The Year the Tide Came In

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as ever. Your century today, and the trouble in it arrives disguised as good fortune.

Two firms both have a roaring year,
Same boom, same rush, same crowded door.
One rides it hard and asks no questions,
One spends the fat months mending things.
The tide goes out on both alike.
Which one was left with something built?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two firms in the same trade, and the work, all together now, was equally good. And in the same year both of them were suddenly, unaccountably busy: a shift in the market that neither had caused and neither fully understood.

The first enjoyed it, and who would not. The telephone rang without being asked to, the diary filled, and every problem he had worried about the previous winter simply stopped mattering. His prices were fine, since people paid them without comment. His enquiries converted well, since the callers were half sold before they rang. He stopped writing to anybody, because what was the point, and he stopped counting anything, because the numbers were all pleasant.

He took whoever came, including the customers he would have refused in a lean year, and he squeezed rushes in between, and the standard slipped in ways he told himself were temporary.

Then the tide went out, as tides do, and he discovered several things at once. He had no list, having sent nothing for two years. He had no idea which of his old sources of work had dried up, since he had never recorded where anybody came from. His prices had never been tested against a customer who could say no. And the habits that had brought him work in the old days had been out of use so long that he could not remember which of them had actually worked.

He had not had a good year. He had had a year off, paid for handsomely, and the bill arrived eighteen months later.

The second firm treated the boom as a wage advance rather than a change in the weather.

She raised her prices twice, since a full diary is the one condition in which a rise costs nothing to test. She used the excess demand to shed the customers she had been enduring, which she could not have afforded in a thin year. She wrote down where every enquiry came from, precisely because there were so many, and so she learned in one year what usually takes five. And she kept writing to her list the whole way through, unnecessarily, which felt absurd at the time.

She also put money aside and hired nobody permanent, having noticed that the work was arriving for reasons nobody could explain.

When it ended, she had a higher rate, a better set of customers, a written record of what actually brings her work, and a list of eleven hundred people who had heard from her that month. The lean year was a nuisance rather than a crisis.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A good year teaches you nothing unless you make it, because everything works when demand is doing the work for you. That is the danger hidden inside prosperity: the feedback stops. Poor prices are paid, weak material converts, bad customers seem tolerable, and every habit you have, useful or useless, appears to succeed. A trade cannot learn in those conditions, and a trade that cannot learn is simply drifting at speed.

So the fat months are for building the things you cannot build when frightened. Raise the price, since a full diary is the safest possible place to discover what the market will bear, as the queue was already telling you. Shed the customers you have been enduring, which requires exactly the surplus a boom provides. Write down where the work is coming from while there is plenty of it to trace. And keep the slow, unglamorous habits running when they are least necessary, since a habit dropped in a good year is not there in a bad one, and rebuilding it takes longer than keeping it ever did.

And be wary of the permanent commitments that a temporary boom seems to justify: the extra staff, the bigger premises, the standing costs. Demand you cannot explain is demand you cannot rely on, and the question worth asking in the middle of a marvellous quarter is a plain one. Do I know why this is happening? If the answer is no, enjoy it and commit to nothing.

Three questions, and ask them while things are going well rather than afterwards:

1. Do you know why you are busy? Name the cause. If you cannot, you are being carried by something outside your control, and it will stop for reasons equally outside it.
2. What have you stopped doing since the work got plentiful? The letters, the counting, the following up, the asking. Each one is a habit that will need rebuilding at precisely the moment you are least able to spare the time.
3. What can you do now that you could not do in a thin year? Raise the rate, end with the worst account, test a higher price on the next three quotes. The surplus is the whole opportunity, and it is spent by default on simply being busier.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which one was left with something built?

The woman who behaved, in the best year of her life, as though it were an ordinary one. Both of them earned well and both saw the tide go out, and one of them had spent the fat months raising his standard of living while the other spent them raising her rate, thinning her customer book and writing down what worked. Prosperity had told him he was doing everything correctly, which is the one thing prosperity cannot be trusted to say.

The verse:

In the good year all things seem sound,
For everything you try succeeds.
Mend then, while money's coming round,
And learn the year that hides your needs.

Until next time. Go and name one thing you can only do while you are busy, and do it this month rather than when the tide turns.

P.S. The hardest part is that none of this feels urgent, which is precisely the point. Everything in this letter is easy to do in a good year and impossible in a bad one, and that asymmetry is the whole reason the good years decide what the bad ones look like.

Also in the archive: The Quiet Month, The Cooper and the Single Gate and Booked Until March.