The Box of Offcuts

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as ever. Your century today, and the subject is a sentence your customers either say to somebody else or do not, and everything follows from which.

Two firms both do the work quite well,
Both leave the customer glad, they tell.
One spends a fortune being heard,
One does one odd, particular thing.
Both please. Yet only one gets said.
What made the difference? Not the spend.

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two firms in the same trade, and the work, all together now, was equally good. Both did a proper job, finished on time, cleared up after themselves, and left customers satisfied.

The first firm's plan for growth was to be heard more. More advertising, better placed, said more often and more cleverly, all of it paid for out of margin. It worked in the way that spending works: while the money went out, enquiries came in, and when it stopped, they stopped.

What never happened was the other thing. Nobody mentioned him at a party. Not because anybody was dissatisfied, but because there was nothing to say. Imagine the sentence a customer would have to construct: they came when they said, did what they said, and it was fine. That is a good report and it is not a story, and people do not repeat reports. They repeat stories, and only when there is a reason to.

So he had to buy every single customer, forever, at rising cost, which is a perfectly viable way to run a business and an exhausting one.

The second firm did something odd, and the oddness was small, cheap and built into the work rather than added to the marketing.

At the end of every job, the customer got the offcuts, the spare parts and a written note of exactly what had been used, in a labelled box, with the date. So that in four years, when something needed matching or mending, the material was in the garage with a label on it.

It cost about twenty minutes and a box. It was not in any advertisement. It was simply what happened.

And people talked about it, because it was strange enough to mention. Not admired: mentioned. Somebody would say, you know what they did, they left me a box with all the spares labelled up, and the person hearing it would file that firm away under a description rather than a name, which is the only way anybody has ever been recommended.

Notice what the box actually was. It was not a marketing idea. It was a small change to how the work was done, made because it was genuinely useful in four years' time, and the talking was a consequence rather than the purpose. Had he done it in order to be talked about, he would have made it showier and less useful, and people would have felt the difference without being able to name it.

His enquiries did not stop when he stopped spending, because a thing that is being said in kitchens does not need paying for weekly.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Very good is invisible. Nobody has ever crossed a room to tell a friend that a job was done properly. That is the uncomfortable arithmetic underneath most small businesses: competence is what you are paid for, and it earns you satisfaction, repeat custom and silence. It does not earn you the sentence in somebody else's mouth, because there is no sentence to say.

So if you want to be spoken about, the remarkable part has to be built into the work rather than bolted onto the advertising. And it need not be large. One deliberate oddity that is genuinely useful will do it: the box of labelled spares, the photograph sent every evening, the thing you always do that nobody else in your trade does. What matters is that it is specific enough to be described in one sentence by somebody who is not trying.

Two tests keep it honest. It must be useful, not showy, since a gesture designed to be noticed is noticed as a gesture, and your customers are better at spotting that than you are at hiding it. And the judgement of whether it is remarkable belongs to them and not to you: if they mention it, it is; if you think it is and they never say it aloud, it is not, and no amount of your own enthusiasm changes that.

Then the reason nobody does it, which is the same reason in every trade. The oddity has to be decided on and then done every single time, in weeks when you are busy and nobody would notice its absence. That is a cost, and it is exactly why it works: your rivals could all copy the box tomorrow and almost none of them will keep it up past March, which makes a small permanent habit a stronger position than any advertisement you could buy.

Three questions, and think about your last ten jobs:

1. What sentence would your customer say about you? Write the actual words, as they would say them to a neighbour. If it comes out as "they were very good", you have nothing that travels, and no amount of advertising will supply it.
2. What is annoying about your trade that everybody accepts? The mess, the not knowing, the thing customers always ask for and never get. Your oddity is usually hiding there, since the remarkable thing is nearly always the removal of an ordinary irritation.
3. Could you do it every time, in your worst week? If it takes an hour, it will quietly lapse by spring. Twenty minutes and a box survives, and the surviving is the whole of the advantage.

The Answer to the Riddle

What made the difference?

A box of labelled offcuts, costing twenty minutes, which gave people something to say. Both firms did excellent work and both left their customers pleased, and only one of them left them holding a sentence. The first man spent every year buying the attention that the second was given for nothing, and the strange part is that the second was not trying to be talked about at all: he was trying to be useful in four years' time, and being talked about was what happened on the way.

The verse:

A job done well earns quiet thanks,
And quiet thanks are never spread.
Do one odd thing, and do it always,
And let the kitchens do the rest.

Until next time. Go and find the ordinary irritation in your trade that everybody accepts, remove it for every customer from now on, and say nothing about it.

P.S. Do not build the oddity on being cheapest, fastest or most agreeable, since all three can be outbid by anybody with deeper pockets or worse judgement. Build it on a habit that costs a little and is remembered for years, which is a thing your competitors can copy in an afternoon and will not sustain past the first busy fortnight.

Also in the archive: The Baker's Thirteenth Loaf, The Yellow Wheels and The Parted Seam.