The Man Who Sold the Horse

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, when the turnpike yard held a sale on the first Monday of the month, two saddlers stitched the same leather, and only one of them knew where his customers had stood the week before.

Two saddlers cut the selfsame hide,
Same awl, same wax, same honest price.
One waits behind a well-swept counter,
One walks each month to the dealer's yard.
Neither man has a horse to sell.
Which saddler stitched the more harness?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two saddlers in the town I've never named, and their work, in the old chorus, was equally good. The same oak-bark leather, the same waxed thread, the same nine stitches to the inch, and the same quiet knowledge that a collar which fits is the difference between a horse that works and a horse sold on in the spring as difficult.

The first kept the better shop. It stood on the square with a bay window, and behind the glass a set of harness so well finished that men stopped in the rain to look at it. He was there six days a week from seven in the morning, waiting, as his father had waited, for the door to open. He could not have told you, at the end of any year, where a single order had come from.

The second noticed something dull. Going back through his book one wet February, he found that almost every new order in three years had followed a horse changing hands. Nobody wakes in the morning wanting harness. A man wakes owning a horse he bought on Monday, in the last owner's collar, made for a different pair of shoulders and lengthened with string.

So he walked out to the dealer's yard and spent the first Monday watching. He sold nothing and offered nothing. He stood at the rail and saw a buyer shake hands on a good cob and lead it away in whatever leather had come with it, pleased with the horse and not thinking about the collar at all.

He also saw the dealer's own trouble. A horse sold in ill-fitting harness comes back at the shoulder within a month, galled and sour, and the buyer, who does not know one collar from another, blames the horse and the man who sold it to him. The dealer had a great many such complaints in his memory and no answer to any of them.

The saddler did not ask the dealer to recommend him. He offered the dealer something the dealer could give away. Any horse sold out of that yard would be visited within the week, at the buyer's own stable, and whatever harness it was working in checked, eased and fitted properly, without charge. The dealer could say so while the money was still on the table, in his own voice, as part of his own sale.

It took the dealer two sales to understand what he had been handed. By the autumn he mentioned the fitting before he mentioned the price, because it settled a nervous buyer better than anything he had ever said about a horse. The saddler spent a day a week in other men's stables with a knife and a punch, easing straps for nothing, and in more than half of them the talk arrived, without being pushed, at a new collar or a cart saddle two winters overdue.

He never asked the dealer how many he had sent. He did send the dealer every farmer who stood in his shop wondering aloud where a quiet cob might be found, by note rather than by vague direction. The first saddler made the finest harness in the county for a shrinking number of people, and was heard to say that trade was not what it had been.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Somebody sold your customer something last week, and standing beside that somebody is the cheapest advertising you will ever buy. Wants are not discovered, they are caused. Almost nothing you sell is bought because a person sat in an empty room and decided they needed it. They bought a horse, a house, a puppy, a van or a lease on a shop, and your work became necessary four days later. The purchase that causes yours is going on now, a few streets away, in another trade.

The man who makes that sale has three things you cannot buy. He has the customer's attention at the hour the want is created, which no notice of yours will ever manage. He has already been believed once, as the seller present when the want appears is believed. And he has a sale of his own that is not quite finished, which is the part nearly everybody misses.

Here is why the usual version fails. Most traders go to the neighbouring trade and ask to be recommended, which is a favour asked of a man who must lend his good name to a stranger, for nothing, and remember to do it on a busy Tuesday. He agrees, sincerely, and does it twice. What worked in the yard was not a favour. It was an improvement to the dealer's own offer, handed over free, which made his horses easier to sell and his buyers less likely to come back cross. He recommended the saddler for the same reason he mentioned the sound feet. It helped him, and a good word that serves the man saying it needs no reminding.

Money is the obvious shortcut and the worst first move. A commission buys a recommendation rather than earning one, the buyer is then being sold to twice and can usually hear it, and you have made yourself a cost on another man's books. Costs get reviewed in hard weather. Be useful first, as the glover who sent a customer to a rival by name was useful first.

Two cautions. First, the yard must be the right yard. A trade whose customers are not yours will send a steady stream of wrong work, arriving with a recommendation you then have to disappoint. Choose the yard whose buyers you would have chosen anyway. Second, give without keeping a ledger. The day you ask how many have been sent your way, a kindness between two trades becomes an account, and accounts are settled and closed. Count at your own end, by asking every new customer who told them about you.

Three questions, answered with your order book open rather than from memory:

1. What happened to your last twenty customers in the week before they contacted you? Write down the event, not the feeling. Something was bought, moved, signed or broken.
2. Who was standing there when it happened? Name the trade, then the actual person in it. There are usually three or four such trades, and you know two of them already.
3. What could you hand that person that their own customer would thank them for? Not a stack of your cards. Something that finishes their sale better than they can finish it themselves.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which saddler stitched the more harness?

The one who walked to the yard, by a distance that widened every year. Not because he met more people, and not because he was the better talker, which he was not. He met them on the day the want was made, with another man's credit behind him, having given that man something to gain by the introduction. The saddler in the bay window was the better hand with leather, and sold only to those who had worked it out for themselves.

The verse:

The want is made before it's felt,
And made inside another's shop.
Go stand beside the man who makes it,
And give him something he can give.

Until next time. Go and name the trade that touched your last ten customers just before you did, and call the best of them this week.

P.S. The most willing partner is usually the trade quietly embarrassed by what happens after its sale. The man who sells the thing and then hears about the fitting, the delivery and the first bad fortnight, and has no answer ready. Be his answer and you need never ask him for anything.

Also in the archive: The Collab, The Cart in the Frost and The Baker's Thirteenth Loaf.