By Friday, Please

Dear friend,

The riddle first. Your century today, and the subject arrives on a Tuesday afternoon, in a message that begins with an apology and ends with a date.

Two workshops hear "by Friday, please".
Both could, if pushed, with time to squeeze.
One drops the rest and works all night,
One names the price and keeps it right.
By June, one's rushed on every job.
Who paid for Friday? Who was robbed?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two workshops, one trade, and the work, all together now, was equally good. Both had a fortnight's work in the book and a customer on the telephone asking, very apologetically, whether there was any chance of Friday.

The first said yes. Of course he said yes: he is a helpful man, the customer sounded stretched, and being the person who saves the day is one of the better feelings available in trade. He worked the Wednesday night and most of Saturday, delivered on the Friday, and sent his usual invoice, unchanged, because it felt grasping to do otherwise after making such a fuss of being glad to help.

Three things happened, and he only ever noticed the first.

He was tired. That much was obvious. What was less obvious was who had actually paid for Friday: two other customers, quiet and patient ones, whose jobs slid a week and who were told nothing about why. They did not complain. They simply moved him, a little, in their private estimation, from the column marked reliable into the column marked usually fine. That is not a complaint you ever get to answer, and it is the innkeeper's lesson in a different coat: the loud guest is always paid for by the quiet ones.

And the customer learned something. Not that the workshop had performed a miracle, because he never saw the Wednesday night, and people cannot see what they are not shown. What he learned was that Friday was available at the ordinary price. His next three jobs all needed Friday, and, by the end of the year, so did everybody's, because word gets round about which suppliers can be pushed.

The second workshop said something different, in a tone with no grievance in it at all:

Friday is possible. It means moving two other jobs, so it's a third more, and I'd rather ask them than surprise them. Or Thursday week at the usual price. Which suits?

About half chose Friday and paid the third, and every one of those had a real deadline behind them: a launch, a tenant moving in, a fine. For them the extra was nothing at all against what was riding on it.

The other half, once asked, discovered that Thursday week was fine. They had not been lying. Nobody had ever put a price on their urgency before, and until you do, everything is urgent, because urgency costs the person asking exactly nothing.

Both answers suited him. The first paid for the disruption. The second protected the fortnight's work he had already promised to other people, which was the point of the whole exercise.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Every rush is a queue-jump, and the person who pays for it is the customer who waited politely. There is no version of Friday that comes out of thin air. It comes out of somebody's promised date, or your Wednesday night, or the standard of the last job on the bench, and the seller who says yes without naming a price has simply chosen, silently, to take it from all three.

So speed is not a favour, it is a product, and one your customers value highly and separately from the work itself. Priced, it earns you money from the people with a real deadline and gives everybody else a way of finding out whether they have one. Unpriced, it does neither: it becomes the standard service, arrives with every enquiry, and quietly converts your entire business into a rush shop staffed by one exhausted person.

This is the while-you're-here problem again, with a clock on it. Say yes gladly. Just say what it costs, and say what it moves, and let the customer choose between the two honest options rather than making the choice on their behalf out of a wish to be liked.

Two refinements worth having. Tell the customers being moved, rather than hoping they will not notice, because a person who is asked usually says yes and remembers being asked; a person who is simply moved remembers being moved. And if you do decide to do a rush for nothing, as you sometimes will and sometimes should, say so out loud, once: this normally carries a premium, and I am not charging you for it. Otherwise you have paid for a gift nobody knows they received, which is the most expensive kind.

Three questions, and go through the last three months of work before answering:

1. How many rushes did you absorb, and what did they move? List them with the jobs that slipped behind each one. The second column is the real invoice, and it is nearly always addressed to your steadiest customers, who paid it without ever being told.
2. What is your premium, and what is your honest alternative date? Decide the number now, in calm weather: a third, a half, whatever genuinely covers the disruption. Then decide the ordinary date you can always offer beside it. Two options, one calm sentence, no apology.
3. How many of those rushes were real? Look back and count the ones with an actual event behind them. If most were not, that is not a complaint about your customers. It is a report on the fact that nobody had ever been asked to weigh their haste against anything at all.

The Answer to the Riddle

Who paid for Friday?

Two customers who had waited their turn, and a man's Wednesday night, and nobody was ever told. The first workshop believed he had given something away for nothing. He had given away something valuable and taken the price of it out of people who were not consulted, and then taught his whole customer list that this is how he can be worked. By June, everything was urgent, nothing paid more, and the fortnight in his book had become a polite fiction.

The verse:

The favour done at speed, for free,
Becomes the only speed they'll see.
So put a number on the haste,
And half their urgency's replaced.

Until next time. Go and set your rush premium this week, and offer both options to the very next customer who asks for Friday.

P.S. Watch for the rush that is caused by your own side of the work: the question you sat on for four days, the drawing that went out late. Those you carry yourself, at your own cost, and you say so plainly. A premium is for their haste. Your delay is your own bill.

Also in the archive: Booked Until March, While You're Here and The Price of an Hour.