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Why the month everything went late had nothing break.
Waiting does not grow in a straight line with load. See what one more job does to your lead time once the narrowest point in your business is full.
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What does one more customer cost you?
It depends entirely on how full you already are.
The narrowest point is whatever the work waits for longest — a machine, a bench, an estimator, a licensed tech, a truck. Not where people look busiest.
typical wait before a job starts
At 80% loaded a job waits about 4× its own working time before anyone touches it. Busy. Still fine.
Kingman's approximation for a single constrained resource with ordinary variability. Treat the shape as certain and the exact multiples as an upper bound — your own variability moves the number, not the curve. Above 100% there is no steady answer: the queue simply grows.
What this is telling you
Waiting does not grow in a straight line with load. It grows on a curve that turns almost vertical near the end. Going from 80 percent loaded to 95 does not take a fifteen percent bite out of your headroom — it roughly quintuples how long a job waits.
That is why a business can seem to fall off a cliff in a month with nothing broken. You said yes to one more customer and moved along a curve that was always there. You had just never been on the steep part.
Why this one matters most
If your narrowest point is full, taking on more work does not increase what you deliver. It increases only how long everything takes. And the reverse is the useful half: taking a little load off the right place buys back an enormous amount of time — and a little load off the right place is usually a decision, not a purchase.
This is step 16 on the roadmap →Everything here is arithmetic on the numbers you typed. No request is made, nothing is stored, and there is no email gate — which is the whole reason anyone moves the sliders honestly.
Data with integrity makes the best decisions
Bring that number to a call.
Twenty minutes, no obligation. If it turns out not to be your problem I will tell you that too.