The Cooper and the Single Gate

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, at the cooperage by the water, where the yard is stacked high and every barrel is spoken for.

Two coopers keep two busy yards,
Both full of work, both playing cards.
One hand holds all of one suit,
One spreads it thin and takes less loot.
By autumn, one yard's gates are shut.
Whose hand was strongest? Whose was not?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two coopers in the town I've never named, and their barrels, in the old chorus, were equally sound. Both had full order books and neither had a moment's worry, which is the condition in which this particular mistake is always made.

The first supplied the big brewery, and supplied it with everything: nine barrels in ten went through that one gate. It had come about honourably, over years, by being good and being close, and it looked from the outside like the best position on the river.

Watch what it did to him, though, long before anything went wrong. When the brewery asked for ninety days to pay instead of thirty, he agreed, because what else does a man do when the alternative is losing everything at once. When they wanted the price shaved, he shaved it. When they wanted a rush in August, they got it, and the two small customers he still had waited, and eventually stopped asking. He had not been bullied. He had simply lost the ability to say no, and a man who cannot say no is not a supplier, he is a department that sends invoices.

He also stopped selling. Naturally he did: his book was full for years ahead, so what would he be selling for? He knew nobody new, had no name beyond that gate, and had not had a fresh conversation in a decade.

Then the brewery was bought by a larger concern from the next county, which had its own cooperage. There was no malice in it, no complaint about his work, and it did not happen slowly. Six weeks' notice, forty years of trade, and a yard full of staves.

And here is the cruel geometry of it: the very thing that had made him prosperous was what left him with nowhere to go. He had no other customers to lean on, no reputation elsewhere, no habit of finding work, and no idea how to begin, at fifty-eight, in a trade where everyone assumed he was busy.

The second cooper had less. That is worth saying plainly, because this is not a story where prudence is also more profitable in the moment. He supplied the same brewery, but kept it to about a third, and made up the rest with two smaller breweries, a vintner, a fishmonger who wanted salt casks, and a slow trade in butter firkins that he could never be bothered with and never dropped.

It cost him. More customers meant more chasing, more different sizes, more accounts to keep, and his best year never matched his rival's best year.

What it bought him was the word no. When the big brewery asked for ninety days, he said thirty as usual, and they paid it, because losing him would have been an inconvenience rather than a relief. And when the buyout came and that third of his trade vanished in six weeks, it was a bad autumn: he let a man go and had a thin Christmas. It was not the end of a cooperage.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

The most dangerous number in business is one. One customer who is most of your income, one channel that brings all your enquiries, one supplier who can stop your work, one person who knows how the ordering runs. Each of them is a comfortable arrangement that has quietly transferred the deciding to somebody else, and none of them announces itself as a risk, because for years it presents as good fortune.

Notice the two separate harms, since only one of them is the obvious one. The collapse is what everybody imagines: the gate closes and the yard goes with it. But the daily harm comes first and does more damage over time, because dependence eats your terms. A man who cannot afford to lose a customer will accept longer payment, lower prices, worse behaviour and unreasonable dates, and he will call it good relations. There is no negotiating position anywhere in trade that survives the other party knowing you have nowhere else to go.

Then the quiet part: dependence stops you selling. The full order book removes the reason to go looking, so the habit dies, the name fades, and the skill of finding work rusts. Which means the collapse arrives precisely when you are least able to do anything about it. This is the quiet month lesson written large: the work of finding trade must happen when you do not need it, or it will not be there when you do.

And a word on rented ground, because your century has its own version of this. A single platform that sends all your enquiries is one customer wearing a different coat, and it can change its mind about you overnight without a conversation. That is the owned audience point, and the remedy is the same: move what you can onto ground you hold.

Three questions, and do the first with the actual figures:

1. What share of your income comes from your largest customer? Work it out properly. Past a quarter, you are exposed; past a half, you are employed without any of the protections of employment. Do the same for where your enquiries come from and who your work depends on.
2. What have you agreed to that you would refuse from anybody else? The payment terms, the price, the dates, the tone. Every one of those concessions is the interest you are already paying on the dependence, before anything has gone wrong at all.
3. What would you do on the Monday after they left? Write the actual first three steps: who you would call, what you would send, what you have to sell. If that page is blank, the work of the next six months is obvious, and it wants doing while the book is still full.

The Answer to the Riddle

Whose hand was strongest?

The one that looked weaker every year but one. The first cooper's position was not strong, it was concentrated, and the two are opposites dressed alike: everything he had rested on a decision made in another county by people he had never met. The second earned less and owned all of it, which is why a six-week notice cost him a man and a Christmas rather than a trade. Safety is not the size of the book. It is the number of hands the book is held in.

The verse:

A yard that serves a single gate
Has hired itself, at someone's rate.
So keep the small ones, thin and slow.
They are the reason you can say no.

Until next time. Go and work out what share your largest customer is, and if the answer frightens you, spend one day a week this quarter on the small trade you have been neglecting.

P.S. The awkward part of this letter is that following it costs money now and saves you in a year you cannot name. That is why so few do it, and why the ones who did never get any credit for it: nobody has ever been congratulated for the disaster that failed to happen to them.

Also in the archive: The Owned Audience: Building a List the Platforms Can't Take, The Year the Tide Came In and Notice at Michaelmas.