The Morning After the Cart

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, two sweeps worked the same streets with the same brushes, and one of them knew a week in advance which doors would want him.

Two chimney sweeps, the same rods and brushes, the same bundle of sheets,
The same shilling a flue, the same black print left upon a doorframe.
One spent September telling the whole town to think about its chimneys.
One spent Monday mornings noting which houses stood empty.
By Easter the first had swept the more flues and the second the fewer.
Which of them had the better year, and what was the second man waiting for?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two chimney sweeps in the town I've never named, both sober, both quick, both careful with a householder's carpet, and their work, in the old chorus, was equally good. Both charged a shilling a flue, both laid a sheet across the hearth, and both left the same faint black print on a doorframe, which no sweep has ever entirely prevented.

The first man advertised. Every September he had a hundred handbills printed and walked them round the parish, paid for four inches in the county paper through October, and chalked his name in a good round hand on his cart. It worked in the way such work does. Autumn brought a rush of flues, and he swept more in a year than his rival did. But a householder who reads a handbill in September and has no trouble with his chimney until March has, by March, thrown it away and is asking a neighbour who to call.

The second man did a thing that looked like idleness. Every Monday morning, before his first job, he walked a circuit of about two miles. He noted which boards outside the empty houses had come down since the week before, read the auctioneer's window where the notices of tenancies were pasted, and watched for a cart with a bedstead roped on top. The street and number went on a slip he kept in his hat.

Then he called, not on the day of the removal, when a household is a corridor of boxes, but on the morning after. He never made a speech. He said the flues had been swept for the last people and not for these, that nobody could say what had been left in them, and that he could do the lot that afternoon while the furniture was still under its covers. It cost three shillings and an afternoon in which little else could have been done.

Consider what he had walked into. A family a week into a strange town, with a cold grate that smelled of another family's smoke, knowing not one tradesman in the place and eleven other arrangements to make by Saturday. They did not compare him with anybody, having nobody to compare him with. They took him, and kept him.

Be fair to the first sweep. He did the visible, respectable work, and his handbills were not wasted. He simply spoke to a whole town, of whom perhaps one household in forty had a chimney anywhere in its mind that week. The second spoke quietly to four families a fortnight, at the one hour of the year when a sweep is a pressing matter rather than a chore deferred.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Almost nobody is in the market for what you sell this week, and the few who are have usually announced it in public. Wanting is not spread evenly across a town or across a year. It arrives in a short burst, set off by something that has just happened, and outside that burst the best handbill ever written is a sheet of paper about somebody else's trade.

There are two honest ways to be present in that burst. You may be so well known, and so continuously, that your name is in the head when the moment comes, which is what the great firms pay for and is largely beyond a small trade in its first ten years. Or you may find the few whose burst began last week and go to them, which costs an hour on a Monday.

The mechanism is that need is nearly always set off by an event, and events are noisy. A family moves house. A firm takes a larger yard. A new manager arrives and wants everything looked at. A rival shuts. Each makes a person who did not want you in June want you urgently in July, and most leave a public mark: a board taken down, a notice pasted up, a line in a trade paper, a complaint written by somebody in a temper. Learn which mark goes before your own trade and you have the nearest thing to a list of next month's customers. It is the working half of the argument about the enquiry that is not a no but a not yet, except that here you find the moment instead of waiting out somebody else's.

There is a second thing at work, worth more than the first job. A burst does not only produce a sale, it produces a supplier. The new household chose a sweep in its first fortnight and then stopped choosing for twenty years. Incumbency is settled quickly and defended slowly, and a trade arriving inside the window competes with nobody at all. It is another form of being where the want is when the want is there.

Two cautions. First, a signal is not an invitation. The sweep called with a useful offer and a short sentence, and would have been put out of the door had he made a speech. Some events are nobody's business but the household's, and a trade that turns grief or misfortune into a knock at the door earns what it gets. Second, this will not rescue a trade nobody can check up on. A list tells you when to go. It does not tell them who you are.

Three questions, and the first is the whole of the work:

1. What happens to a person in the fortnight before they need you? Not why they buy, which nobody can answer, but what occurred. Ask your last dozen customers what changed just before they got in touch. You will hear the same three or four events, and you have never written them down.
2. Where is that event recorded, and who else can see it? Boards, notices, registers, listings, local pages, the trade press. If the answer is nowhere, ask who finds out first, because somebody does.
3. What could you offer in the first week that would be worth nothing in the tenth? The sweep offered to come before the covers came off. Inside a window you are not persuading anybody to want anything. You are removing the small difficulty between a want and a date.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which of them had the better year, and what was the second man waiting for?

The second, though he swept the fewer flues. He was waiting for houses to change hands, the one hour in twenty years when a family must choose a sweep and has no opinion about any of them. The first sold sweeping to a town that was not thinking about sweeping. The second sold it to the only people who could not put it off, and every one of them was still his three years later.

The verse:

One printed up his hundred bills and cried his trade in autumn,
One walked two miles of a Monday and looked at empty doors.
The bills were read and folded and were in the grate by Lady Day,
The empty doors filled up with folk who wanted him that week.

Until next time. Go and ask your three most recent customers what happened in the fortnight before they got in touch.

P.S. Ask it of customers of long standing too. A trade I knew well had assumed for years that people came to him when they had saved the money. They came when their eldest started school, every time, and nobody there had ever thought to ask.

Also in the archive: April and October, The Quiet Month and Twenty Strangers.