The Leaking Coach

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, at the coaching yard on a Monday morning, where two proprietors are loading passengers for the same road.

Two coaches leave one yard at eight,
Same road, same horses, same fair rate.
One fills each seat by handbill's art,
One fills by word, and slower starts.
By autumn one runs near to empty.
Whose bills were good? Whose trade was plenty?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two coach proprietors working the same road out of the town I've never named, and their coaches, in the old chorus, looked equally sound in the yard.

The first had a difficulty he knew about and had learned to live with. The last stage of the road was too much for his horses, so he arrived an hour or two late about half the time, and in wet weather the roof leaked over the near side.

Neither fault was ruinous. Both were the sort of thing a trade absorbs, and he intended to see to them when the money allowed.

Meanwhile he set about filling his seats, and he did it well. Handbills at every inn, a good notice in the paper, a boy at the market calling the times. His notices promised Norwich by nightfall and a dry ride, both of which were true rather more than half the time.

It worked immediately. His coach filled, and for one glorious month he was the busiest man on the road.

What followed is the whole of this letter. Forty-eight strangers a week now had first-hand experience of the leak and the late arrival, and each of them told it as a story at the other end, because a man who arrives two hours late and damp has an anecdote and a man who arrives on time has nothing to say. By September his reputation was fixed on that road, and fixed considerably faster than it would have been had he stayed quiet and carried eight people a week.

The handbills had not failed. They had worked perfectly, and what they had done was deliver several hundred witnesses to a fault he had been meaning to fix since spring.

The second proprietor had spent that same spring on the last stage of the road. He changed the team, bought better wheels, and had the roof properly sealed by a man who knew how, and during those months he was quieter than his rival and rather poorer.

Then he began advertising, and his handbills were worse than his rival's and did not matter, because every passenger he carried arrived when he said and dry, and told nobody anything, which sounds like nothing and is in fact the ground on which everything else stands. What his passengers did do, when asked, was say he was the one who gets in on time.

By the following autumn his coach ran full and his rival ran near to empty on a road they had entered together.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Good marketing does not fix a poor job. It makes more people find out about it, sooner. That is the part nobody says aloud when a trade is worried about its takings, since the obvious cure for too little work is more advertising, and it feels like action. But every enquiry you win is another person placed in front of whatever your business actually does, and if there is a hole in the middle of it, you have simply arranged for more people to fall through it in less time.

And the arithmetic is worse than it looks, because the two verdicts do not travel at the same speed. A customer well served says you were very good, which is nothing much and gets said once. A customer let down has a story with a shape to it, and stories are repeated, so a fault does not merely spread, it spreads faster than the praise that might have balanced it.

Which gives a plain rule for the order of things. Find the hole first, fix it, then push. And the hole is nearly always known to you already: the stage of the work that goes wrong, the week when nobody answers the telephone, the thing you find yourself apologising for twice a month. You do not need to go looking for it. You need to stop treating it as the price of doing business, since it is currently a private cost and advertising will make it a public one.

Two qualifications, because this is easily taken too far. It does not mean waiting for perfection, which is the unshown thing all over again and never arrives; it means fixing the specific fault you already apologise for. And it does not mean staying quiet indefinitely: the second proprietor advertised in the end, and his advertising was the weaker of the two, and it worked because there was nothing behind it to find out.

Three questions, and answer the first one honestly:

1. What do you apologise for most often? Write down the sentence you find yourself saying to customers more than once a month. That is your hole, you have known about it for a year, and it is the first thing your next hundred customers will meet.
2. What happens if enquiries double next week? Walk it through: who answers, what slips, what standard falls. Whatever breaks under that weight is what your advertising would be advertising.
3. Which fix could you do this month? One thing, chosen because it is the one you apologise for. Do it before you spend another pound on being heard, and the pound will go considerably further when you spend it.

The Answer to the Riddle

Whose bills were good?

The first man's, and they ruined him. They were well written, well placed and entirely effective, and what they effectively did was introduce several hundred people to a leaking roof and a tired team in the space of one summer. His rival, with poorer notices and a better last stage, spent that summer being unheard of and the following year being recommended. The road was the same road. Only the order of the work differed.

The verse:

Cry loud about a leaking roof,
And all the county learns the truth.
Mend first, and then go make your noise,
And every passenger's a voice.

Until next time. Go and write down the thing you apologise for most often, mend it this month, and advertise afterwards.

P.S. There is a particular danger in a thin year, which is when this mistake is nearly always made. Trade falls, so you advertise harder, so more people meet the fault, so trade falls further, and the whole thing reads from the inside as a market turning against you. It is worth checking, before you spend, whether you are pumping harder into a bucket with a hole in it.

Also in the archive: The Ad That Worked, The Rebrand and The Parted Seam.