Never Once Refused

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, two wheelwrights worked within a hundred yards of one another, and one of them could say, truthfully and often, that nobody had ever refused his price.

Two wheelwrights in one lane, the same elm for the stocks, the same iron for the tyres.
One asked twenty-five shillings a wheel and was never once refused.
One asked thirty, and was sent away one time in five.
Both were busy from Lady Day to harvest, and neither made a poor wheel.
The first finished fifty wheels that year, the second forty.
Why did the man who lost the work end the year richer, with twenty days to spare?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two wheelwrights in the town I've never named, both at the top of the same lane, both with the sawpit at the back and elm stocks stood on end under the eaves to season. The stock of elm because elm holds a mortice, the spokes of cleft oak, the iron tyre shrunk on hot while the wheel groans and tightens itself. Both men worked that way, there being only one way, and both did it well.

The first wheelwright had settled his figure a long while back and twenty-five shillings it had stayed. He had chosen it, if he was honest, at the level where no farmer in the parish would ever argue, and the farmers never did. He was proud of it, and would say at the Michaelmas fair that no man had walked away from his gate in nineteen years, the way another man says he has never been in debt.

A wheel took him two days and about nine shillings in timber and iron. Fifty wheels that year: a hundred days of his life, sixty-two pounds ten taken, twenty-two pounds ten gone in stuff, forty pounds left. He bought no new tools, there being nothing over.

The second wheelwright had begun at twenty-five too. The difference was a penny memorandum book on the shelf above the bench, four columns in it: the date, the farmer, the figure asked, and whether the work came to him or went elsewhere. He had begun it to settle an argument with himself about whether spring or autumn was the busier. What it told him instead was that in a whole year he had been refused twice, both times by the same man, who bought everything in his life on price.

Twice in a year struck him as strange information. He put the wheel to twenty-seven shillings for the next five who asked. All five came. He went to thirty for the five after that, and four came. So the figure stayed at thirty, and the book settled where it settles: one asking in five went elsewhere, nearly always to the same half-dozen farmers, who were also the slowest to settle an account.

Forty wheels, then. Eighty days, sixty pounds taken, eighteen in stuff, forty-two pounds left. Two pounds more than his neighbour for twenty days less at the bench, and those twenty days did not sit idle. They went on tyring and repairs for the carriers, which paid better by the day than new work ever had, and on buying elm in the summer when timber was cheap instead of in the spring when he was desperate.

Be fair to the first man. He was no coward and no fool, and the evidence was on his side every day. He was busy, and a busy man does not hunt the one fact that would make him less busy.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

If nobody has refused your price this year, you have not got a price, you have got a guess that nobody has troubled to argue with. Refusals are not the cost of doing business. They are the only instrument you own that reads what your work is worth to other people.

Consider what you can learn alone. Your books tell you the floor: materials, hours, rent. Nothing in them tells you the ceiling. The ceiling is held by other people, and the only ones who will ever tell you where it stands are the ones who say no. Decline to collect that and you price blind in one direction for ever, which is the direction that costs money.

The second reason is the cruel one. An underpriced trade and a popular trade look exactly alike from the inside. Being too cheap never announces itself. It arrives as praise, as recommendation, as a diary with nothing left in it, each of which reads as proof that your figure is right. A full book is the most persuasive wrong evidence in trade, and a man can carry it for nineteen years.

The third reason is that losing a fifth of your askings costs much less than it looks, because the fifth you lose is not an average fifth. It goes to the people who buy on price alone, who are also the people who want the work done first and settle late. You lose the thinnest work in the book and you gain hours. The customer is weighing several things at once and your figure is only one of them, which is why a rise of a fifth does not cost you a fifth of your trade.

Two cautions. First, the rate is information only if you write the reason beside it. A quote never answered is a refusal of something, perhaps an estimate that arrived on Thursday for a job starting Monday. Guess at reasons and you will guess the flattering kind. And test on new askings only: raising a price on people already in your book needs a reason, a date and a window. Second, there is such a thing as going past the mark. If a third or more go elsewhere, step back rather than argue with the whole parish. The object is not to lose work. It is to find the edge and stand just inside it.

Three questions, and the first will take you an evening:

1. Of your last twenty askings, how many turned into work? If you cannot say within two, you have been pricing on feeling. Start the column tonight and raise nothing until it can be read.
2. When you last lost one, do you know why? Price, timing, or the way the thing was written down. Three faults with three remedies, and a trade that calls them all price goes on cutting a figure that was never the trouble.
3. What would you have to ask before one in five went elsewhere? Most people can name that figure within a few per cent, and almost nobody is asking it. The gap between the figure you can name and the one you send out is the cheapest money you will see this year.

The Answer to the Riddle

Why did the man who lost the work end the year richer, with twenty days to spare? Because he was not selling wheels. He was selling two days of his life at a time, and he had taken the trouble to learn what two days would fetch. Twenty-five shillings was not a price agreed between his neighbour and the parish. It was a figure set low enough that the parish never had to think about it, and nineteen years of unbroken yes told him only this: he had been right once, about something he never tested again.

The verse:

Fifty wheels at twenty-five, and never a man said no,
Forty wheels at thirty, and ten went up the lane.
The first filled every day he had and had the lighter purse,
The second kept his Michaelmas, and twenty days again.

Until next time. Go and write out your last twenty quotes with how many came to anything, and keep the sheet where you will see it when you set your next figure.

P.S. The first refusal after a rise feels like a verdict and it is only a reading. Five askings tell you nothing and twenty tell you a good deal, so the man who puts his price back down because one farmer went elsewhere on a Tuesday has thrown away his only measurement on the strength of one figure. Take the reading over twenty, in writing, and judge the price then.

Also in the archive: What Your Price Says Before You Do, The Crowded End and The Good Iron on the Axle.