The Figure He Did Not Tidy

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, where two paviours priced the same inn yard in the same week, and the one who asked for less was the one who was paid more.

Two paviours in one town, the same granite setts and the same yard of mud.
Both measured two hundred and forty square yards behind the same inn.
One wrote sixty pounds on his paper, one wrote fifty-seven pounds eleven.
The innkeeper read the smaller figure through once and did not argue with it.
The larger he argued down to fifty-five before he would put his name to anything.
Why did the man who asked for less carry home the most money?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two paviours, in a town I have never named. Granite setts the size of a loaf, a bed of sand, a rammer, a kneeling board and a pair of knees finished by fifty. You set the stones close, ram them down, brush the joints full, and leave a surface a loaded dray can stand on in February without sinking to the axle.

The yard behind the inn had been earth and cinders for thirty years. In wet weather the ostler put planks down for the brewer's men, and a barrel had gone over in the autumn and burst against the pump. Both paviours came on the same grey morning, both paced the yard out at twenty-four by ten, and both wanted the work.

The first paviour was not a careless man, and it does him no justice to say he guessed. He counted the yards on the back of a feed bill, he knew his stone and he knew his sand, and the sum his pencil gave him was a little over fifty-seven pounds. Then he did what nearly every tradesman does at the last moment. He made the number comfortable. Sixty pounds, because sixty is a figure a man can say without stumbling, and because a little room never hurt anybody.

The second paviour did his counting at the gate with the innkeeper beside him. So many setts to the square yard and so many yards. A load and a half of sand. The carriage of the stone up from the wharf, which is the item nobody remembers. A kerb along the pump wall. Four days, and a lad for two of them. Then one line on one sheet: fifty-seven pounds eleven shillings, the yard laid complete by the end of the month.

The innkeeper argued about money as a matter of principle. He got five pounds off the first paviour inside a minute, and the first paviour let it go, because the five pounds was there to be let go and both men knew it. At the second figure he opened his mouth and found he had nothing to open it about. Fifty-seven pounds eleven is not a number you ask a man to knock a bit off. You would have to say which part he had got wrong, and the innkeeper had stood at the gate and heard the parts. He took the second man, and paid the figure entire.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A round price sounds like an opinion, and a worked price sounds like a measurement. Your customer cannot see your arithmetic. He judges whether there was any by the shape of the number you hand him.

Sixty pounds could have been reached by counting, and it could have been reached by looking at the sky and thinking about the rent. Fifty-seven pounds eleven could only have been reached one way. The buyer does not reason this out. He behaves as though he had, within three seconds of reading it.

There is a second edge, and it is the one that costs money. A round number advertises its own cushion. Everybody who has ever made a price knows the tidying goes upwards, because no man rounds sixty-two pounds down to sixty. The customer supposing there are a few pounds of comfort in your tidy figure is not being unreasonable. He supposes it because it is what he would have done. He is not disputing your rate. He is reaching for the rounding, and you put the rounding there.

Watch, too, what shape the answer takes. A round price is met with a round reply. Take off five and we shall call it fifty-five, which requires no case, only cheek. To argue with fifty-seven pounds eleven a man must pick something and name it, the carriage or the sand or the lad, and to name it he must have a reason. Most will not do that work.

This is why a precise figure and a single figure belong together. A price given as a range is heard at its lowest number, which is rounding by another method. One sheet, one number, the number your pencil gave you.

Two cautions. First, the precision must be real, and you must be able to stand behind it without a sheet of paper. If you cannot say in three plain sentences how you got to the figure, you have not made a worked price, you have put pence on the end of a guess, and the first customer who asks will find the bottom of it. Manufactured precision is worse than honest rounding. Second, a precise total is not an itemised one. The counting belongs in your book and at the gate, said aloud if you are asked, but an estimate written out in parts invites the customer to take it apart. Count like a clerk and write like a craftsman.

One honest limit. This governs quoted work, where a method exists and the customer can imagine it being done. It does not govern a price on a shelf, where four shillings and elevenpence reads as a device, because nobody believes a loaf was measured into being. And if you need margin, as most trades do, put it in your rates where you can defend it, not in a last rounding with nobody's name on it.

Three questions, and the first wants ten minutes with your old papers rather than an afternoon:

1. What figure does your own counting actually produce? Take your last three quotations, find the raw total before you tidied it, and set the two numbers side by side. The gap is what you have been inviting customers to ask for, and they have been accepting the invitation.
2. Could you say how you reached it, aloud, in three sentences? Try it on the next job, standing up, with nothing in your hand. If you cannot, what wants fixing is not the shape of the number but the state of your costing.
3. Which numbers in your trade are round because you have never measured them? Travel, setting up, waste, materials bought by eye, the half day always lost on a Friday. Pick the one that appears in every job and measure it over the next fortnight.

The Answer to the Riddle

Why did the man who asked for less carry home the most money? Because his figure gave the innkeeper nothing to pull on. The first paviour counted honestly and then hid the counting under a tidy number, and a tidy number tells every buyer that somebody chose this and somebody may choose again. The second showed his working in the telling, wrote one unlovely figure, and was paid it. Sixty became fifty-five. Fifty-seven pounds eleven stayed as it was.

The verse:

One counted up the setts and sand and tidied up the sum,
One left the pence upon the end and let the figure stand,
The tidy man gave five away before the ink was dry,
The untidy man was paid in full for just the work he planned.

Until next time. Go and take the last quotation you sent out, work it again to the shilling, and send the next one without tidying it.

P.S. The same law governs every other number you give a customer, and most plainly the dates. Three weeks is an opinion and will be treated as one, by him and in time by you. The eleventh, before noon, is a measurement. It will be believed, which is the advantage, and remembered, which is the price of it.

Also in the archive: The Good Iron on the Axle, What Your Price Says Before You Do and Twenty-Seven Hundredweight.