Excerpt from Bookkeeping and Cost-Finding for the Plumber The plumber, who opens up a shop of his own and em barks in business, is supposed to have learned his trade thoroughly, and, as a rule, he is a superior workman, who by industry and economy has been able to save enough to become an employer. He is seldom a business man, because his training has been in an entirely different dirce tion; The young plumber, who thinks that he can run a plumbing shop of his own successfully because he knows the mechanical end thoroughly and knows how to do goodwork, has a great deal to learn, and quite as much to forget. When a plumber becomes a proprietor he must forget in a measure that he is a plumber, and he must always have uppermost in his mind the' idea that he is a business man, whose duty it is to sell plumbing at a profitable figure. There is no fount of general information to which he can go and gather the knowledge of how to make money out of a plumbing shop. The master plumbers who have learned it do not go about advising young com petitors how to succeed, and if such do occasionally drop a word of good seasonable advice to a beginner it is ten to one that the young man in business suspects that it is a pointer given to mislead him, and he goes contrary to the advice. This is usually the case when an established plumber remonstrates with a newcomer in the field as to cutting prices. The newcomer is sure to think that the established plumber is simply worked up, because he is losing trade to him, and so the youngster in business laughs in his sleeve, and goes on cutting prices, to his own ruin and to the damage of the trade in his vicinity. It is natural that a beginner in business should think that the way to get work is to lower the prices, but the men who have been there know that the way to get customers worth having is to keep up both the quality and the price. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.