The Ninth Winter

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town a tradesman's book was his memory, and nearly every book in that town remembered the same single thing, which was money that had already come in.

Two bellows makers in one town, the same elm boards and the same horse hide.
Both kept a book, and both wrote into it every pair they ever hung.
One wrote down what he had been paid, and could tell you the whole of his past.
The other wrote down the year of the hanging, and could tell you the coming spring.
Same work, same prices, the same forty smithies within a day's cart.
Which of the two was sent for before the forge went cold?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two bellows makers in the town I have never named. Both made the great double bellows that hang over a smith's fire, elm boards above and below, horse hide tacked round the ribs, a nozzle of brass into the tue iron. Three pounds fifteen for a new pair, and twenty-two shillings to take an old pair down, strip the perished leather and hide them afresh.

The first bellows maker kept a careful book. Every pair, the smithy it went to, the price, the date the money came in. It balanced to the penny over eleven years. When trade thinned he had three hundred bills printed, bellows made and repaired, prompt attention, moderate charges, and what came back was all of one kind. A smith would send a lad at seven in the morning to say the bellows had split in the night and the fire was out. He came that day, worked in another man's yard in the cold, charged what he dared, and was thanked the way a man is thanked for mending something that should never have broken. Twice that year he found another maker already up the ladder, because a smith with a dead fire does not send for the man who built the thing. He sends for whoever can be there by noon.

The second bellows maker kept the very same book and ruled one more column into it. Beside each pair he wrote the year he hung them, and when he went back to re-leather a pair he wrote that year in the same line, so that one line held a hanging, a re-hiding, and the distance between. He did it for a dozen years with no clever purpose, and at the end of the dozen the column had taught him what no printed bill could. Hide on a shoeing forge, four fires a day and a lad who leans on the chain, went at about nine years. Hide at a jobbing smith's with a lighter fire went twelve or thirteen. Nothing he sold failed at an unpredictable hour. It failed inside a season he could have named in advance.

So every January he turned back nine pages in his own book and wrote to those men. Short, and not a bill. Your pair were hung in the spring of such a year, nine seasons back. At that age it is the fold under the bottom board that goes first, and it goes quietly, so you will be blowing harder for the same heat before you ever see a split. I am at the Tuesday market in your parish on the twelfth and will put my hand inside them for nothing. If they want hiding it is twenty-two shillings, done in a slack week, and I will hang you a loan pair while it is off.

Rather more than half said yes, not always that winter, but inside the year. He did the work at his own bench at his own price, on bellows that were still working, which is an easier job than one that has burst. And the smiths, who are not sentimental men, concluded that he was the only bellows maker in the county who knew his trade, on the evidence that he had known about their bellows before they did.

Be fair to the first man. His book was not careless. It was complete, accurate and well kept, and it answered every question he ever asked it. The trouble was that every question he ever asked it was a question about the past.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Everything you have ever sold has a date on which it must be bought again, and for most trades that date is already written down in your own handwriting. Not guessed at. Written down, in the book you keep for the taxman, waiting to be read forwards instead of backwards.

Begin with the thing most traders have the wrong way round. A customer does not come back when he remembers you. He comes back when the thing you sold him stops doing its work. Those are two separate dates with nothing to do with one another, and most of ordinary marketing is spent trying to move the first, which is the harder and the less useful of the two. You cannot make a man want a new pair of bellows in June. You can be standing in his doorway in the season they give out.

Which is why the general letter to all your old customers performs so modestly, sound as the instinct behind it is. It is the right words on the wrong day for almost everybody who gets it. Timing is not a polish you put on a message. In a trade where things wear out, timing is most of the message.

And note what the timing buys, because it is not goodwill. At the moment a thing fails your customer is not weighing you against anybody. He is looking for whoever can attend. That is the plain mechanism behind reaching people inside the short window when they actually need you, and it is why the man who built the article so often loses the replacing of it. Arrive a fortnight early and there is no race to lose.

You do not have to guess the life of your work, which is the part that stops people. You have measured it already, year after year, without writing the measurement anywhere you thought to look. The gap between a job and the return visit to that same customer is the life of that job, and you have fifty of them in your book. Take them out, as a tinsmith once spent a wet week sorting his day book into piles on a kitchen table, and you will have a figure with a spread either side of it. Write at the near end of it. Early is a kindness. Late is an apology.

Two cautions. The note must carry something the customer could not have worked out for himself, or it is a nag with a calendar behind it: the date you did the work, the part that goes first, the sign he will notice before the fault shows, the figure, the day you will be near him. Strip those out and what remains is a letter about your month rather than his property, and people learn the difference by the second one. The other caution is that a renewal note is no occasion to sell anything else. One errand. Add a line about your new anvil tools and you have turned intelligence back into advertising, and it will be read as such.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. What is the life of the thing I sell, in months? Take fifty jobs out of your own records and find the gap to the next order from that same customer. If there is no next order for most of them, that is a finding worth more than the figure you went looking for.
2. Who is due inside the next sixty days? Make that list this week and make it short. Not the whole book. Only the names whose date falls inside sixty days, which in most small trades fits on an envelope.
3. What does my note tell them that they do not know? Write it, then strike out every sentence whose subject is you or your firm. If nothing survives, you have not got a renewal note. You have got a circular with a date on it.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which of the two was sent for before the forge went cold?

The second, because he was the only one of them who knew when the forge was going to go cold. He had foreseen nothing. He had written the year of the hanging for a dozen years, read his own column, and found the future sitting where everybody else keeps the past.

The first man was not beaten by the better salesman, and not on price, the price being the same. He was beaten by a book that balanced.

The verse:

One wrote the money as it came
and shut the ledger tight;
one wrote the year the leather hung,
and knew next winter's night.

Until next time. Go and find the ten customers whose work is due to wear out inside the next two months, and write to one of them today with the date you did it and what goes first.

P.S. If your trade is one where nothing wears out, the method holds and the clock is simply somebody else's. A thing bought for a reason recurs when the reason does: the busy January, the harvest, the shut fortnight in February, the lease that runs three years. Write that date beside the name instead of the life of the goods, and you are reading the same column under another title.

Also in the archive: The Ones Who Went Quiet, The Oil After the Lamp and Three Lines Against Her Name.