What They Expect of You
The American mafioso Pete Salerno, who later became a government witness, told a researcher a story I still laugh at. As he tells it, the phone rings, his partner Figgy picks up and says something like: fine, we’ll be there in a few minutes. Then he turns to Pete. Pete, we’ve got a problem at the fruit store. The fruit man wants what he’s been paying for: protection.
After that, Salerno owns up honestly: until that minute it had never crossed their minds that anybody would seriously want protection for his money. At some point Figgy had given the fruit man the usual line, that if there was ever a problem they’d sort it out. And now there was a problem. So, Salerno says, they had to do something, or the shopkeepers would have rebelled, which is to say stopped paying.
Gambetta, who cites the story, draws a serious conclusion from it: two extortionists started out taking money on the pretext of protection, and then, so as not to lose face, were forced to keep their promise and become real protection. My conclusion is simpler. The most dangerous sentence in any business is “If anything comes up, we’ll sort it out.” One day something will.
A Promise Becomes the Yardstick
Everything you’ve said to the client becomes the ruler he’ll measure you by. Not what you meant to do, not what you’d have done on a good day, but what you said.
Hence the simple arithmetic of a happy client. He’s happy when he got more than he expected. Unhappy when he got less. And what matters isn’t the work itself but the gap between the work and the expectation. The same shirt, pressed by five o’clock, delights the man who was promised it by six and infuriates the man who was promised it by four. One shirt, but different clients, because the promises were different.
Young salesmen don’t understand this and promise more: it makes the sale easier. And it does. But you don’t sell just once. Every promise too many is a debt you’ll pay back in disappointment. In forty years Don Vincenzo never once put “shirt within the day” on a sign. The sign said “by tonight”, and the shirt was ready at five. A client who came in at six found it done and often already wrapped. We promised a little less than we could do and surprised people a little every day. A year later people were saying of us “they’re always on time”, and that sentence was worth more than any advertising.
Expectation works the other way too: it changes how a person sees the thing itself. An expensive wine in a beautiful bottle tastes better, even if it’s the same wine poured. That’s not a con. It’s how the human head is built, and we’ll come back to it. For now just know this: what the client expects becomes part of what he gets.
Slow but Sure
The second thing people expect is predictability. It’s the most underrated of all.
Until the early nineties Palermo had almost no working radio taxis, the only such case among Italy’s big cities. The rule was the usual one: the dispatcher gives the call to the car nearest the client. But the drivers reported their own positions, and each suspected the others were lying to snatch the fare. Gambetta, who looked into the story, writes that if one of the drivers got lucky and picked up a couple of extra calls in a day, the rest decided, almost automatically, that he was cheating, and there was no talking them out of it. His conclusion: in Sicily nothing is more suspicious than luck. By 1987 no more than forty cars in the whole city were working by radio, and the drivers kept leaving.
In 1989 the drivers came up with a new rule. Anyone who wants calls joins the queue at a taxi rank and reports in to the dispatcher. The call goes to the first car in the queue at the rank nearest the client. Even if some other car happens to be passing closer at that moment, the call still goes to the first in the queue. The dispatcher can see where everyone stands, and the other drivers can check it all for themselves just by looking round the rank. By 1991 the biggest cooperative had a hundred and sixty cars.
Gambetta adds, honestly, that for the client the new system is no better: on average you wait longer and pay more, because the meter starts when the call is made. But the taxis worked. A slow system that everyone trusted beat a fast one that nobody did.
Remember this lesson. It applies to your people and to your clients alike. People would rather pay for what will be certain than for what might be excellent. A restaurant that’s always equally good keeps its guests better than one that’s sometimes wonderful and sometimes awful. A supplier who always delivers on Tuesday is worth more than one who sometimes comes on Monday and sometimes on Thursday. Predictability means the client doesn’t have to think about you. You can’t give him a better present.
How Much You Can Carry
Third: capacity. How much you can do in a day, a week, a month, without losing quality. You measure it. You don’t guess it.
Roberto Saviano described a drug-dealing pitch on via Baku in Naples, belonging to the Di Lauro clan. He confesses that these pitches always amazed him with their flawless organisation, like clockwork. Wages were paid every week: a hundred euros to the lookouts, five hundred to the coordinator and the cashier, eight hundred to the dealers, a thousand to those who kept the stores and hid the goods in their own homes. Two shifts: from three in the afternoon to midnight, and from midnight to four in the morning; working in the morning is hard, too many police. One day off. For every hour late, fifty euros came off the weekly wage. Every day they sold four hundred doses of cocaine and as many of marijuana, half a million euros a month. When a queue of cars built up behind the dealers, reinforcements were sent over from other pitches. When a dealer was arrested, a reserve stepped straight into his place. Saviano sums up their logic: business is business, and even in a case of force majeure you can’t stop.
I’m not telling you this out of admiration for the goods, but out of respect for the timekeeping. These people knew their capacity by the hour. They knew when the flow would rise and kept reinforcements to hand. They knew what would happen if one link dropped out and kept a replacement ready. Fifty euros for an hour late, by the way, is an excellent way to teach people to turn up on time. I wouldn’t advise bringing it into the office: you’re in a different labour market. But you get the idea.
In an honest business it’s all the same. If you’ve taken on more orders than you can fill, you haven’t earned anything, you’ve run up a debt. Know how much your business can carry on an ordinary day and on the worst one. Keep something in reserve: a person, a lorry, a spare day in the schedule. Capacity is measured at the narrowest point, and you need to know that point by sight.
When Certainty Goes
One last thing. In Sicily, from the late fifties until 1984, taxes were collected not by a state service but by a private company belonging to two cousins, Nino and Ignazio Salvo. Dickie writes that in 1959 their cartel won the right to collect forty per cent of Sicily’s taxes, and in 1962 Palermo’s taxes as well, which promised at least two million dollars of profit a year. In other regions of Italy the collectors got no more than three per cent, while the Salvos got a full ten, and permanently. According to testimony, both cousins were members of the family of the town of Salemi. Gambetta remarks drily that in return they provided an efficient service, not least thanks to their unusual powers of persuasion.
From 1984 taxes were once again collected by a state service. And, as prosecutors and newspapers noted, tax evasion shot up.
I’m not asking you to admire the Salvo cousins: they took three times what honest collectors did and shared it with the right people. Look at something else. As long as taxpayers knew for certain that someone would come for them, they paid. When the certainty went, so did the money. Predictability works both ways: people keep their word as long as they’re sure you keep yours. That, too, is what they expect of you.