Thirty years of answers and no way to hand them over.

A man rang me last week about a supplier who had gone quiet on him.

Before that it was a court letter somebody didn't understand. Before that, which doctor to see. Before that, whether to take a contract. Somewhere in there, someone wanting to know who to hire for a job I've never done in a town I've never been to.

This has been going on for thirty years.

They are not clients. Most of them are people I worked with once, years ago, and they ring the way you ring a brother-in-law who happens to know things. I answer. I have always answered. There has never been an invoice, and I have never wanted one.

For most of my life I thought this was a defect.

Because underneath it sat a fact I could not argue with: I never specialised in anything.

Construction. Facility management. Pest control. Logistics. Food. Automotive. Shipyards. Just to name a few. I did not move between them on purpose, and I did not move between them because I was restless. I kept walking into places that were already broken, because those were the jobs nobody else wanted, and those were the jobs going.

Most people I knew had one thing. One trade, one discipline, thirty years deep. I had thirty years wide. In every room I was the man who knew a bit of everything and was the world's leading authority on nothing, and I understood perfectly well that this is not a career. It is a hobby with a long commute.

So I put a question to myself, and it was not a comfortable one.

Thirty years of answers, handed over one phone call at a time. Every one of those calls was somebody needing an answer to a question they didn't know existed until it was already costing them money. What good is any of that? Where does it go? Who is it for? You cannot sell it, because it is not a niche. You cannot teach it, because it is not a subject. It exists in a head, and heads stop.

And then I noticed the thing I had been looking straight past for three decades.

The answers repeated.

Not similar answers. The same answers. A man ringing me about a pest control problem in a shop and a man ringing me about a crew that had gone slow on a site were, underneath, asking me about the same broken thing. However different the businesses were, the answers to the basic questions came out the same.

Here are two of them.

Men who produced nothing alike got exactly the same rise

He worked for a competitor of mine. He produced about 110% of the norm, steadily, on a crew whose average sat at 70%.

At the review he got 2%. So did every man beside him. So did the ones running at 60%.

Nobody wronged him. No manager singled him out, no one refused him anything, there was no argument. The firm simply never looked at him separately.

Looking at people separately is work. Dividing a budget by headcount is not.

Our world is small and men on sites talk to each other, so he came looking for me. I did not find him.

He did not need to ask how I paid. That is what the talking is for. He already knew that on my sites a man went home with what he produced, and he had run out of reasons to stay where he was.

My crew's median was around 150% of the norm. Read that against his 110%. The best man on their books would have been a below-average man on mine — not because my men were born better, but because on their site there was a ceiling on what your own effort was worth, and it sat at 2%.

Inside three weeks he was running at double the norm and holding it. Same man. Same trade. Same hands.

His old firm did not lose him to a better offer. They lost him to arithmetic they never ran.

And here is the part I will not dress up, because the dressed-up version is a lie you have read a hundred times: nobody else on my crew sped up. They saw what he took home. They did not chase it. Each of them worked to the number they wanted and went home, and the output stayed uneven, and that was fine, because it was theirs to set.

A good system does not turn everyone into your best man. That is a poster, not a result. A good system stops punishing the one who wants more. That is all it has to do.

Three shops, one chain, one difference

Different industry entirely. I ran pest control for years. A national retail chain had three shops in my area, each with its own manager.

The first manager signed with me directly. Five years. Not one problem, not one closure, not one visit from anybody official.

The second wanted the same, but sent the request up to head office. Every time something needed doing it took about two weeks to come back down approved. The shop shut its doors during some of those weeks.

The third followed the procedure exactly as written. He asked head office for a contract with whoever handles it. He did not ask for me, because asking for a supplier by name was not his to do.

That shop was closed by the food safety authority for six months.

Six months of rent and staff and stock, and a notice on the door on a high street, because the man standing inside the building was not allowed to ring a number.

He made no mistake. He did exactly what he was told. That is worse, because it means the next man in his chair will do it again.

Construction and food retail share nothing. Not the skills, not the margins, not the risks, not the customers.

The failure is identical. In both, somebody standing next to the problem could see it clearly and was not permitted to act on what they saw. In one case the thing they could see was their own output. In the other it was a health risk in a shop.

Underneath both sits the same choice, made every day, by people who would be offended to hear it described this way:

It is cheaper to administer a scheme than to look at people.

A flat 2% needs no judgement. A central procurement rule needs no judgement. Nobody has to know anything about anybody.

And the cost never appears on a report, because the cost is a man who left and a shop that shut, and neither of those gets filed under the policy that caused them.

That is why the phone calls worked. Not because I am clever. Because the errors are the same errors, and after the fourth industry you stop being surprised by them.

Which finally answered my question. The thirty years were not wide and shallow. In every field I ever worked in, the answers to the basic questions came out the same.

So I wrote them down.

Not opinions and not theory. The things that held in every business I worked in, which is the only reason I trust them at all. Then I learned to build the tools to go with them, because there was no other way to hand any of it over.

That is the whole reason this site exists.