There Is One of Me

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as ever. Your century today, and the subject is the sentence you have been leaving out of your marketing for years, at some expense.

Two firms are small, and know it well,
Both wish they had more folk to sell.
One writes as though the team were ten,
One writes: there's me, and that is when
The buyer chose. Same size, same day.
What did the second dare to say?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two firms in the same trade, and the work, all together now, was equally good. Both were one person and a part-time helper, and both wished they were larger.

The first wrote to hide it. Not dishonestly: he simply used the plural, described a team, showed a photograph of an office he rented by the hour, and said nothing anywhere about how many people he actually was. He spent a good deal of energy on this, and every enquiry brought a small dread that it would come out.

What it did to his marketing was worse than the dread. Since he could not mention being small, he could not mention anything that followed from it, which was most of what was good about him: that the person who quotes is the person who does the work, that nothing gets handed to a junior, that he answers his own telephone. All of that was buried, so what remained was a firm that sounded like every other firm, only vaguer.

And he lost on the thing he was pretending to be. Set beside an actual twelve-person outfit, his imitation of one was simply a worse version, and any customer choosing on scale chose the real thing.

Occasionally the truth came out mid-job, and then the customer felt slightly misled about a fact that would never have troubled her had she known it at the start.

The second firm led with it. The first line said there is one of me, with a part-time helper on Thursdays, and then said exactly what follows from that.

I take four jobs at a time and no more. You will not be handed to anybody. The person you meet is the person who does the work and the person who telephones you when something goes wrong. I am not the firm to ring if you need forty men on a site next Tuesday, and if that is what you want I will tell you who to ring.

That last sentence did an extraordinary amount of work, and it is the one everybody leaves out.

She did not win everybody. She lost the customers who needed forty men, which she was never going to serve well anyway, and she lost them in the first thirty seconds rather than after a fortnight of pleasant conversation.

What she won was the buyer who had been let down by exactly the thing she could not do: handed to a junior, telephoned by an account manager who had never seen the job, one of ninety clients. For that person, four jobs at a time was not a limitation to be excused. It was the whole reason to choose her, and nobody else in the trade was saying it, because everybody else was busy sounding bigger.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

The thing you are apologising for is usually the only thing you have that nobody can copy. Every trade has one: small, slow, expensive, local, narrow, new, old-fashioned. And the instinct is to conceal it and hope nobody asks, which costs you twice. It removes from your marketing everything interesting about you, and it commits you to competing on ground where somebody else is genuinely better.

The move is not to admit the weakness after the fact, which is politeness. It is to lead with it and then say what follows from it, since every disadvantage has a benefit attached that the customer cannot work out for themselves. Small means the owner does the work. Slow means nothing leaves before it is right. Expensive means you are not cutting the thing that gets cut. Narrow means this is all we do. None of that is spin. It is the true other half of the sentence, and it stays unsaid because the first half is embarrassing.

Then the part that makes it credible rather than clever. You must name who you are not for, plainly, in writing, and mean it. A firm that says it is small and then implies it can do everything has merely found a new way to be vague. Saying I am not the one to ring if you need forty men next Tuesday is what converts an excuse into a position, and it is the same move the trade insider makes when she says her thing is no use to you in the summer.

And note what it does to the customers you keep. They arrive knowing exactly what they are getting, so they never discover it later and feel misled; the fact that would have been a grievance in week three becomes the reason they chose you in week one. Nothing about the business changed. Only the order in which they learned it.

Three questions, and be honest on the first:

1. What do you hope nobody asks? Write it down plainly: the size, the wait, the price, the one thing you do not offer. Whatever made you wince slightly is the subject of this letter.
2. What is the true other half of it? For each one, write the consequence a customer would actually value, and check that it is true rather than flattering. If you cannot find one, that is not a marketing problem, it is a real weakness and wants fixing rather than framing.
3. Who are you plainly not for? Write the sentence you would say to somebody at the wrong end of it, including who they should ring instead. Put it in your material where it can be read before anybody makes an enquiry.

The Answer to the Riddle

What did the second dare to say?

That there was one of her. Everything worth choosing her for followed from that single fact, and her rival had spent three years making sure nobody ever heard it, which meant he had spent three years unable to say anything true about himself at all. He was not beaten by a bigger firm. He was beaten by a firm the same size as his own, which had noticed that the thing it kept apologising for was the only thing it had that could not be bought, hired or imitated by anybody in the trade.

The verse:

The fault you hide is all you own,
The one thing rivals cannot clone.
Say small, say slow, say who you're not,
And keep the ones the others got.

Until next time. Go and write down the thing you hope nobody asks, put the true half that follows beside it, and lead with both in the next thing you send.

P.S. There is a limit, and it is worth marking. This works on facts about how you are built, not on faults in the work. Slow because every piece is checked is a position. Slow because you forget to ring people back is a problem, and no amount of clever framing has ever fixed one of those, though a great many people have tried.

Also in the archive: The Sign Nobody Read, The About Page and Four Sides at the Horse Fair.