The Pail on the Landing

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town there were two slaters, and the difference between them lay in neither the slate nor the price, but in what each believed he was arguing against.

Two slaters in the town I have never named, the same Welsh slate, the same ladders, the same price by the square.
Both had six hundred handbills printed in the third week of October, and both paid four shillings for them.
One set his work against the other slaters: longer in the trade, better slate, no man beaten on price.
One set his work against another winter, and said on the paper what another winter costs.
By Candlemas the first had nine enquiries and the second had forty-one.
Same slate, same ladders, same four shillings. What was the second man arguing with?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

October is the month in which roofs are thought about and seldom seen to. Both men worked the same four streets and the farms behind them, charged within a shilling of each other, and ordered six hundred handbills in the same week.

The first man's sheet was no foolish thing. He kept the other slaters' bills in a drawer and set himself against them line by line: thirty-one years up ladders, slate from a named quarry, boards left where they were found, nobody beaten on price. Every word true. Six hundred doors, and by Candlemas nine enquiries, seven of them with water already standing in a bedroom.

The second man did something odd before he printed. He took a fortnight of evenings, walked back to eleven houses he had slated in the previous three years, and asked one question on each step. How long was it between the first mark on your ceiling and the day you sent for me, and what had the waiting cost you by then.

The answers went in a pocket book, and were not what he expected. The waiting ran from one winter to four, and not one of them had thought of it as waiting. A ceiling in a back bedroom, thirty-one shillings to a plasterer who could not come until March, so the room stood shut from November. Laths gone soft over an area the size of a door, which turned two days of slating into five. At the last house, a woman who had kept a pail on the landing for two winters and emptied it twice a week. She said the pail had cost her nothing, then stood thinking, and said her sister had not stayed since the spring before last.

His handbill mentioned neither his years nor the other slaters. The top of it said what a slipped slate costs in the second winter and in the third, with the figures from those eleven houses set down plainly, no two alike. Then his charge to come and look, and the week he could come. Forty-one enquiries by Candlemas, and nineteen of them had no water coming in at all. They had a mark on a ceiling and, for the first time, a figure for what it would be worth if left alone.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Most of the people you want are not choosing between you and another man in your trade, they are choosing between you and another year of putting up with it, and that rival asks nothing of them today. He sends no stranger into the house, names no price and sets no date, and he wins by being what happens when nobody decides anything.

Material written against competitors assumes the hard decision is taken. It is not. The hard decision is not which slater, but whether to have a slater at all this year. A householder with three estimates on his table has crossed a line the bulk of your market has not come near, and your lines about quarries and years are written for those few.

The reason delay beats you is arithmetical. The cost of the problem arrives in instalments too small to attend to. The cost of curing it arrives in one lump, on one day, out of money already spoken for. Forty pounds on a Tuesday is felt in the stomach. A pail on a landing is felt for three weeks and then not at all, though it goes on costing after it stops being noticed.

So the work is not persuasion. It is addition. You gather the instalments nobody has added up and set the sum beside your price, so that the comparison the reader makes is the true one. A stranger has no instrument for weighing your workmanship, but he knows his own trouble the moment he is shown it, and this trouble he already owns.

The sum must be theirs, not yours. A figure reasoned out at your bench reads as a selling argument and is discounted as one. A figure gathered on a doorstep arrives with its particulars attached, and an exact figure is believed where a round one is weighed against you. The asking hands you language you would never have invented. You would have written damage to plaster and timbers. The woman said her sister had not stayed since the spring before last.

Notice that your price has not changed by a farthing, yet reads differently, being no longer the only figure on the paper. Forty pounds against nothing is an expense. Forty pounds against a ceiling and a shut bedroom is a bargain, and the reader does that sum himself.

Two cautions. Do not manufacture the figure and do not stretch it. A trade that exaggerates is known for it within a season, and then the true figures cannot be used either, being assumed to be yours. Where a thing can honestly wait a year, say so, and you will be the man sent for in the year when it cannot. Second, waiting does not cost money for everybody. For a tenant it may be the landlord's temper, for a shopkeeper the Saturday trade. Put the cost in the currency of the reader, and keep the argument from the man who already has estimates on his table. He has decided to act, and will take it as a slight.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. What does one more year of this problem cost the person who has it? Not guessed at, asked. Three of last year's customers, one question each.
2. Of the enquiries I lost last year, how many went to a rival and how many nowhere at all? If most went nowhere, your lines against competitors were written for a fifth of your market.
3. What is the first line of my material arguing with? Read it as a stranger with a mark on a ceiling and no intention of spending this year. If it is about you, or about the other men in your trade, it answers a question he has not asked himself.

The Answer to the Riddle

Same slate, same ladders, same four shillings. What was the second man arguing with?

The right opponent. The first spent four shillings beating rivals in front of people who had not decided to employ anybody. The second argued with the winter and the habit of waiting, which was what his readers were actually choosing, with eleven doorsteps of evidence.

The verse:

A pail upon the landing is a cheap enough affair,
And a pennyworth of trouble is a thing you cease to see,
But the laths go soft in silence and the plaster follows there,
And the bill that waits three winters is the dearest of the three.

Until next time. Go and ask one of last year's customers how long they put up with the thing before sending for you, and what the waiting cost them.

P.S. The figures do a second job. Once you know what waiting costs, you know which customers it costs the most, which is a list in the order to call on them. Such a man is worth approaching first not because he is richer, but because the sum comes out in your favour without help from you.

Also in the archive: The Clear Evening, The Sign Nobody Read and Set Aside at Nine in the Evening.