The Slope He Left Alone

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town a barn roof was not a comfort but the lid of a granary, and hay under a leaking slope lost worth every week until it had none.

Two slaters in the town I have never named, the same Welsh slate and the same twelve shillings a square.
Both were called to the same barn by the widow at the home farm, and told eighteen pounds was all there was.
Both knew the roof entire could not be laid again for less than thirty.
One took the eighteen pounds, covered the whole barn, and was blamed for it by the second winter.
One took seventeen pounds twelve, covered half of it, and had the other half four years later.
Same slate, same twelve shillings a square, same eighteen pounds. What did the second man do?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Both were sound men at the same work. A roof is stripped, the slate hung in courses from the eaves, and lead dressed into the valley where two slopes meet. Done properly it is forgotten for forty years. Done hurriedly it looks the same in October and tells the truth in February.

The long slope of this barn faced south and had taken sixty years of weather. From the doorway at noon you could see daylight through it in a dozen places. The north slope was sound but for a course near the ridge. The widow had eighteen pounds in the box and a hundred and twenty tons of hay to get in, and she said both those things in the first minute.

The first slater heard the eighteen pounds as the trouble it was. He went home with his figures and came back having found a way: second-hand slate from a chapel coming down at Ketton, the old battens left in place, a strip of mortar fillet at the valley instead of lead. Eighteen pounds exactly, the whole roof, and he was proud of the arithmetic. The barn was dry that winter and the next. In the February after, the fillet lifted in a gale, water ran down the inside wall for days, and four tons of hay went black and warm and was carted out. She told two neighbours the roof had been done four years since and had not lasted, which is all anybody needs to hear.

The second slater heard the eighteen pounds as a measurement. He asked what the money had to do and by when: the hay came in at the end of July and must keep until spring. Then he went up the same ladder and came down with the roof divided in two. The south slope, every slate of it, new lead in the valley, the ridge bedded: with carriage, seventeen pounds twelve. The north slope he left alone and said so plainly, writing at the foot of his estimate that the course below its ridge had perhaps four years in it, and that he would write to her in the spring of the fourth.

She took it. The slope was finished in nine days and the hay kept. He wrote in the fourth year as promised, did the north slope for nine pounds, and while he stood in the yard she walked him over to the dairy roof, which had troubled her a twelvemonth.

Neither man reduced his rate: twelve shillings a square in both estimates. One of them reduced the work. One of them reduced the roof.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A customer who names a figure has not refused your price, he has told you the size of the job; spend his figure on less work done properly, never on all the work done thinly. The named figure sounds like an objection and is nothing of the kind. It is the one fact about a buyer you would otherwise spend three visits guessing at.

There are two ways to bring a thirty pound job inside eighteen pounds. You reduce what is done, or you reduce how well it is done. The first you decide together and both can see. The second you decide alone, about materials he cannot inspect, and the fault, when it comes, attaches to your name and not to his economy. He will not remember agreeing to a mortar fillet. He will remember a roof that did not last, and so will the neighbours he tells.

Dividing the work costs you nothing by comparison, because the part you do is done to your usual standard and stands there to be looked at. It also keeps your rate whole, which matters more than any single job, since a bent rate is quoted back at you by the next customer, and the slow work of raising a price or thinning the cloth begins again from lower down.

Better still, the part left undone, written out with a date against it, is not a loss but a booking. The first man got eighteen pounds and an ending. The second got a job four years out that he had named himself, and the dairy besides, all from giving somebody something to choose between.

Two cautions. The first is that a named figure is not always true. Some name a low number to see what it shakes loose. Do not argue with it: answer the figure as given, show what the next step up buys, and leave it there. A soft figure will move on its own, and without your having pleaded. The second caution matters more. Not every job divides, and a thing half done is sometimes worse than a thing not begun. Half a roof is dry. Half a drainage scheme puts the water onto ground that was dry before. Where the work will not divide, say so at once, and say what the figure does honestly buy: the survey, the plan, or the first stage and no more.

Three questions, for the next enquiry that arrives with a figure attached:

1. What must this money achieve, and by when? Ask it before you reduce a single thing. The eighteen pounds was never for a roof but for a hundred and twenty tons of hay keeping until spring, and once you know that, which half to lay answers itself.
2. Where does my work divide? Write out the three honest smaller jobs your trade can sell, with a price against each. If you cannot name them in a minute, you will invent something regrettable under pressure.
3. What am I about to leave out, and whose name is on it if it fails? If the answer is your name, you are reducing the standard and not the work. Put it back and take the quantity out instead. That question alone would have saved the first slater four tons of hay and his good name.

The Answer to the Riddle

Same slate, same twelve shillings a square, same eighteen pounds. What did the second man do?

He spent the whole of her figure on half the roof, and did that half as he would have done it for thirty. He reduced the area, named the part he left, and put a date on it. The first man kept the area and reduced everything else, which is to sell four years of dryness at the price of a lifetime, with your own name on the result.

The verse:

She said that eighteen pounds was all, and all the roof was thirty,
So one man stretched a thirty pound job thin across the whole.
The other spent her money out on half of it done rightly,
And one of them was sent for twice, and one of them was not.

Until next time. Go and write down the three smaller jobs your trade can honestly sell, with a price against each, and keep the list where you write your estimates.

P.S. Keep a note of which half they choose. Over a year or two the choices fall into a pattern, and that pattern is the smaller offering your trade has wanted all along, tested already on paying customers.

Also in the archive: The Fourth Lever, Six Shillings for a Locking Door and The Crowded End.