Under Another Man's Name

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town two men did identical work in identical rooms, and neither was ever thanked by the people who lived with it.

Two french polishers in one town, the same shellac and the same warm back room.
Both worked for the cabinet makers, and neither was known to a householder by name.
Both charged nine shillings a piece and both laid a finish you could read a page in.
One of them, the evening a table was certain to be a week late, wrote to the cabinet maker.
Same shellac, same price, same week lost, and only one of them had benches queuing for him.
Which of the two understood what his customer was actually buying?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two french polishers in the town I have never named. Neither kept a shop. Each had a back room with a stove in it and the windows shut against dust, which is why a polisher's room smells of spirit and warm wood. The work came from the cabinet makers, four of them in that town, and went out again to drawing rooms the polishers never entered. A householder ordering a mahogany table knew the cabinet maker and his cart, and not that the gleam on the top was eleven days of somebody else's patience.

The first polisher asked three questions of every piece that came in, and none was about the piece. Who is it for. Which room is it going into. When must it be in the house. He wrote the date in his book as the cabinet maker's date rather than his own and worked back from it. With each finished piece went a half sheet of paper saying what the finish was and how to dust it. At the top was the cabinet maker's name, and nothing of his own appeared anywhere, which was deliberate.

One October a walnut sideboard went wrong on him. The old finish lifted under the new and the top had to come back to bare wood, which is six days he had not got. He did not work late and hope. He walked round that evening, before supper, and said it plainly: the nineteenth and not the twelfth, here is why, here is what I will do about it. The cabinet maker swore for a minute, then wrote to his customer himself, in good time, as a man in command of his own workshop. The householder was mildly inconvenienced and never learned there had been a polisher in it.

The second polisher was the better craftsman, and the trade would have told you so. But when a job slipped he mended it in silence, thinking that was what reliability meant, so the cabinet maker heard of it in his own shop, from his own customer, with nothing to say back. That happened twice. And when a housemaid came round and asked him direct, as a kindness, whether he would do the eight dining chairs without troubling the cabinet maker, he did them, at a good price, and did them beautifully.

Within two years the first polisher had the benches of three cabinet makers and a fortnight's work always waiting. The second had the fourth, who was slow, and a thin scatter of direct work from houses that remembered him. He would have told you the trade was tight and the cabinet makers mean.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

When your work goes out under another man's name, he is not buying the work. He is buying the safety of putting his name on it. That is what he is short of, and almost nobody sells it to him.

Look at where he stands. He has taken the order, named the price and promised the date, he cannot watch the work being done, and yet every fault in it is his fault in the only account that ever reaches his customer. A householder does not say the polisher was late. She says the cabinet maker was late. He has handed his standing to a man two lanes away and must spend the week hoping.

So what wins trade work is not what we are taught to show off. It is early bad news, dates that can be repeated to a third party without crossing fingers, something he can hand on and look organised doing it, and no surprise reaching him sideways from his own customer. Three of those cost nothing but attention, and the finest finish in the county supplies none of them.

Price belongs in this, honestly. He must be able to add his own portion to your figure and still name a sum his customer will take, and a man whose figure leaves the middle nothing is dropped in the end however good he is. Quote him as a trade customer and say so. He is a person whose decision you need and who gains nothing by making it easy for you.

Then the arithmetic. A householder is one job and must be found, courted and convinced. A cabinet maker is forty jobs and brings them at his own expense, so an hour spent making one trade customer safe is spread across a year of benches, and most of that hour is writing things down and telling people early. Going round him is good arithmetic for one Tuesday and poor arithmetic for a decade. The arrangement wears different clothes now and has not otherwise moved: the subcontractor on another firm's site, the maker whose goods sit in somebody else's window, the one who writes software another company sells under its own name. Each has total exposure and no control, and each is waiting to be told early what he will otherwise explain late.

Two cautions. A trade customer who becomes nine tenths of your book has stopped being a customer and become a landlord, and the most dangerous number in business is still one. Be the safe pair of hands for three of them, and keep your own name known somewhere. The second is subtler. Making a man safe is not the same as making yourself small, and one who answers your early warning by squeezing your price is telling you about the years ahead. Safety is worth a premium and should quietly carry one.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. Whose name does my work go out under? Write out everyone who sells, fits, forwards or presents your work as part of their own. They are customers in their own right, and most trades have never once sold to them deliberately.
2. What have I given him to hand on? One page in his name rather than yours: what was done, how it is cared for, what to expect and when. Write it once and it serves every job after.
3. When something last slipped, who heard it first? If it was his customer rather than him, you have lost the next order and simply not been told yet.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which of the two understood what his customer was actually buying?

The first, and he understood it the evening he walked round before supper with bad news in his mouth and gave a cabinet maker seven clear days to be master of his own shop. The second sold a finish, the best in the town and never in question. The first sold a quiet week to a man who had promised something he could not see being made.

The verse:

The finish goes into the hall
beneath another's name,
and what he buys is not the shine
but never bearing blame.

Until next time. Go and write the one page your trade customer can hand to his own customer without altering a word of it.

P.S. The day to ask a trade customer for more work is the day after bad news cost him nothing. He has just watched you behave well under the only test that matters to him, and the memory is at its warmest before the job is even finished. Most of us wait instead for a triumph to point at, which only proves we can do the work, a thing he already believed.

Also in the archive: The Cart With the Barrels, The Name He Lent and The Thirty Who Pay the Rent.