The Ones Who Went Quiet

Dear friend,

The riddle first. Your century again, and today's lesson costs nothing to act on, which is precisely why nobody does.

Two shops both hunt for faces new,
Both chase the strangers passing through.
One never asks who slipped away,
One writes to those who used to pay.
By June, one's diary's full, one's bare.
Where were the customers? They were there.

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two salons, one town, and the cutting, in the old chorus, was equally good. Both had been going five years. Both had, in the software they had paid for and rarely opened, about four hundred names.

The first owner spent her Monday mornings on getting new clients. Ads, offers for first-timers, a spend that worked out at forty pounds a head, and she was quietly proud of how hard she worked at it, as anyone would be. Her diary was thinner every quarter and she could not see why, given how many new faces came through the door.

Here is why. Of those four hundred names, a hundred and eighty had not booked in over a year, and she had never once thought about them. She assumed, in the vague way we all assume, that they had left because something was wrong, and that to write to them would be to invite a complaint or, worse, to look desperate. So she paid forty pounds a head to find strangers, while a hundred and eighty people who already knew her work, already liked it, and had already handed over money sat in a list she never opened.

The truth about those hundred and eighty is the part worth carrying about with you. A few had fallen out with her. Most had not. They had moved house, or had a baby, or got busy in March and never got round to it, or came once when their usual place was full. There was no grievance in it at all. They had simply stopped, the way people stop, without deciding anything.

The second owner did a thing that took her a Tuesday afternoon. She pulled every client who had not been in for six months, which was a bigger number than she expected and gave her a small unpleasant moment. Then she wrote to them, plainly, with no offer in it anywhere:

It's been a while since we saw you. I've a Thursday at two and a Saturday morning free next week if you'd like one. And if you've found somewhere you're happy, that's absolutely fine, just say and I'll leave you be.

About one in six booked. At full price, from a list that cost her nothing, on an afternoon she would otherwise have spent worrying about advertising. A few wrote back to say they had moved away, which is worth knowing. And two told her the real reason: the girl who used to do their colour had left and nobody had said anything about who would take over. That is a thing she could fix, and she fixed it, and it had been silently costing her for a year.

Then she did the part that mattered more than the Tuesday. She put it in the book as a monthly job: pull whoever has gone six months, write the same plain note. Not a rescue when trade is thin. A routine, like the cheesemonger's drumbeat, done whether it is needed or not.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

The cheapest customer you will ever win is the one you already had. They know your work, they know where you are, they have crossed the hardest line in commerce once already, which is the line between never having bought from you and having done so. Everything you spend on a stranger is spent getting them to where your lapsed customer already stands, and yet the lapsed customer is the only one nobody advertises to.

The reason is not laziness, it is embarrassment, and it deserves saying out loud. Writing to someone who stopped feels like admitting you noticed, and we would all rather chase strangers than risk one person replying that they went elsewhere. But consider what your silence actually communicates: that they were never missed. Almost nobody who lapses does so in anger, and of those who do, the ones who tell you why are handing you a repair that a hundred new customers would never have revealed.

Two rules for the note itself. Keep the discount out of it: you are not apologising, and a returning customer paid a discount learns that going quiet is rewarded, which is the landscaper's mistake in a smaller coat. And give them an easy exit, a plain sentence saying you'll leave them be if they'd rather. It costs you the people who were never coming back and it keeps the goodwill of every single one of them, which in a town is worth more than the booking.

Three questions, and open your book, your software or your shoebox before you answer:

1. How many customers have not bought in a year? Count them, properly, and expect the number to be uncomfortable. That figure is the cheapest list you will ever own, and until this afternoon it was not a list at all, it was an absence you had not looked at.
2. What is your plain note? Four sentences: it has been a while, here is a specific slot or date, here is how to take it, and here is your leave-me-be. Write it once, keep it, and resist every urge to decorate it with an offer.
3. When does it happen each month? Put a date in the calendar and treat it like the accounts. A win-back done once, in a bad February, is a panic; done on the fifth of every month, it quietly becomes the least glamorous and most profitable half hour in your business.

The Answer to the Riddle

Where were the customers?

In the book. Already convinced, already sold to once, already in possession of an opinion about your work that was, in most cases, perfectly good. The first owner spent forty pounds a head looking for people, and the people were sitting in a file on her own counter, waiting to be asked and assuming, since nobody had, that they had not been wanted.

The verse:

The stranger costs you forty pound,
The old one's waiting to be found.
He knows your work, he knows your door.
Just ask him back. He'd been before.

Until next time. Go and count who has not bought in a year, write the four sentences, and send them before Friday.

P.S. Brace yourself for one or two replies explaining exactly what went wrong. They will sting for an afternoon and then earn you money for years, which is a better rate of return than anything else you will do this week.

Also in the archive: Ten Days After, The Farrier's Fortieth Shoe and Three Lines Against Her Name.