Twenty Strangers

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as ever. Your century today, and the sum at the bottom of it takes four minutes and almost nobody has done it.

Two firms both want a better year,
Both work the hours, both persevere.
One asks: how many can I reach?
One asks: how few will do for each?
Same trade, same town, same twelve months gone.
Which question was the harder one?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two firms in the same trade, and the work, all together now, was equally good. Both wanted a better year and both went about getting one.

The first set out to be seen by as many people as possible, which is what wanting a better year usually means in practice. He wrote for everybody, spoke to everybody, and priced so that nobody would be put off, and he was tired all the time.

What he had never done, in eleven years of trading, was work out how many customers he actually needed. Not wanted: needed, to have the year he had in mind. So the target was everybody, forever, and against that target no week was ever a success, and no customer was ever quite enough.

It also made him timid, though he would not have called it that. A man who needs everybody cannot afford to be too particular about anybody, so his letters had the softness of writing meant to offend nobody, and his prices apologised, and he took work he knew he would resent.

The second firm did the sum one January evening, and it took about four minutes.

She wanted a certain amount out of the business that year. The average job was worth about a thousand pounds to her. So she needed something like forty of them, and about half her work came from people who had used her before, which left twenty new customers to find. Twenty, in a county of several hundred thousand people, over twelve months. Fewer than two a month.

The number changed nearly every decision she made afterwards, and this is the part worth sitting with.

She could write properly to two hundred people rather than badly to eight thousand, since two hundred is a thing one person can actually do. She could turn down the wrong sort of work without panic, because losing one bad job out of forty is not a catastrophe. She could take real trouble over each customer, since forty is a number you can know by name, and taking trouble was what produced the half of her work that arrived without asking.

And she stopped competing for the attention of people who were never going to hire her, which is where her rival spent most of his year.

By December she had done forty-three jobs and turned away six, and had been, by her own account, considerably less busy than the man who was chasing everybody and had done thirty-one.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Nearly every small trade needs a startlingly small number of customers, and almost none of them have worked out what it is. The sum is one line: what you want out of the year, divided by what a customer is worth, less those who will come back anyway. Most people are shocked by the answer, because they have been marketing as though they needed a crowd when what they needed was a number you could fit in a modest room.

And the shock is useful, because the number changes what is sensible. Reaching everybody is expensive and shallow and suits a firm that needs thousands. Twenty customers a year is a different problem entirely, better answered by knowing two hundred people well, by being one of a particular trade, and by taking enough trouble over each job that the next one arrives unasked. Those things are impossible at scale and perfectly possible at twenty.

Note also what the number does to your nerve, since this is the greater part of it. A man who needs everybody cannot refuse anybody, cannot price properly, cannot write anything sharp enough to be interesting, and cannot say who he is not for. All the advice in this series about choosing and refusing rests on knowing that you do not require the whole county, and the arithmetic is what makes that knowledge real rather than brave.

Two cautions. Do the sum honestly, including the jobs that fall through and the months that are thin, since a number arrived at optimistically will have you refusing work you cannot afford to refuse. And do not shrink the number by shrinking your ambition: this is not an argument for a smaller business, it is an argument for knowing the size of the one you want, which is quite often reached by fewer and better customers rather than by more of them.

Three questions, and do the first before you read the others again:

1. How many new customers do you need this year? Take what you want the business to produce, divide by what a customer is worth over a year, subtract those who will return anyway. Write the number down. It will be smaller than you expect and it is the most useful figure in your business.
2. What would you do differently at that number? Whom could you know by name, write to properly, take real trouble over. The answer will look nothing like reaching everybody, which is what you have probably been attempting.
3. What could you now refuse? Knowing you need twenty rather than everybody, name the work you will stop taking. That refusal is the whole benefit of the sum, and it is not available to a man who has never done it.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which question was the harder one?

How few will do, because it requires a number, and a number can be checked against your year and found wanting. Asking how many can I reach never fails and never finishes: it is an appetite rather than a target, and a man can pursue it for eleven years without ever being able to say whether a given Tuesday went well. She did the sum in four minutes and found she needed twenty strangers in a county of several hundred thousand, and everything she did afterwards was calmer, narrower and better paid.

The verse:

Chase all the county, tire your feet,
And never know when you've enough.
Count twenty names you'd like to meet,
Then go and do that much, that's all.

Until next time. Go and do the sum tonight, write the number on something you will see in March, and decide what you can now afford to refuse.

P.S. There is a peculiar relief in the number that people report afterwards and do not expect. Not because the work becomes easy, but because it becomes finite. A target you can reach is a different companion to walk about with than an appetite you cannot satisfy, and the second has worn out more good traders than any competitor.

Also in the archive: One Pot in Seven, The Crowded End and The Follower Count.