April and October

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, in the soot and the early dark, where two men do the same filthy work and go home to very different Januaries.

Two sweeps both clean the selfsame flue,
Same brush, same soot, same hour or two.
One knocks each autumn, hopeful, cold,
One has the date already sold.
By spring, one's book is bare, one's full.
What did the second never pull?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two sweeps in the town I've never named, and their brushes, in the old chorus, were equally thorough. Same rates, same soot, same aching shoulders.

The first sold sweepings. A good honest trade: a householder decides the chimney wants doing, sends for him, he does it well, takes his money and goes.

Which meant he began every year at nothing. Each September he walked the streets knocking, and every knock was a fresh persuasion of somebody who had half forgotten him, because being pleased with a man in October does not mean thinking of him the following autumn. He had done four hundred good jobs and had four hundred people who would say kind things about him and would not, on the whole, send for him unprompted.

And note the customer's side, which is the part that decides everything. She does not think about her chimney. Nobody has ever thought about a chimney. She thinks about it the week it smokes, and by then it has been eighteen months, and it is his fault in no way whatsoever that she left it, and yet the thin winter is entirely his.

The second sweep sold something else with the same brush. At the end of every job he said one thing:

Most flues want doing twice a year. I come in April and October. Two shillings the pair, and I put you in the book now, and you never think about it again. If I come and it doesn't need it, I don't charge you.

Perhaps half said yes, and the half who said yes changed his trade entirely.

He stopped selling in September. His book for the following autumn was written the previous autumn, so his year began already half full, and the walking and knocking was for the empty half rather than the whole. Which meant he could spend it on getting new households rather than re-persuading old ones.

He knew his winter before it arrived, so the wheelwright could be paid and the boy kept on and the thin months planned for rather than dreaded.

His customers were better served, and this is not a decoration on the argument, it is the argument. A flue swept twice yearly on a fixed date is a flue that does not catch fire, and the woman who had a standing arrangement never once lay awake in a smoky room in February wondering who to send for.

And the arrangement quietly killed his rivals. Not by outcompeting them: by removing the moment at which they might have been chosen. A house that expects him in April is a house that is never in the market for a sweep at all.

The clause about not charging was the whole of the trust, mind. It cost him a few shillings a year and it meant no householder ever suspected she was paying for a visit she did not need, which is the one fear that kills these arrangements everywhere.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Every trade sold one job at a time begins each year at nothing. That is the hidden condition most businesses live in without ever naming it: not that the work is bad, or the customers unhappy, but that January's income depends on decisions nobody has made yet, and every one of those decisions must be prompted, chased and won again from people who were perfectly satisfied last time.

The cure is not more selling. It is to sell the arrangement rather than the occasion. Same work, same brush, but bought once and repeated on a date, so the customer's future intention is written down instead of left to the week the chimney smokes. And notice which side gains most: the customer is spared the remembering, which is a service in itself, since people do not want to think about flues, filters, accounts, servicing or any of the necessary dull things you know about and they do not.

Then the three conditions that make it work, because these are done badly far more often than they are done well. It must be genuinely better for the buyer, not merely more convenient for you, which usually means a fixed rhythm and a promise about what happens if a visit is not needed. It must be offered at the moment of maximum goodwill, which is the end of a job well done, exactly as the second rung is. And it must be effortless to leave, since an arrangement that is hard to cancel is not trust, it is a trap, and one letter of complaint at market undoes fifty quiet renewals.

And mark what it does to your rivals, which is the part nobody notices. A customer with a date in the book is not a customer who compares prices, reads advertisements or asks a neighbour for a recommendation. You have not beaten your competitors; you have arranged for the question never to be asked. That is worth more than any argument you could win against them, and it is the same effect the cooper's smaller customers had in reverse: quiet, unglamorous trade that decides everything.

Three questions, and be practical about the first:

1. What does your customer have to remember in order to buy from you again? Write it down plainly. Whatever it is, they will forget it, and the length of that forgetting is the size of the hole in your year. Your job is to take the remembering off them.
2. What is the natural rhythm of your work? Twice yearly, quarterly, monthly, every spring. Nearly every trade has one hiding in it, and if yours does not, look for the thing that ought to be checked, maintained or refreshed and is not.
3. What would make it plainly fair? The clause that protects the customer from paying for nothing: no charge if it is not needed, cancel by a word, the price fixed for the year. Write that clause before you write the offer, and say it aloud when you make it.

The Answer to the Riddle

What did the second sweep never pull?

The bell. He did not knock in September, because September had been settled the previous October, at the end of a job, in one sentence spoken while the householder was pleased with him. Same brush, same soot, same two shillings. One man sold four hundred sweepings and owned nothing; the other sold two hundred arrangements and owned a year he could see the shape of before it started.

The verse:

Sell once, and start again at naught,
Each autumn's bread must all be sought.
Sell twice a year, upon a date,
And winter comes to no debate.

Until next time. Go and find the rhythm hiding in your trade, and offer the arrangement to the next customer at the end of the job.

P.S. If your trade truly has no rhythm, and a few do not, then sell the reminder instead. Ask permission to write to them when the time comes and put the date in your own book. You will not have their money in advance, but you will have removed the remembering from the person least likely to do it, which is nine tenths of the benefit for none of the awkwardness.

Also in the archive: The Second Rung, The Quiet Month and Three Lines Against Her Name.