The Gap the Cattle Used

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, where two hedgers priced the same neglected hedge in the same tight year, and only one of them laid any of it.

Two hedgers in one town, the same billhook and the same winter ahead.
Both were asked to lay eleven hundred yards of neglected hedge on one farm.
Both said sixpence a yard, and the farmer called the figure fair.
He could find seven pounds that year and not a shilling beyond it.
One carried his estimate home entire, one laid two hundred and eighty yards.
Why was the second man laying the other eight hundred and twenty next winter?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two hedgers, in a town I have never named. Billhook, slasher, maul, ash stakes and a bundle of hazel binders. You cut most of the way through a stem near the ground, bend the living stub over at a slant, stake it, bind the heads, and leave behind a thing that is both fence and growing hedge.

The farm was up the valley and its hedges had been let go for ten years. Blackthorn grown leggy and gappy at the bottom, cattle out of the brook field whenever they chose, and a farmer who had taken a poor harvest. Both hedgers walked the boundary with him in November, both measured eleven hundred yards, both said sixpence, which came to twenty-seven pounds ten, and neither figure was argued with. The farmer said what a great many customers say. The work wants doing, your price is right, and I have seven pounds.

The first hedger did the honourable thing as he understood it. He would not break up a job. A hedge laid in patches looks like a mended coat, and his pride was in a line running unbroken from gate to gate. He knew too, and he was right, that a short stretch costs more per yard than a long one. So he would keep the estimate by him, and the farmer should send word in a better year. He walked down with nothing, and would have called it the farmer's decision.

The second hedger stood in the brook field a while longer and asked which gap the beasts actually used. The farmer showed him: two hundred and eighty yards along the water, thin at the bottom, where a bullock stepped through in three places. That, said the hedger, is seven pounds at sixpence, and I will lay it between the first frosts and Candlemas while the sap is down. He laid it. The bullocks stayed in. The farmer walked that stretch most Sundays through the spring and watched it thicken from the bottom, which is the only proof of hedging anybody can read.

The following November the hedger came up the valley without being sent for. There was no conversation about rate, and none about whether he could do the work. There was money in from the wool, a hedge the farmer had admired all year, and eight hundred and twenty yards still gappy. The first hedger's estimate lay in a kitchen drawer, a piece of paper from a man the farmer had never seen work.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

When a customer cannot meet your price, offer him a smaller piece of the work rather than a smaller price for the same work. He has not disputed what you charge. He has told you what he has.

Those are two sentences, answered in opposite directions. A man who says your price is too high is arguing about value, and the answer is evidence or a parting. A man who says he has seven pounds is reporting a fact about his year, and the answer is arithmetic. Take a fifth off the twenty-seven and he still cannot pay it, and you have taught him for ever that your first figure was an opening bid. Take a quarter of the work at the same sixpence and he can pay this week, your rate stands, and what gets done is the part he was losing money over.

Consider too what the small stretch buys that talking never will. It puts your work on his own ground, where he walks past it on Sundays, and a man who has seen you work cannot be compared with one who has only priced. You are the thing in place rather than one of the estimates, and next year's money has somewhere obvious to go.

Where you cut it matters more than that you cut it. The piece must be useful on its own, which is why the brook field was the right two hundred and eighty yards and the lane, which nothing walked through, was not. A part that does nothing until the rest is done is no part at all. It is a deposit with labour attached. So know where your work divides at a natural seam, and let the customer's own trouble choose which one. Keep that knowledge off the page, though: an estimate laid out in parts invites the customer to take it apart. The division is offered aloud, after the refusal, in one version only.

Two cautions. First, offer the part after the refusal and never before. Present a cheap fragment alongside the whole at the outset and you have not made yourself affordable, you have made the whole optional, and the man who could have found twenty-seven pounds will find seven. Second, price the piece on its own merits and say so plainly. A short stretch costs more per yard, and the answer is not to swallow that but to say sixpence holds for the long run and sevenpence is the figure under three hundred yards. The attendance you give away on small jobs is the commonest leak in a trade, and a part sold at a discount teaches a customer that buying in pieces is the cheaper way to buy.

Three questions, and the first wants a sheet of paper rather than an afternoon:

1. Where does your work divide into pieces useful on their own? Write your usual job out as four or five stages and mark each as it would look if the customer stopped there. The stages he could live with are your seams. The ones that leave him worse off than before you came are not available to you.
2. What does the smallest of those pieces cost you to carry out? Set your travel and setting up against it, and find the rate at which a small piece pays as well as a large one. Until you know that figure you cannot offer a part without funding it.
3. Which refusals this year were about the sum and not the work? Separate those who said your price was too high from those who said they did not have it, and write this week to the second group, with one piece of the work, one figure and one date.

The Answer to the Riddle

Why was the second man laying the other eight hundred and twenty next winter? Because he was the only one who sold anything in the first, and what he sold was not a cheaper hedge but a shorter one. He took the seven pounds at his own rate and put the work where the farmer was losing stock. His rival sold a piece of paper for a drawer, the usual price of refusing to divide a job.

The verse:

One would not break the hedge in parts and carried his price away,
One asked which gap the cattle used and laid it in the frost,
The first had twenty-seven pounds of nothing in a drawer,
The second had the whole of it, and nothing of it lost.

Until next time. Go and write your usual job out in stages, and mark the first one a customer could stop after and still be better off.

P.S. There is a version of this that costs you the whole job. Divide the work for a customer who has refused nothing and you have answered an objection he never made, telling him in the same breath that the job was always smaller than you said. A part offered in answer to nothing is a confession.

Also in the archive: March, Two Years, the Extension, The Second Rung and Three Gates.