The Letter He Did Not Have to Write

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, a great many jobs needed the consent of somebody who was not paying for them, and the trade that forgot it lost work already won. Your century has more such people, and hides them better.

Two oven builders in the old town, the same firebrick and fireclay, and the same eleven pounds to build a baker a new oven.
Both were asked by the same baker, who rented his bakehouse, as bakers did.
One left the baker to settle the consent with the landlord's agent, that being the baker's affair and not his.
One wrote a single page to the agent himself, with the baker's leave.
By October one oven was drawing and the other job had ceased to exist.
Same brick, same price. What was on the page?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

The trade is oven building. Firebrick laid on edge, the crown turned over a timber centre knocked out once the work has set, fireclay in the joints because lime will not stand the heat. The thing you build is a hole, and your skill is all in how slowly the heat leaves it.

The baker had a cracked oven with a cold back corner, which cost him the last two batches of every long day. He asked two men. Both said it wanted building again, and both said eleven pounds.

The first oven builder was a good workman and no fool. He measured, drew the crown on the back of his bill, and told the baker he would need his landlord's consent before anybody broke a brick, the lease forbidding alterations. Which was true, and the baker's business and not his. The baker mentioned it on rent day, across the office counter, with four other things on his mind. The agent said he would look into it.

Consider the agent, because he is the whole letter. He had thirty-one properties in his care and had never built an oven in his life. He knew two things about fire: that it destroys buildings, and that if this one did, he was the man who would be asked why he had allowed it. Against that he had nothing whatever to gain, there being no version of the following year in which an agent is thanked for a bakehouse oven.

So he asked for particulars, which is what any sensible man does with a question he need not answer today. The baker told him it was a bigger oven and a better one and the man a good man, all of it true and none of it particulars. By September the baker had stopped asking, the cracked oven still baking after a fashion. Nobody refused. The job thinned out and vanished.

The second oven builder asked a different question at the kitchen table. Not when the baker would like it done, but who in practice said yes to anything being altered in the bakehouse. Then he asked the baker's leave to write to the agent himself, and sent the baker a copy. It was one page.

What would be taken out and by what means: the old brick carried away by hand, the party wall not touched. Where the flue would go, up the chimney already there, with a new liner and two bricks out at the breast, made good in cement by him. The fire risk and its answer: the hearth on a stone slab, nine inches of dry sand between brickwork and the nearest joist, the insurance office's own rule quoted. Who paid for making good, which was him, in figures. And that the oven stayed with the building at the end of the tenancy, as the landlord's own.

At the foot he wrote that he would call on the Thursday between ten and twelve with the drawing, and that if the agent would sooner write back a line naming any condition he wished imposed, that would do as well. The answer came in four days, naming one: that the chimney be swept before the first firing. Two shillings, and an hour.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Nearly every job above a certain size contains somebody who cannot gain by saying yes and cannot lose by saying no, and until you have written to that person yourself, the hardest part of your sale is being carried by the one man least able to carry it. Find him before you quote, not after you have waited.

Look at the arithmetic of his position, which trades misread as obstruction. Yes exposes him. No costs him nothing. Silence costs him less than either, since silence cannot be quoted back at him in six months. He is not weighing your oven against another man's but an unknown risk against the comfort of an unanswered letter, and the letter wins until somebody lifts the risk off him. He is neither enemy nor idler, but uninformed and exposed.

Notice what the first oven builder did. He took the hardest piece of selling in the job, persuading a cautious stranger to carry a fire risk for no reward, handed it to a baker who could not have drawn a flue, and called the result bad luck: the error of leaving your case to be put at second hand, as in the matter of the man who was not there.

What the page does is turn a feeling into a list, formless fears being impossible to agree to. Four things settle most of them. What will be touched and what expressly will not. How the thing is left afterwards. Who pays for making good, in figures. Then the smallest possible act of agreement, with a date on it, because a man asked for a line naming his conditions can give you one in four days, whereas a man asked to approve a scheme must first decide what he thinks about ovens. Make the answer cheap or you will get none, as I have argued about estimates nobody replies to.

Two cautions. Never write round your customer. Ask his leave, send him the copy, and keep him the owner of his own affairs, because the landlord is his landlord long after your oven is cold. And do not mistake a permission holder for a buyer. Nothing will make him want your work, so flattery and offers aimed at him are wasted and look like what they are. You are not selling to him. You are indemnifying him.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. Besides the person paying me, whose signature or silence can stop this job? Write the names down before you price the work, not in the second week of waiting. Landlords and their agents, insurers, the owner of the adjoining wall, a committee, a head office.
2. What is the worst thing that person is imagining? Rarely your price or your competence. Damage, blame, or a mess he must explain to somebody above him. Your page answers that and little else.
3. How many of my dead quotes were never actually refused? Go back a year and count the ones that simply stopped. They are permissions nobody obtained, filed under bad luck.

The Answer to the Riddle

Same brick, same price. What was on the page?

Everything the agent needed in order to say yes and, more to the point, to show afterwards that saying yes had been reasonable. The first oven builder left all of it to a baker who could not do it, and lost eleven pounds to a man who never once said no to him.

The verse:

The man who gains nothing by granting it gains nothing by refusing,
And so he does the third thing, which is nothing at all,
Till a page in your own hand lifts the risk off his desk,
And leaves him the one small answer he can cheaply afford to give.

Until next time. Go and take the three biggest quotes you have out today, and write beside each the name of every person besides your customer whose yes the work requires.

P.S. There is a second gain the oven builder did not plan for. The agent had thirty-one properties and a drawer of trades he was prepared to allow, which until that autumn held three names. A man whose only dealings with your sort have been vague requests and awkward silences remembers the page that told him plainly what was to happen to a building he answers for. Permission holders are repeat customers in a disguise so good that most trades never see them.

Also in the archive: Unless I Hear Otherwise, The Woman Who Works the End and Yes, No or Not This Year.