Every Thorn in the Parish

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town there were two hedgers on the ridge, a trade in which no two lengths of work are the same work.

Two hedgers in the town I have never named, two billhooks and the same whetstone.
Both laid and ditched for the farms on the ridge, and both asked ninepence a chain.
Both were busy from Michaelmas to March, and neither man idled an hour.
One took every length he was offered and finished the winter poorer than he began.
The other walked the hedge before he named a figure, and turned away one length in four.
Same hook, same price, same winter. How?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two hedgers, both raised to it. The first was the better craftsman and everybody said so. A hedge he laid was stock-proof the day he left it and stayed so a dozen years.

He had a price and was proud of the plainness of it. Ninepence a chain, cutting, laying and ditching, the same figure to every farmer on the ridge. Nor had he plucked it from the air: he had sat one August with three winters of his own day book, and ninepence had covered the lot. A man cannot be fairer than his own arithmetic.

The second hedger was slower with the hook and knew it. What he did before giving a figure was walk the length. He read the years since it was last laid off the thickness of the stems, looked at what grew in it, hazel being honest work and blackthorn a day of blood, and put his boot in the ditch. Then he named his figure: sixpence a chain on a hedge laid eight years back, ninepence on an ordinary one, one and sixpence on twenty years of neglect with wire in the bottom.

Now consider what the farmers did with those prices, for every one of them knew his own hedges. The man with the clean hazel hedge thought ninepence dear for what little was there, and got sixpence over the hill. The man with half a mile of twenty-year thorn and a silted ditch heard one and sixpence from the second hedger and went very quietly to the first, who said ninepence. He said yes before the sentence was finished, and so fast that the first hedger took it for a compliment.

By December that man's winter was all neglect. Hedges wanting two days to the chain, at a price built for half a day. He was at it in the dark both ends, and never once turned down. Not one farmer asked him to do better on the price, and he thought himself the best-regarded hedger in the parish.

He came out of March a quarter down on the year before, and put it to a hard winter and a cheap rival. So the next August he did his sum again and raised his price to a shilling, which is the part I would have you watch. At a shilling the middling hedges went over the hill as well, so he kept the very worst and nothing besides, and his second winter was worse than his first. The man with the duller hook laid less hedge and made more money.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

One price for jobs of unequal difficulty is not a simple price, it is a standing offer to the worst work in your trade, because the customer knows his own job better than you do and only the ones for whom your figure is cheap will accept it. Your price does not merely get answered. It sorts, and the mesh of the sieve is set by your own ignorance.

Begin with what the farmer has that you have not. He has lived beside that hedge twenty years and knows what is in the bottom, because he put the wire there. He cannot price the work and does not need to. He need only weigh your figure against his own private sense of what he is asking, which takes a second. Every man for whom it is generous accepts, and every man for whom it is hard goes to somebody who will look at the job first. You have not set a price. You have set a condition of entry, admitting what you understood least.

The cruelty is in the arithmetic, which was honest. His ninepence was correctly averaged over three winters of a mixed book, easy hedges and hard. It was true the day he worked it out and false the day he published it, because publishing it destroyed the mix it came from. An average describes a past your own price prevents. Worse, each rise sheds the easiest work you have left, so the cost of your book climbs to meet every new figure. That is how an honest man raises his price twice and is poorer after each.

The remedy is not to be dearer. It is to find the one or two things that truly move your hours, and let the price move with them. For most trades it is distance, access, or the state of what is already there. You know which, because it is the thing you find halfway through and swear at. Ask about that before you name a figure. A price nobody ever refuses has told you nothing about what your work is worth, and a diary with no refusals in it is a sieve working against you.

Two cautions. Do not answer this with a range, since a range is heard at its lowest number and you will have conceded the cheap end unasked. Give one figure, after one question, and let it differ between jobs rather than within one. And do not publish a tariff of thirty lines, for that hands the customer a pencil and an afternoon to decide which lines he can do without. Three plain bands with the condition named can be said aloud at the gate.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. Which of my prices is never refused? If one kind of job always says yes without a pause, you are the cheap man for it, and the market noticed before you did.
2. What do I learn on site that I did not know when I priced the job? Written down in one sentence, that is the variable your price is missing.
3. What one question separates the cheap job from the dear one? It must be answerable over the telephone by somebody not in the trade. Draft it tonight and use it before your next figure.

The Answer to the Riddle

Same hook, same price, same winter, and the man who turned away a quarter of the work finished better than the man who took it all. How?

Because ninepence was a bargain on a clean hedge and a ruin on a neglected one, and every farmer knew which he owned. The easy work went to the man who priced it easy, and the hard work went, gratefully and at speed, to the man with one figure for everything. He was not undercut and not unlucky. His own price sorted him into the hardest winter in the parish.

The verse:

You set one figure for the lot, and all of them can read
What lies inside their own long hedge far better than you may.
So those it favours say you yes, and those it robs go elsewhere,
And all that fills your winter is the work you underpaid.

Until next time. Go and mark the last twenty jobs in your book with the hours you allowed and the hours they took, and write down what the overrunning five had in common.

P.S. The sieve works whichever way you point it, and that is worth having. By being plainly the cheap man for well-kept hedges, the second hedger collected the farms that keep their hedges, and those are the farms that send for you every eighth winter and pay on the day. Price the work you want more of a little kindly and the rest at what it honestly costs.

Also in the archive: The Biggest Name in the Book, The Pencil in the Margin and The Second Column.