Six Shillings for a Locking Door

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, at a front door that will not lock, with a householder standing beside it and a locksmith on his knees.

Two locksmiths mend the selfsame door,
Same lock, same fault, same skill, same floor.
One names an hour and starts the clock,
One names the price to fix the lock.
Same forty minutes, near enough.
Why was one watched, and one was thanked?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two locksmiths in the town I've never named, and their work, in the old chorus, was equally sound. Both were called to the same sort of door with the same sort of fault, and both fixed it in about forty minutes.

The first charged by the hour, which is how his father had charged and how every man in the trade charged, and it seemed to him the only honest way: you pay for the time I spend, no more and no less.

Watch what it did to the forty minutes. The householder stood in the hall and could not help it: every minute was money leaving, so every minute was watched. When the locksmith stopped to think, which good locksmiths do, the customer saw a man being paid to stand still. When he went to the cart for a tool, that was a shilling walking down the path. When he fixed it quickly, the customer was pleased and slightly resentful, since forty minutes had seemed a great deal for so little visible effort; and when a job ran long, the customer was displeased and slightly suspicious, since the man had every reason for it to run long.

He was, in other words, paid least for the jobs he did best, and distrusted for the ones he did slowest, and there was no arrangement of the hourly rate that could get him out of that.

He also could not say, when asked on the doorstep, what it would cost. He could only say what he charged an hour, which is not an answer to the question and which every householder recognised as not an answer.

The second locksmith looked at the door and said: I can have that locking properly for six shillings, and it will hold. Then he did it.

The householder, having agreed six shillings for a locking door, went and made tea. She had bought a result rather than a stretch of time, so there was nothing to watch. When the locksmith stopped to think, she did not see money standing still; she saw a man working out how to give her what she had paid for. When he finished in forty minutes she was delighted, since the door locked and that was the whole of the arrangement.

And on the days when a job went badly and took two hours, he absorbed it, said nothing, and charged six shillings, because that was the price of a locking door and the trouble was his to carry. Those were the days that made his name, and they cost him a few hours a year.

Over twenty years his forty-minute jobs paid him properly, his difficult jobs bought him a reputation, and no customer of his ever stood in a hall counting.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Sell the hour and the customer buys a suspicion. Sell the result and the customer buys a locking door. The hourly rate feels like honesty and produces the opposite, because it puts your interest and the customer's in direct opposition for the whole length of the job: every minute you take is a minute they pay for, so your skill is penalised and your slowness is rewarded, and they know it, and they watch.

A price for the outcome removes the watching entirely. The customer has bought a thing rather than your time, and so your speed becomes your profit rather than their saving, your thinking becomes work rather than idleness, and the whole conversation on the doorstep changes from what do you charge an hour to what will it cost to have this done, which is the only question the customer ever actually had.

And note who bears the risk, since this is where people resist. Charging for the result means you carry the job that goes wrong, which feels like loss and is the entire source of the trust. A tradesman who says six shillings and means it, on the bad days as well as the good, has said something about himself that no hourly rate can say. It is the same currency as the seedsman's guarantee: you have taken the uncertainty onto your own side of the table, and been believed for it.

Two cautions. Price the result from your own records rather than from hope, since a fixed price set optimistically is a discount you did not intend, and you will need the book to know what forty minutes actually is across a hundred doors. And where the work genuinely cannot be scoped before you begin, charge for the diagnosis first, as the millwright did, and then price the result once you can see it.

Three questions, and think of the last job you were watched on:

1. What does your customer actually want to buy? Not your time: the door that locks, the leak that stops, the figures that balance. Name it in one line. That line is what you should be pricing.
2. What do your best jobs earn you an hour? If the answer is less than your worst jobs, your pricing punishes skill, and every year you spend improving will make you poorer by the hour.
3. What would you charge for the result? Take your last twenty jobs of one kind, find the time they actually took, and set a price that pays you properly for the average and lets you carry the bad one without complaint.

The Answer to the Riddle

Why was one watched and one thanked?

Because one sold the forty minutes and the other sold the door. The work was the same, the skill was the same and the time was very nearly the same, and one customer spent it in the hall counting shillings while the other spent it making tea. The hourly man was paid for standing still and resented for it; the other was paid for a locking door and thanked for it, and on the days he was slow nobody knew, because nobody was counting.

The verse:

Name the hour, and they will stand
And watch each minute leave their hand.
Name the door, and name the sum,
And they will put the kettle on.

Until next time. Go and take one kind of job you do often, work out what it truly costs you across twenty of them, and put a price on the result.

P.S. The objection I hear most is that some jobs are unknowable until the lock is off, and that is true. It is an argument for pricing in two stages, not for the hourly rate: a fixed fee to look and say, and a fixed price for what you then find. The customer still never buys a minute of your time, and still never has a reason to stand in the hall.

Also in the archive: The Seedsman's Sentence, The Millwright's Two Pounds and What Your Price Says Before You Do.