Out of the Wool Money

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, where two well sinkers were called out to the same farm in the same July, and both came down the lane having found the same water in the same place.

Two well sinkers in one town, the same rods, the same windlass, the same men to dig.
Both were asked to bring water nearer the house than the yard pump.
One sounded the ground, went home, and drew the best answer the farm could have.
One sounded the ground, and then asked what had been put by for water that year.
Both were honest, both could have built either work, and neither added a penny to his figures.
Why did the better plan lose, and lose to a job a quarter of its size?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two well sinkers in the town I've never named, each with a cart of rods, a windlass and two men who could stand a day in wet clay. In July both were asked out to a farm in the dip below the wood, on separate days, to see what might be done about water. There was a pump in the yard, sixty paces from the kitchen door, and the farmer's wife had carried every drop of it across that yard for nineteen years, two cans at a time on a yoke.

Both men found the same things. The old well steined with brick gone soft in the top four feet, four and twenty feet to the water, a foot of silt under that. A spring in the bank above the barn, watched in the heat of the day, which is the only honest hour to watch a spring, and standing higher than the dairy roof, so that it would run to the house of its own accord without anybody turning a handle.

The first well sinker went home and designed the right work. A catchpit at the spring, a hundred and sixty yards of iron pipe laid below the frost, a cistern in the loft over the dairy, a tap over the scullery sink that would run on a Sunday in a drought. Thirty-one pounds, and he was not wrong about any of it. The farmer read it at the table, said nothing, and put it on the shelf behind the clock, where it stood three years later, gone brown at the fold.

The second well sinker, wiping his hands in the yard, asked the farmer what he had put by for water this year. The farmer told him, because people generally do when the question is put plainly and without apology. Nine pounds, the last of the wool money, some of it already spoken for by a field gate. He had expected to be told thirty, he said, and to put the thing off another twelvemonth, as he had twice already.

So the second man did not price the spring. He priced the well. Six feet deeper to the gravel, the soft brick out and steined again hard, the silt lifted, a lift pump in the scullery and forty feet of lead pipe under the yard to reach it. Eight pounds twelve, a fortnight in August while the water was low. Then two lines at the foot: this does not water the beasts and will still run slow in a drought, and the spring remains the better work whenever the farm can carry it, at thirty-one pounds, a figure he would hold.

He had the job by the Tuesday, and the wife had water at the sink before the corn was in. Two summers later, after a good clip, the farmer sent up for him and he laid the pipe from the spring. He got his thirty-one pounds in the end. He got it second.

Be fair to the first man. His scheme was the better work and the better value over forty years, and he padded nothing. He answered the question the ground had asked him. He had designed for the farm, and the money was in the farmer.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Find out what the customer has put by before you decide what to offer, because your price is never weighed against the work, it is weighed against a figure he came in holding. You cannot see that figure and he can. Everything you write is read beside it, in about a second and a half, and if you have guessed it badly then nothing further down the page gets read at all.

Consider the ordinary shape of a quotation. A man looks at the job, settles what ought to be done, and prices what he has settled. Every part of that is sound except the order, for he fixes the size of the work before learning the size of the purse. The figure is refused, and he does the one thing left to a man who has already chosen the work. He takes money off the same job, and teaches the customer that his first number was an opinion and the second one probably is too.

Most trades have more than one way of doing what they are asked for: the whole work, the half of it that matters, the repair that buys five years. A man who knows his three versions is never reduced to haggling, since his answer to a purse smaller than his price is a different piece of work rather than a thinner margin on the same one. That is the use of offering a smaller piece of the work, and the asking tells you which piece to offer.

Two objections are made to this. The first is that it is an impertinence to ask a man about his money, but the impertinence lives in the wording. What can you afford is an enquiry into his circumstances, and he will resent it properly. What had you thought of putting to this, this year, is an enquiry into his plan, and most people are glad to have a plan treated as a plan. The second objection is that whatever figure you are given you will quietly charge it, which is a choice and not a consequence. Told nine when the right version comes to six, you say six.

Two cautions. First, cut the work to the money and never the quality. The temptation, on hearing nine pounds against a thirty-one pound scheme, is to lay the same pipe in a thinner gauge and leave out the cistern, which is thinning the cloth and will be found out by the first hard frost. Write down plainly what the smaller job does not do, for a customer told what he is not getting does not feel cheated when he does not get it. Second, ask beside the work and not before it, once you have shown you understand the job. Where a man does not know, name two jobs you have done, the eight pound one and the thirty pound one, and what each gave the household. He will point at one.

Three questions, and the first wants doing before the next enquiry arrives:

1. What are your three versions? Take the job you are asked for most and write out the small honest one, the usual one and the full one, with a figure against each and a line on what each leaves out. A trade with one version has one answer for a man with less money, and the answer is no.
2. What did last year's refusals cost you to produce? A trade that writes twenty estimates and wins six has spent fourteen evenings learning what two minutes in a farmyard would have told it in July.
3. What words will you use? Write your own sentence out tonight, short enough to say while you are putting your tools back in the cart, and use it on the next job.

The Answer to the Riddle

Why did the better plan lose, and lose to a job a quarter of its size?

Because one man answered the ground and the other answered the farmer. The finer scheme arrived in a house where nine pounds existed and thirty-one did not, so it was never weighed at all. The smaller work was taken not because it was cheap but because it could be bought, and that is written nowhere down a well.

The verse:

One priced what the farm wanted, one asked what had been put by,
The same rods, the same water, the same fortnight in the clay.
The finer scheme went up behind the clock and stayed there,
And the one that could be bought was running by September.

Until next time. Go and write out the three versions of your commonest job, with a figure against each, before the next person asks you for a price.

P.S. Ask it of the customers you already have. A standing customer has a figure for the year as surely as a stranger has one for a job, and nobody has ever enquired what it is. Ask him in October what he has set aside for your sort of work next year. You will hear a number you can plan a winter against, or that there is none yet, which is the better answer of the two, since a sum nobody has decided on is a sum you can still be the reason for.

Also in the archive: Away in April, Three Gates and To the Waterline.