The Second Saturday in May

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as ever. Your century today, and the difference between the two firms in it is one Saturday.

Two workshops open every day,
Same doors, same hours, same work on show.
One waits for whoever wanders in,
One shuts them all but one a year.
Both sell the same, both work as hard.
Why does the town know one by name?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two workshops in the same trade, and the work, all together now, was equally good. Both were open to visitors, in the sense that anybody could knock, and almost nobody did.

The first was available every day, which sounds like the generous arrangement and is the invisible one. A door that is always open is a door nobody needs to go through today, and so the town intended to visit for eleven years and largely did not. When somebody did wander in, they found a man in the middle of a job who could spare them four minutes, and left with the impression of a place that was busy and not especially glad to see them.

He advertised, and the advertising brought enquiries one at a time, each of them a separate persuasion conducted with a stranger.

The second workshop was open to visitors one Saturday a year, the second in May, and had been for six years.

What happened on that Saturday was not spectacular. The doors were open all day, the work was out on the benches, half-finished things were left half-finished so people could see how they went together, and there was tea. He explained things to anybody who asked and sold nothing to anybody who did not, and by mid-afternoon there were more people in the yard than had come through the door in the previous three months combined.

Three things had been done by the Saturday that no amount of daily availability could do.

It gave the town a date, and a date is a reason to go now rather than eventually. The eleven years of intending collapsed into a morning.

It put people in a crowd, and a crowd persuades in a way no single visit can, since every visitor could see that other people had thought this worth a Saturday. The first firm's occasional caller had only ever seen an empty workshop and drawn the obvious conclusion.

And it made the work visible in its unfinished state, which is where the skill actually lives. A finished piece is a finished piece. A joint half cut on a bench, with the man explaining why it is cut that way, is the workshop letter performed live, to forty people at once.

The Saturday cost him a day's work and some tea. It produced, each year, a list of everybody who came, a dozen enquiries that began already persuaded, and a small piece in the local paper, which wrote about it because it was an event, and a workshop being open on a Tuesday is not.

By the sixth year, people in that town said the second Saturday in May the way they said the fair or the fete, and his rival was still open every day to nobody.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A door that is always open gives nobody a reason to walk through it today. Give the town a date. Availability is not an invitation, and a small business that waits to be visited will be visited by the few who happen to need it that week. An occasion, once a year, on a named day, converts a decade of good intentions into a morning of actual people, and does so precisely because it is rare.

The occasion does three jobs at once, and each is worth more than an advertisement. It gathers a crowd, and a crowd is the strongest proof you can offer a hesitant person, since it shows them that others have already decided. It shows the work in progress rather than the finished article, which is where your knowledge becomes visible. And it gives the local paper, the neighbourhood page and the person telling a friend something with a shape to it: a thing that happened, on a day, which is what stories require and what daily trading never supplies.

Keep it plain and keep it annual. Sell nothing on the day, since the crowd came for an occasion and will smell a sale, and it will not need selling to: a person who has spent a Saturday morning in your yard and gone home with their name in your book is a person the ten days after letter will finish for you. And hold it on the same day each year, so it becomes a fixture rather than a promotion, which is the yellow wheels principle applied to the calendar.

Two cautions. Do not mistake the day for a fair with your name on it; the work must be at the centre, and the tea at the edge, or you have thrown a party rather than opened a workshop. And write down every name, since the whole of the harvest is in the list and the follow-up, and a crowd that leaves unrecorded was merely a pleasant afternoon.

Three questions, and pick a date before answering:

1. What would people see if they stood in your workshop for an hour? If the answer is nothing much, find the part of your work that is interesting half done, and arrange for it to be half done that morning.
2. Which Saturday? Choose it now, put it on the wall, and hold it every year on the same day. The first will be small. The value is entirely in the fourth and fifth.
3. How will you get every name? A book by the door, a card in every hand, a reason to write it down. Decide before the day, because on the day you will be talking to somebody.

The Answer to the Riddle

Why does the town know one by name?

Because he gave them a day, and the other gave them a door. Both workshops were equally open and equally worth seeing, and one of them was seen by three or four wanderers a month who found a busy man and left, while the other was seen by the town in a single morning, together, with the tea on and the work out. A place that is always available is a place you can always visit later. A place that opens one Saturday a year is a place you visit this Saturday, and tell people you did.

The verse:

Leave the door open every day,
And they will come some day, not this.
Name one Saturday in May,
And find the whole town at your bench.

Until next time. Go and choose one Saturday next year, write it on the wall, and start deciding what will be half finished on the benches that morning.

P.S. If your trade has no workshop to open, the same device works with a talk, a demonstration or a walk round a finished job, on one named day a year, with the same tea. The building is not the point. The date is, and the crowd it gathers, and the names that go in the book before the crowd goes home.

Also in the archive: The Half Hour in October, Four Doors Either Side and The Four Hundred Who Know You.