Twenty-Seven Hundredweight

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, along the harbour wall, two ropemakers kept their walks side by side, made the same rope from the same hemp, and only one of them ever wrote down what it would hold.

Two ropemakers, the same hemp and the same long walk,
Same twist, same tar, same price by the fathom.
One chalked up: the strongest rope in the county.
One chalked up: inch rope, parts at twenty-seven hundredweight.
Put to the test, both ropes held the same.
Which board did the masters believe?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two ropewalks in the town I've never named, running parallel behind the harbour wall, each a long low shed a furlong from end to end, where a man walked backwards all day paying out yarn from the bundle at his waist while a boy turned the wheel. Both makers had learned the trade in the same yard. Both bought their hemp off the same ships, laid it three strand by hand, and tarred it the same way. Their customers were the masters of the coasting vessels and the quarry that needed tackle for its cranes.

Both men were careful, and both tested their rope. Each had a beam in his yard with a scale pan hung beneath it, and once a week a length from the week's work was hung there and loaded with iron weights, one at a time, until it parted. Neither would sell a coil he had not had tested. As it happened, their rope broke at almost exactly the same load. A master could have bought from either and been equally safe.

The first ropemaker had a board painted above his gate. It said: Finest Rope in the County. Strong, Honest, Fairly Priced. Every word of it was true. It was also, word for word, what the chandler at the end of the quay had painted above his own door, and he sold rope bought in cheap from up the coast that nobody would trust to moor a rowing boat. The masters read the first board as they read every board, which is to say they did not read it at all. Finest in the county was what everybody said.

The second ropemaker kept a slate by his gate, and on it he chalked, and rechalked each week: Inch rope, three strand, hand laid. Tested on this yard's beam every Saturday. Last twelve tests, parted at an average of twenty-seven hundredweight. Below that, smaller, the week's own result, which was sometimes twenty-six and a half and once, in a damp month, twenty-five.

A master walking past that slate did something he never did in front of the painted board. He stopped and did a sum. His heaviest lift was a hogshead of some five hundredweight. Twenty-seven was five times that and more. So an inch rope would do, and he need not pay for the thicker. He bought, and he bought from the man who had given him the figure, because the figure had done his thinking for him. Then, on the quay, when another master asked where he got his rope, he did not say it was the finest in the county. He said it went at twenty-seven hundredweight. That was a thing a man could repeat, and it was.

The first ropemaker was an honest man and he was puzzled. His rope was as good. But he had supposed that praising your goods was simply the custom, like touching your hat, and that the rope would speak for itself once it was bought. He was right about the rope. He was wrong about the board. The rope could only speak after the sale, and the board had to speak before it, and his said nothing a buyer could use.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A general claim is heard as a boast and discounted, and an exact figure is heard as a fact and believed, so wherever you can, replace an adjective with a measurement. Every seller says his goods are the best, and so the reader has learned to expect it and to knock it off, the way a sensible woman knocks a third off a hawker's first price. A claim the reader expected to hear carries no news. It is not disbelieved. It is simply not counted.

A figure is different in three ways. First, it looks measured, and above all when it is not a round one. A man who is guessing says a ton. Only a man who has hung weights on a beam says twenty-seven hundredweight. Second, it can be checked, and a man who offers you something you could check is presumed to have checked it himself. That is why a figure works as a kind of proof that can be carried to the buyer who was never in the yard. Third, and most useful, a figure can be used. The buyer can lay it against his own case and decide, and a claim he has worked out for himself is one he will defend to others.

Fast service is an adjective. Replies within four working hours, and last year the average was under two, is a measurement. Experienced is an adjective; has fitted eleven hundred and forty kitchens since the business began is a fact somebody could repeat at a dinner table. Some good things cannot be counted, such as care or tidiness, and for those the equivalent of a figure is a single exact description of what you do, which is its own lesson and the subject of another letter.

Two cautions. First, the figure must be true and it must be kept true. The second ropemaker chalked his worst week as well as his best, and the damp month's twenty-five did him more good than harm, because it showed the slate was written from the beam and not from his hopes. Second, do not bury the reader in figures, and do not invent precision you do not have. One or two numbers the buyer cares about will be read and remembered; a column of them is a fog, and a figure given to two decimal places for something nobody could measure that closely smells exactly like the boast it replaced.

Three questions, before you next write a word about your business:

1. Which of your adjectives could be counted? Go through your website, your price list and your quotation letter and underline every word such as quick, reliable, experienced or popular. For each one, ask what number stands behind it.
2. What do you already measure and never mention? Jobs done, days taken, customers who came back. The buyer would find several of these more persuasive than anything you have written.
3. Which number would your customer repeat? Choose the one figure that answers the question the buyer is most afraid to get wrong, and put it where he will see it first.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which board did the masters believe?

The slate that said twenty-seven hundredweight. Both ropes held the same, and both makers told the truth. But one told it in a form the masters had heard a thousand times and had long ago stopped counting, and the other told it in a form nobody invents, which a master could check, use for his own sum, and carry down the quay to the next man.

The verse:

The best in the county is chalked on every door,
And every reader knocks a third away.
So write the weight at which your rope once tore,
And they will quote it on the quay all day.

Until next time. Go and find one adjective on your website or your price list that you could replace with a true number, and replace it.

P.S. The same holds for prices. A quotation for a round two thousand looks like a figure somebody thought of, and invites a round counter-offer. A quotation for one thousand nine hundred and forty looks like a figure somebody worked out, and is haggled over less, because the buyer assumes there is arithmetic behind it. So there should be. Show the arithmetic, and quote what it comes to.

Also in the archive: The Mason's Witnesses, Eight to Twelve Hundred and The Sign Nobody Read.