The Boy Minding the Shop

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, in the good shop on the corner, where the master is out at the warehouse and a boy is minding the counter.

Two merchants keep two equal shops,
Same stock, same sign, same window props.
One does the greeting all himself,
One taught the boy who minds the shelf.
Both spend the same on trade and light.
Whose custom stayed? And who took flight?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two merchants on the same street in the town I've never named, and their stock, in the old chorus, was equally good. Same window, same sign, same money spent on making the shop known.

The first was excellent with customers, and knew it. When he stood behind his own counter, people bought, and came back, and told others. His difficulty was that he was behind his own counter perhaps half the time, being at the warehouse, at the bank, or out seeing to a delivery, and the rest of the time the shop was minded by a boy.

The boy was not a bad lad. He was fifteen, and had been told to look after the shop, which he understood to mean not letting anything be stolen and not breaking anything.

So when a woman came in and asked whether they had such a thing, he said no, because they did not have it in the window and he did not know what was in the back. When a man asked when a delivery might come, he said he could not say. When somebody hesitated, he waited, silently, until they left, because it had never occurred to him that he was permitted to speak first.

Every one of those people had been brought to that door by the sign, the window, the reputation and the money the master had spent, and every one of them was lost at the last step by a lad who was doing exactly what he had been told.

And the master never knew. That is the cruel part. Nobody comes back to tell you that your boy said no to a thing you had in the storeroom. He simply concluded that trade was slower than it used to be.

The second merchant did something dull and unromantic. He wrote down, on one sheet, what happens when somebody comes through the door.

Greet them within five seconds, whatever you are doing. Never say no to a request until you have looked in the back and asked me. If you do not know, say you will find out and take their name. If they hesitate, ask what they are trying to do rather than what they want to buy. And write down everything anybody asked for that we did not have.

Five lines, and he went through them with the boy on a Monday morning, and then, which is the part most masters skip, he stood at the back of his own shop on three separate afternoons and watched.

The boy became, within a season, a passable shopkeeper. And the last line of that sheet, the writing down of what people asked for and were not given, turned out to be the most useful list in the business, since it was a record of the shop's failings written by the customers themselves.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Your marketing is delivered by whoever happens to answer. Everything you spend on being known ends at one moment, in one exchange, conducted very often by the person in your business with the least experience and the least idea of what it cost to bring that customer to the door. The finest sign in the town is a machine for delivering strangers to your least prepared employee, and if that meeting goes badly, the whole apparatus behind it counts for nothing.

And note why the failure is invisible for years. A customer served badly at the counter does not complain, because nothing was done to her; she was merely told no, or met with silence, and she leaves believing she has learned something about your shop. Your evidence of the problem consists entirely of a slow year you cannot account for, exactly as the letter on being set aside described.

Which means the ordinary instruction to look after the customer is worth nothing at all. It has no content. A boy of fifteen has no idea what it contains, and a competent adult will fill it with their own guesses, which will be different from yours and different again from each other's. Write the five things down. Not a manual, and not a policy: the five specific moves that turn an interruption into a sale, in the words your trade actually uses.

Then watch, which is the half that nobody does. Stand at the back of your own shop, or listen to the calls, or read what goes out under somebody else's hand, three times, and be prepared to be surprised. Every trade that does this discovers something they would have sworn was impossible, and discovers it in an afternoon rather than in a slow year.

Three questions, and be honest on the second:

1. Who meets your customers when you are not there? Name them, and then ask what they have actually been told about how to do it, as opposed to what you assume they have absorbed by standing near you.
2. What are your five lines? Write them today: the greeting, the never-say-no-without-checking, the take-their-name, the question to ask a hesitator, and the record of what was asked for and not supplied. It fits on one sheet or it will not be followed.
3. When did you last watch? Not supervise: watch, from the back, without stepping in. If the answer is never, you do not know what your marketing is buying, since you have only ever seen the version of your business that occurs when you are standing in it.

The Answer to the Riddle

Whose custom took flight?

The man who was good with people and thought that sufficient. He was better behind a counter than his rival and it did not matter, because he was behind it half the time and had never once described, in words, what he did there. His boy was loyal, honest and entirely untaught, and turned away trade that had cost real money to attract, and neither of them ever knew it had happened. The other man wrote five lines on a sheet and watched three afternoons, which is the smallest possible amount of management and was enough.

The verse:

You paid for sign and window bright
To bring them to your door.
Then left the last word of the night
To one you never taught before.

Until next time. Go and write the five lines, go through them with whoever answers, and then stand at the back and watch three times without saying anything.

P.S. The list of things customers asked for and were not given is worth more than any survey you could commission, and it costs a pencil. Most trades discover within a month that they are turning away the same request over and over, and that they could have supplied it all along.

Also in the archive: The 9:47pm Enquiry, The Chair You Cannot Fill and The Printer's Apprentice.