The Habits of the Hungry Year

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as ever. Your century today, and the thing that ruins the firm in it is the very thing that made it.

Two firms both prosper twenty year,
Same trade, same town, same good career.
One keeps the way that made its name,
One asks each year what still holds true.
By thirty, one is much reduced.
What killed it? Nothing. Its own success.

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two firms in the same trade, and the work, all together now, was equally good. Each had been built up over twenty years by an owner who had done a great many things, most of which had worked.

The first had a way of doing business that had made him. He quoted on site, always, in person. He worked Saturdays. He took every job that came, because in the early years you take every job that comes, and he answered every call himself because that was how he had won the trade in the first place.

All of it was true and all of it had worked, and none of it was examined again, because why would a man examine the practices that made him prosperous?

That is the whole difficulty. Success does not tell you which part of what you did was the reason. It hands you the result with no itemised bill, and a sensible man, unable to distinguish the causes, keeps the lot. So he kept the Saturdays, which had been necessary when he was unknown and were now merely tiring. He kept taking every job, which had filled a thin diary in year two and now filled a full one with work he should have refused. And he kept quoting in person at every enquiry, which had been his great advantage when there were four a month and became, at forty a month, the bottleneck that decided how large his business could ever be.

None of those practices failed loudly. They simply stopped paying, quietly, some years before he stopped doing them, and his prosperity was the reason he could not see it: the money kept arriving, so the method appeared to be working, and the money was in fact arriving for other reasons entirely.

By thirty years he was tired, his margins were thin, and he could not have told you which of his habits was the load-bearing one.

The second firm did one small thing every January that took a morning.

She wrote down the six or seven practices the business actually ran on, and against each one asked a single question: would I start this today, knowing what I now know? Not is it working, which is unanswerable in a good year, but would I begin it now.

Most years the answer was yes to nearly everything. But over the years she retired the Saturday working, which had become a habit rather than a necessity; she stopped quoting in person for the small jobs, having discovered that customers minded far less than she assumed; and she gave up a whole line of work that had been her original trade and was by then the least profitable thing she did, which cost her a great deal of feeling and nothing at all in money.

She was not more clever than her rival. She had simply noticed that a practice which has stopped earning its keep does not announce itself, and that in a successful business it will be defended by the strongest possible evidence, which is that everything has been going well.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Success is a poor teacher because it never tells you which part worked. Failure is specific: the thing broke, and you can usually see where. Success arrives as a single lump, and since you cannot tell which of your twenty practices produced it, you keep all twenty, including the several that contributed nothing and the one or two that are already costing you. Prosperity then protects them, because nobody dismantles the habits of a business that is doing well.

And note the particular cruelty in it. The practices most likely to expire are the ones that worked hardest at the beginning, since they were built for a firm that was small, unknown and hungry. Doing everything yourself, saying yes to everything, being available at all hours: these are the correct answers to the problems of year two, and they become, unaltered, the exact shape of the ceiling in year twenty. The virtue does not turn into a vice. It simply goes on being a virtue for a situation you no longer occupy.

So make the examination deliberate and annual, since it will never happen by itself. List the practices your business actually runs on, six or seven of them, and ask of each the only question that works in a good year: would I start this today, knowing what I now know? It is a better question than is it working, which prosperity answers yes to indiscriminately, and it is far better than waiting for something to fail, which is the other way of finding out and costs considerably more.

Two cautions. Do not retire a practice merely because it is old, since the yellow wheels were thirty-one years old and were the whole of that man's advantage: age is not the test, the test is whether you would begin it now. And expect the expired practice to be the one you are proudest of, since it is usually the thing you built the business on and the thing you tell people about, which is precisely why nobody has questioned it in a decade.

Three questions, and put a morning in January aside for the first:

1. What are the six things your business actually runs on? Not your values: the practices. How you quote, when you work, what you take, who answers, what you refuse. Most owners have never written them down and are surprised by how short the list is.
2. Which would you start today? Take each one and answer honestly, as a stranger arriving at your business this morning with your knowledge and none of your history.
3. Which of them is a monument? The one you keep because it is what you have always done, or because it is the thing you are known for, or because giving it up would feel like an admission. That is the one to look at hardest.

The Answer to the Riddle

What killed it?

Its own success, in the plainest sense: the prosperity that told him every habit he had was sound, when in truth three were carrying the business and four had quietly stopped and one had begun to hold it back. He could not distinguish them, because the takings do not come itemised, and by the time the evidence was clear enough to act on, the years had gone. His rival kept the same trade and the same standards and retired three practices in a decade, each of them something she had once been proud of, and neither of them was working harder than the other by the end.

The verse:

The habits of the hungry year
Are what you bring to the fat one.
They served you then, they cost you here,
And nothing tells you which is which.

Until next time. Go and write down the six practices your business runs on, and ask of each whether you would start it today.

P.S. The same applies to the thing you sell. A product that made your name is defended long after it has stopped being your best work, because retiring it feels like ingratitude towards the years it carried you. It is not ingratitude. It is the ordinary business of noticing that the situation which made it right has gone, and that the customers who would have bought it are now buying something else, from somebody who never had the burden of having invented it.

Also in the archive: The Year the Tide Came In, The Potter Who Made Fewer Things and The Rebrand.