that hard…”

For the longest time, I thought it was cool to reply that I worked whenever I felt like it. And in essence, it was true. But whether you believe it or not, routine is one of the great gamechangers in the productivity equation. We are designed to function better when there is routine in our lives.

Routine doesn’t have to be the recurring disgust of wedging your face in somebody else’s armpit on the tube, and it certainly doesn’t have to be the sight of the same fake plastic faces at the watercooler during lunch. Routine need only be an environment lavished with the correct ingredients to bring out the best of your working habits.

Mr Night Owl, Mr Early Bird and Mr Office Chimp sum up, quite suitably I think, three very different professional personas that I have encountered.

I often jest that Night Owls are online sleazeballs and bohemian graphic designers, the type who make money in darkened basements while scattering cheesy wotsits over their boxers.

Likewise, I love to ridicule the Early Birds for being psychomaniac marathon runners, the type you catch whizzing past in the park at god knows what hour because they have to get back to their squeaky clean apartments to do some fucking life consulting on why I’m such an unhealthy bastard.

And then there’s the Office Chimps. Those who arrive at their Macbooks by 9:01am with a large cup of Starbucks and the desire to ‘touch base’ over some useless corporate shit, always worth sacrificing a lunch break over, in the distant hope of success while they plan the only two week vacation of their year to Benidorm on a second minimised browser.

Am I stereotyping? Probably, but fuck that, right?

My point is (yes, there’s a point), that it doesn’t really matter which of these personas you choose to adopt for your professional career. What matters is that you embrace the necessary challenges and learn from our three furry musketeers. Take a peek below to work out what the hell I’m talking about.

The Night Owl Lifestyle

He who works between 9pm-4am.

The Night Owl enjoys a working environment of less distractions, less interruptions and more late night Channel 5 porn. He doesn’t have to answer the phone every 5 minutes, but he does have to contend with Ryan Eagle announcing on Twitter in 17 minute intervals that he’s still awake, and still got a bigger dick than you.

Unfortunately, being a good Night Owl requires a perfect knack for balancing your social life with those late surges of productivity. It’s not healthy to lose every Friday night to your work, but then neither is it healthy to batter your liver in to submission while your latest project gathers dust.

Doing it wrong:

Following the Night Owl work routine while courting a demanding girlfriend is a recipe for your balls to look like mashed potatoes by the end of the first week. Be sure to spend a lot of time with friends, family, loved ones and pets in the afternoon hours when you’re not working.

You must be able to distinguish between Night Owling for the right reasons (it’s your most productive working period) against finding a simple excuse for your insomnia. If your problem is that you can’t sleep, work is not the answer.

Doing it right:

If you’re going to be a night owl, you have to embrace the lifestyle and remain in bed until at least 12pm. It’s not feasible to expect to be working at your full potential in the early hours on little or no sleep. If you choose to ignore this advice, please allow me to recommend a local business that can probably serve you well. Just search… crack dealers in *my town here*

On a serious note… maintain a healthy diet, avoid reliance on caffeine stimulants, and use proper lighting to avoid blitzing the retinas of your eyeballs with chronic monitor glare. Working in the dark, every night, is really fucking stupid.

The Early Bird Lifestyle

He who works between 6am-1pm.

The Early Bird sums up a lifestyle I have never quite managed to embrace. The last time I was up at the crack of dawn, it was to retrieve a bag of Argos cutlery from an apartment I was running away from. Long story, but clearly such early activity has never come naturally to me.

I guess it’s the way forward for those who enjoy a good pre-breakfast workout, love the smell of morning dew, and don’t like late night Channel 5 porn.

The great appeal of getting work done early is to be able to enjoy the rest of the day. This may require a streak of independence, since most of your friends are likely to still be working when you’re finished!

Doing it wrong:

If you’re going to be a professional Early Bird, stick to your guns and obey the cut-off point in the day when work becomes secondary. The Office Chimps will be trying to badger you in to conversing after their 3pm pub lunches, but don’t be having any of it. If you become the pushover who is first in to his home office and subsequently last to close down Outlook, you have to question the merits of your lifestyle.

I always feel a little pissed off when I see that even the Americans on my Twitter have finished work, while I’m still plugging away in the UK. Thankfully I don’t have the fist in the balls of knowing I got up at 5am to add to the bitterness. Take note, Early Birds.

Doing it right:

The smooth sophisticated Early Bird doesn’t just do it right, he looks like he’s doing it right. These are the kind of bastards you see chipping on to the 16th green at 2:30pm because their work is dealt with and they’ve already maxed out the MuscleBlaster.

The successful Early Bird wakes early with a fresh mind, plows through the to-do list and crucially manages to maintain the momentum until his work is done. A fake Early Bird, a Finch in Disguise, may start off brightly at 6am. But when 9am comes, he’s such a virgin to the sudden rush of distractions and attention stealing emails that his best laid plans crumple and fail. He retreats to his natural environment and far from having the golf clubs out at 2pm, he’s drowning in a mug of caffeine and wondering where the morning went.

To be an efficient Early Bird, you need concentration levels of steel, Ivan Drago-esque discipline and the ability to give me those snotty looks as you sprint past in your sweat stained jogpants.

I admire you, Early Birds, but I hope the sunrise swallows you whole.

The Office Chimp Lifestyle

He who works between 9am-5pm.

If there was a God, the Office Chimp would clearly be his projection of how employment should proceed. Right from an early age, we are nurtured in to a routine that for 95% of the suckers on this earth, will become ‘The Routine’ for the rest of their lives. Monday to Friday, 9-5, with the occasional token gesture of holiday to avoid a certain mental breakdown.

The Office Chimp is scoffed at by those of us who are no longer constrained to the traditional work day, and yet many of us choose to work those conventional hours regardless. Oh, but we carry our work through the evening and the morning too. So who is laughing now? Just us unfortunately.

The Office Chimp is encouraged in all of us from an early age. There’s no shame in working to the tune of a lifestyle that regularly brings out the best in our performance. Unless it doesn’t, of course.

Doing it wrong:

As effectively as we are trained to work during the 9-5 grind, we are just as seasoned in the art of wasting time. Most of us have nurtured the skill through years of dossing around at school, pretending to be hard working students and browsing Facebook while the boss isn’t looking.

I can plead guilty to all of the charges above. But the moment I started my own business, the old adage became true. The only person who paid the price of those crimes was the idiot who was guilty of them. Procrastination is like masturbation, you’re only ever fucking yourself.

Adapting your work ethic to that of the Office Chimp requires that you be prepared to immerse yourself in the traditional work day. The phone will ring, emails will arrive and there’s bound to be that annoying queue in Tesco to separate Man from his Meal Deal. Can you stay focused?

Running your own business and still managing to waste time means that you’re definitely doing it wrong. But hey, at least you still have that sense of camaraderie with your fellow chimps. It’s always somebody’s fault but never your own, right?

Doing it right:

The successful Office Chimp is distinguishable by the fact that he looks like everybody else, but he’s a lot richer, a lot happier, a lot healthier and spends a lot more time basking in the sun on vacation. But how does he do it?

The tale of the successful Office Chimp is usually told with a recurring detail, and that detail is hidden in the actual nature of his work. Unlike most chimps, he will choose to only devote his energies to work that is high-value. You’ll never find him processing spreadsheets of meaningless data entry, or ‘touching base’ on matters that could be solved in an instant with a little common sense.

He starts his work at the conventional hour, and just like you and I, he finishes in time for an early evening drink. The difference is simply the value he places on his time, and thus the value he generates from his work.

You won’t catch the Office Chimp galloping through parks at a ridiculous hour, and you probably won’t see him covered in cheesy wotsits in the recess of the night. But just like with these other critters, there is method to his madness.

So which are you? And more importantly, are you doing a good job of being him?

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The Entrepreneur’s Survival Instinct: Got It?

Jun 15 2011

Running an online business works in stages. Those stages are typically bemusement, survival and once in a blue moon, the luxury of thriving.

The majority of enterpreneurs are stuck in survival mode. Not because surviving is any easier than winding up bemused, but because most people give up not long after bemusement sets in.

So that leaves the rest of us. Surviving or thriving. What is it for you?

Many people believe their online businesses are thriving, but in reality, they are prospering on the edge of a cliff. Just one stiff breeze from falling in to the oblivion. It’s difficult to determine what distinguishes thriving from surviving, but in my opinion, the ability to take several setbacks in your stride is a decisive factor.

I know many affiliate marketers who are producing profits of five figures on a monthly basis, but I stop short of calling them thrivers. Why? Because they’re surviving in a marginal market. Their methods are the business equivalent of whoring out a one trick pony. If the products they sell change, or the advertisement methods they use disintegrate, it’s very difficult to recover. Such is the pain in the arse that follows any middleman in a volatile industry.

This isn’t to knock affiliate marketers (I am one), but to get to the bottom of the most important quality in a successful online entrepreneur – the ability to survive, at all costs, in rapidly changing markets.

We have to adapt to new methods of generating income, or fall by the wayside as yesterday’s dotcom optimists.

If you are based solely online, you are running a fluid business. By doing away with the brick and mortar, your rent becomes the price of staying aware of how the online space is changing – and how you can affect it.

I remember hating web programming because I resented the endless evolving technologies attached to the craft. Learn one language and I’d find it out of date, or the poorer cousin of a brand new language. In reality, all online businesses are prisoners to the chains of technology. The quicker technology develops, the more proactive you have to be to stay on top of your competition.

For that reason, I always say that it’s wise to build a business on flexible foundations. You don’t want to be so rooted in what you offer that the evolution of technologies predates you before you’ve even started. There’s simply no good in forming a belief system that Money Making Method X will always work, when Money Making Method Y is already the next hot shit.

Adapting to new technology is one requirement for survival, and it could also be linked to the second requirement: Never get lazy.

For the same reason that a World Champion boxer one day finds it difficult to hang with a younger, hungrier opponent, you too have to deal with your own motivations if you want to stay on top. Can you hear that sound? That is the sound of a thousand keyboards being mashed by would-be entrepreneurs all around the world. Everybody wants a slice of the online riches pie, and just because you’ve had a taste, doesn’t mean you have a right to the next bite.

Dealing with laziness and those mornings where the brain just doesn’t want to cooperate are fundamental to enjoying lasting success.

I think the difference between a successful entrepreneur and a persistent failboat is not the output when they’re both hyped and happy to work. The difference shows in the output when direct motivation is hard to come by.

The people I see thriving with the most successful online businesses do not work in bursts. We all love the rush of a sudden motivational kick up the arse to get some work done, but these kicks cannot help you every day. If it takes reading a blog post, or tearing through a self-help book, to spur you in to action, then you are prone to working in bursts.

We can all achieve excellence when we’re motivated and at the height of our games. But retaining that burning motivation as success arrives can be a difficult trait to master. But you must succeed. There are plenty of other entrepreneurs waiting to fill your spot if you don’t match them for work ethic.

Personally, my favourite method for combating laziness is to engage in projects where money isn’t my sole motivation. It’s the only way I can ensure that when money arrives, I won’t relent and consider my job done. Surround yourself in enough reasons to go that extra mile and laziness should never be a problem.

Listen to Bill Gates:

“I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one.”

This type of commitment – besides being practically unhealthy – simply isn’t possible if money is your only driving force.

Recommended This Week:

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What You Can Learn From Microsoft And Starbucks

May 30 2011

Pricing our products, services and time can be a tricky business. I’ve spent many hours scratching my head and wondering what a “fair price” would be for my latest products. In reality, there is no such thing as a fair price.

It’s impossible to set a price point that satisfies the maximum amount each of your customers would be willing to pay. You are always going to have customers who scoff at the price. And you are always going to lose money by failing to ask enough of those who have personal valuations higher than yours.

Most of us try to find a middle ground.

We have to balance the advantages of securing many low value sales against making fewer sales at a much healthier margin. The conventional persuasion suggests that more sales is better business. So we lower the prices. This may produce the increased sales, but how many of those customers would have paid much more had we simply asked them to do so?

If the answer is “too many”, it’s time to start taking price targeting seriously. Price targeting is the art of setting different prices for different markets to maximise profits and increase sales in one efficient swoop.

Sounds Pretty Cool, But Who Else Is Price Targeting?

One of my favourite examples comes courtesy of The Undercover Economist, an excellent must-have book that really sheds some light on the relationship between consumers and their purchases.

The book dissects price-targeting by using the example of a cup of coffee.

How much is a cup of coffee worth? Some people will pay $2, others will happily hand over $3. The difficult decision is how to price the coffee in such a way that it’s cheap enough to attract maximum sales at a profitable margin, but expensive enough to milk maximum profit from those who are less money-conscious about their caffeine fix.

Price the coffee too high and you’ll lose sales. Price it too low and you’re leaving money on the table. To find the middle ground, they would have to establish a price that balances the best of both worlds. But there’s actually a much better way of doing business.

So what does the coffee house do?

Take a look at the drinks menu and you’ll see exactly what they do. They use a staggered pricing model.

An ordinary no thrills latte can be picked up for a couple of dollars. This satisfies the customers who would go elsewhere if the coffee became too expensive. And then you have the shit that my girlfriend orders. The premium chilled white mochawhatever blend at over $3. These drinks appeal to the luxury seekers. Those who can justify spending more because they place a higher value on good coffee, and will pay the premium to get their fix.

Many of us assume that because the lavish coffee at the bottom of the menu costs twice as much as a regular latte, it must be twice as expensive to produce. This is actually a textbook demonstration of price targeting.

Realistically, it only costs a few extra cents to produce the luxury drink. But the mark up value could have you believe that the shop is sourcing ingredients from a distant organic paradise. This is rarely ever the case.

The lavish coffee shows how much the shop WANTS to charge, and the budget coffee is what it can AFFORD to charge. The shop has the means to sell the luxury coffee at a few cents more than the ordinary latte and still make the same margin of profit. But to do so would be to set a uniform price for all coffee lovers, when some are quite happy to pay the premium.

How Price Targeting Can Work For You

How can we spin the coffee example in to something that an online entrepreneur would be familiar with? Well how about we start with the notorious “full support” upgrade that comes with many online services?

How many times have you compared prices for a digital product only to find that the biggest price hiker is 24/7 support?

Your web server might only cost $50/month with the regular plan. This is a price point that is designed to attract the budget brigade. But your hosting provider knows full well that not every professional is budget conscious when it comes to his web hosting. For those who are prepared to pay more, why leave the money on the table?

If throwing in unlimited 24/7 support allows the provider to charge $75/month instead of $50, they have found a way of appealing to both those who are happy to pay more (extra value, peace of mind), and those who can only justify the budget option.

But then you have to ask yourself; What is the true cost of providing 24/7 customer support? Most of the companies who offer this upsell ALREADY provide 24/7 support for their budget customers. But it doesn’t make sense to campaign on this information. You can’t expect your premium customers to pay the extra $25/month if the budget customers are enjoying the same quality of service for less money.

Many companies will actually make a conscious effort to devalue their “starter packages”, knowing full well that they can’t allow the difference in service to become so marginal that a high paying customer would realise there is little to gain in paying more.

Is there really a need for so many different versions of Windows? We have Home, Professional and Ultimate. Microsoft could quite easily bundle all the capabilities of Ultimate in to EVERY installation. But if my Home edition were as powerful as the Ultimate edition, how could Microsoft possibly charge corporate companies through the nose for the same product? So, of course, Microsoft takes it’s carefully designed software and sabotages it.

They remove enough features to create three very different markets that price themselves accordingly. Crazily enough, the cost of rolling out the weaker product is often greater than the premium version. The additional effort of stripping away functionality can incur extra costs. But it’s worth it for Microsoft because the cream of the crop will be handing over an extra $100 per installation.

When you board an airplane in economy class, do you really think your legs are cramped because the massive profit spinning airline couldn’t afford to specify a few extra cms of room when designing the aircraft? The experience is designed to be marginally uncomfortable so that these companies can still milk money from the picky flyers who are willing to pay extra for first class.

Examples of effective price targeting are all around you. From the trains you board, to the groceries you buy, to the clothes you wear. We make decisions everyday on the value of these items. You should give your own customers every opportunity to find a deal they agree with.

Price Targeting Is Just Plain Smart

When you look at your own products and services, ask yourself what could you be doing differently to effectively price target your customers. Developing a fantastic solution gives you enormous control. You may be selling your product at $150 and attracting sales from both the budget spenders and the corporate ties and suits.

Think about what could be added to the product that would allow you to charge $250. And what could be removed that would allow you to capture more customers at $100?

Structured price targeting gives you the ability to place the ball in the customer’s court and ask: “How much are you willing to pay?” If you never ask this question, you will never realise your maximum sales OR your maximum profit margins.

Recommended This Week:

Check out Filthy Rich Mind, a brand new project I’m collaborating on with a couple of other writers in the self-improvement market. It’s a fun project and if you like off-the-wall advice for improving your lifestyle, subscribe here for updates.
And, of course, don’t forget to subscribe to this blog too if you haven’t already done so. Love you long time. C’est vrai, c’est vrai.