The Quiet Month

Dear friend,

The riddle first. Your century again, and today's lesson is about a month that has not happened yet and is already decided.

Two landscapers work one warm year,
Both watch the winter creeping near.
One waits it out and cuts his price,
One fills it while the sun's still nice.
By March, one's broke and one's ahead.
When was the quiet winter fed?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two landscapers, one town, and the gardens, all together now, were equally good. Both flat out from May to September. Both watching the phone go quiet somewhere around the first week of November, every single year, as reliably as the clocks.

The first landscaper had a reason for everything, and each reason was true. In summer he didn't market, because there was no time and, frankly, no need: he was turning work away. In November he didn't market either, because there was no money coming in and advertising costs money. So the quiet arrived and found him exactly as it had found him the year before, with nothing built and nothing owed to him.

Then, in the second week of a silent December, he did the thing that felt like action. Twenty percent off, posted everywhere, three months of nothing to say followed by a discount shouted at strangers. It brought in a little: two rushed jobs at prices that barely covered the van, and one customer of the sort you met at the inn on the coaching road. And it taught his best customers something he will be paying for until he retires, because they are not fools and they can read a calendar: wait until winter, he goes cheap. Every year the trough got a little deeper and the discount had to get a little louder.

The second landscaper, a woman, treated August as the month in which she sold January. That is the whole of it, and it sounds like nothing until you watch it done.

All summer she was standing in gardens, in front of delighted people, at the precise moment of their maximum goodwill, which is a position most trades occupy for four months a year and use for absolutely nothing. She asked one question before she packed the van: Is there anything you'd want doing in the quiet season? I work right through, same rates, and I can give you a January date now. Perhaps a third said yes. Fencing, pruning, clearance, the hard landscaping that is pleasanter in cold weather than in July, the design drawings for next spring. She wrote the dates down at the time, took a deposit against them, and moved on.

She also spent the summer filling the tin box: every customer, every enquiry, every neighbour who leaned over a wall to admire, all of it collected while the trade was warm, exactly as the stallholder taught. In October she sent one letter to the lot of them, no discount anywhere in it, offering the winter work and the winter dates, of which there were now not many left. That letter has never once failed her.

So her January was full, at full price, of work booked by people who had watched her do the job in their own gardens. Her rival's January was an empty diary and a sale sign, and his customers were waiting for it.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

The quiet month is sold in the busy one. Demand is never gathered when you need it; it is gathered when you are in front of people, and you are in front of people precisely when you have no time to think about the future. That is the whole cruelty of a seasonal trade: the harvest and the sowing want the same hands on the same afternoons, and the man who does only the harvesting is condemned to be surprised by winter for the rest of his working life.

So the trough is not weather. It is a decision made ninety days earlier, usually by omission. And the fix has three parts, none of them expensive. Ask while you are standing there: the sentence takes nine seconds and the goodwill is at its annual peak. Have something winter-shaped to sell: not your busy-season product at a lower price, but the work the cold season actually suits, the planning, the preparing, the thing better done when nobody is looking. And keep the addresses, because a list gathered in August is the only asset that can be spent in January.

Above all, do not answer a quiet month with a discount. A discount in the trough is not a rescue, it is a public timetable: it announces to every customer you have when your prices are worth waiting for, and once taught, a market does not forget. You saw what an ending does for a draper who keeps it, and what a permanent sale did for the man who didn't. Cheapen the quiet season once and you have not filled it; you have moved your busy season into it at half price.

Three questions, and open a calendar for the whole year, not the month:

1. When is your quiet month, and what did you do ninety days before it? You know the date; every trade does. Write it down, count back ninety days, and look honestly at what sits in that week. If the answer is your busiest fortnight of the year, you have found both the problem and the only place the solution can live.
2. What is winter-shaped in your trade? The work that suits the slow season on its own merits: the planning, the maintenance, the audit, the thing customers keep meaning to get round to. Name it, price it at full rate, and sell it as its own product rather than as your usual work with the price scratched out.
3. Who is standing in front of you this week? That is your January pipeline, and it will not be there in December. Ask each one the nine-second question before you leave, take the date, take a deposit, and write it in the book while they are still pleased with you.

The Answer to the Riddle

When was the quiet winter fed?

In August, on somebody's lawn, in a sentence that took nine seconds and cost nothing. Both men had the same winter coming and the same weather in it; only one of them was standing in a garden in high summer treating it as the sowing season. The other was too busy harvesting to plant, and a man who never plants can only ever discount, and a man who only discounts teaches his customers when to wait.

The verse:

An empty winter's not the cold,
It's summer's asking left untold.
So sell the winter while it's June,
And let no discount call the tune.

Until next time. Go and ask this week's customers the nine-second question, and put one quiet-season date in the book before Friday.

P.S. If your trade has no season, do not sit back smiling; it only means your trough arrives without a date on it, which is worse. Look at last year's takings month by month, find the two thin ones, and count back ninety days from each. The letter still applies. It simply won't announce itself with weather.

Also in the archive: Lettuces and Apple Trees, April and October and The Year the Tide Came In.