A Password for an Oven

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. I set this one in your own century, the old town having no door that a customer could fail to open, and the whole difference between these two men was who was asked to learn something.

Two oven cleaners in your own century, the same van, the same tank of caustic, the same list of two hundred and forty households.
Both bought the same booking program in the same March, at the same price by the month.
Both sent word in September to every household due a second clean.
One sent a link, and asked each of them to set up an account and choose a slot.
One sent two dates, and wrote the answers into the same program himself.
Same program, same September, same households. Whose diary was full by October?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Both men cleaned ovens out of a van, and both were good at it. The same dipping tank bolted in the back, the same smell of hot degreaser on a cold morning, wire shelves going in black and coming out silver and dripping on a sheet of card on somebody's kitchen floor. Both worked the same sort of streets, both charged within four pounds of one another, and both had learned the thing that governs this trade, which is that a household that has seen the inside of its own oven made white will want it done again in about eight months and will almost never remember to say so. The money is not in the first clean. It is in the second, and the second must be asked for.

In March each of them bought the same program. It kept a diary, it sent a reminder, it took a card payment, and it could be made to send a message in September to every household that had been cleaned in January. Both men read the same pages, and both were pleased.

The first man set it up as it was meant to be set up. In September he sent out two hundred and forty messages, each with a link, and the link took the householder to a page of his own, in his own colours, with his van photographed at the top. There the householder was asked for an email address and a password of eight characters with a number in it. A code was then sent to confirm the address. Having confirmed it, the householder might choose from the slots shown for the next three weeks, agree to the terms, and have the booking confirmed by return. It was tidy, it was modern, and it cost the man nothing per booking after the monthly fee. Forty-one households came out the other end of it.

He could account for some of the rest. A few had moved. A few had bought an air fryer and said so. What he could not account for was the silence of the rest, and he put it down to the trade being slow that autumn, and he raised his advertising spend in November.

The second man had the same program and the same two hundred and forty households, and he did not send anybody a link. He sent each of them a message of three lines. Your oven was done on the eleventh of January. I have Tuesday the twenty-third in the morning or Thursday the second in the afternoon. Reply with one and I will put you in. The replies came back as replies come back, in the broken grammar of people standing in their own kitchens: Thursday pls, Tues if thats ok, can you do a Saturday, we have moved to Larkhill do you come out that far. He sat with the phone on the dashboard for about an hour and a half across that week and typed the answers into the diary himself, one at a time, and the program sent out all the reminders and took all the payments and did every other thing it had been bought to do. A hundred and thirty-eight households were in his book by the first week of October.

The program made no distinction between them. It was the same program. One man had put it on his side of the counter and one had put it on the customer's, and that was the whole of it.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Count the work a tool saves you and the work it hands to your customer in the same column, because one of those two will be done and the other will simply be abandoned. The ninety minutes the second man spent typing were real, and he felt every one of them, and they were the cheapest ninety minutes he spent that year. The first man's ninety minutes were real too. He did not spend them. He asked two hundred and forty households to spend about four minutes each on his behalf, which is sixteen hours of other people's evenings, and he was charged for the portion that nobody was willing to spend.

Three things make this error easy to walk into. The first is that your own saving is visible and the customer's cost is not. You can feel the hour and a half. You cannot feel the man who opened your link in a car park, found he was being asked to invent a password, and put the phone back in his pocket meaning to do it later. He does not ring to complain. He does not tell you he has gone. He tells you nothing at all, and you record the whole business as a quiet autumn.

The second is the difference in practice. You are in that program forty times a week and you have forgotten what it was to be new in it. Your customer is in it twice a year at the very most, and he is a beginner every single time, and he will be a beginner for as long as he lives. Anything that rewards fluency is cheap for you and dear for him, and when you design the step you design it with your own fluent hands and never notice.

The third is that willingness is perishable. A man who has decided to have his oven done has decided it for about ninety seconds, standing somewhere between two other jobs, and the decision will not survive an errand. I have written before about the size of the step you put in a willing customer's way, and separately about the customer who cannot refuse you cheaply and goes quiet instead. A password is both of those at once. It is a step he did not expect, and failing at it is a small humiliation he will not describe to you, and so the whole of your evidence about it is an empty week in the diary.

Two cautions. The first is that friction is not always a loss, and the fashion for removing all of it is foolish. A deposit, a signed agreement, a form that asks two questions you genuinely need answered, a photograph of the oven before you quote: these cost the customer something and buy him something, and they buy you something as well. The test is not whether a step is effortful. The test is who the step is working for. A deposit does work for both of you. A password does work for your software and for nobody else in the transaction. The second caution is that none of this is an argument against the program. The second man's program earned its fee every month and he would not have been without it. He simply never let it speak to a customer in a voice that required training to answer. Keep the machine, and keep it behind the counter, and go out to the front yourself.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. Between a customer saying yes in his own mind and a date being in my book, what must he do that he has never done before? Write the steps out in order, one line each. Accounts, passwords, codes, downloads, portals, forms longer than the thing they are booking. The list is nearly always longer than you expect, because you have not walked it since the week you set it up.
2. Of the people I sent into my system last month, how many came out the other side? Sent against completed. Most programs will tell you if you ask them. The gap between those two figures is not a statistic. It is the bill.
3. What would it cost me to do that step for him instead? Time it. If taking a reply and typing it in yourself costs you forty seconds, then you have been charging your customer four minutes to save yourself forty seconds, and you have been paying for that trade at the rate of a lost job.

The Answer to the Riddle

Same program, same September, same households. Whose diary was full by October?

The second man's. One hundred and thirty-eight against forty-one, out of the same list, with the same tool, in the same three weeks. The difference was not the software and it was not the message and it was not the price. One man asked two hundred and forty people to learn a small new thing in order to give him money. The other learned it himself in March and never mentioned it to anybody.

The verse:

A program saves you minutes, and they are minutes all the same,
But mark which side the counter they are taken from, and whose.
The man who cannot work your door was willing when he came,
And he will not come back to say it. Silence is the news.

Until next time. Go and open your own booking link on a phone that has never used it, as a stranger with no account, and time yourself to a confirmed date.

P.S. Do the arithmetic before you defend the tidy method, because it is shorter than you think. Say the portal saves you two hours a month of typing, and say you value your own hour at thirty pounds. The portal has earned sixty pounds. Now say it costs you one household in the month that would have booked a clean at seventy. The account is already in deficit, and that is before the second clean that household would have had the following spring, and the sister-in-law it would have mentioned you to. A step that loses one customer a month must save you a great deal more than a Sunday evening of typing, and almost none of them do.

Also in the archive: Two Bars of Signal, By the Same Hand and Still Setting It Up at Christmas.