Small Business Operations: 20 Foundations Every Owner Should Know

Thelma had answered. Doctor Owl knew this because a card had come to the Lone Oak saying a parcel from the desert was waiting for him at Eight-Arm Errands, and because Thelma's parcels always arrived three weeks after you had stopped expecting them.

He went down on a Tuesday morning. That was a mistake, though he did not know it yet.

The shop looked better than he had ever seen it. The storeroom door stood open, and he could see boxes on the near shelves, in neat stacks, with a card on each stack and Tobias's numbers on the card. The tape was against the back wall, all four hundred rolls of it, out of the way. At the front counter, two of Otto's helpers were taking parcels in at a brisk pace, writing tickets, and passing them back. In the packing room behind, three more were boxing and wrapping and tying string, quickly, without bumping into each other.

And at the side of the shop, by a small door that led out to the loading dock, there was a line.

It was a long line. It went from the little door, along the side wall, past the counter, and out to the street. Everyone in it was holding a finished parcel: boxed, wrapped, tied, and ticketed, ready to go. Moss from the honey house was in it, with four crates of honey on a cart, looking patient in the way of a creature who has been patient every Tuesday for a month. Behind her was a hedgehog with a hatbox. Behind him, a vole with a package for the coast. They were all waiting for the same thing.

On the other side of the little door, a young helper stood at a scale. One scale. She weighed each parcel, carefully, wrote the weight on the ticket, worked out the postage on a slate, and passed the parcel through to the dock. Then she took the next one. She did not hurry. She did not slow down. She was, Doctor Owl thought, doing exactly the job she had been given, as well as anyone could do it.

His parcel from Thelma was in the line too, somewhere. He joined the end of it.

* * *

Otto found him there twenty minutes later, coming through the front with five arms full of papers and three free.

"Doctor Owl! You don't need to wait in that! I'll get yours." He reached over the counter. "I've got a hand for that."

"How long has that line been there?"

Otto looked at it. He looked at it the way you look at a piece of furniture that has always been in the room. "Tuesdays," he said. "It's always long on Tuesdays. The coast ferry goes at noon, so everyone comes at once." He brightened. "But look at the front! Look at the packing room! I hired two more helpers on the counter last month. And another one in packing. We're twice as fast as we were in the winter. Twice!"

"Are you sending twice as many parcels?"

Otto opened his mouth. Then he looked at the line again.

"No," he said slowly. "About the same. A few more." He frowned at the line, all eight arms going still. "I don't understand it. I made the counter faster. I made the packing faster. Why isn't the shop faster?"

* * *

This is the most surprising lesson in operations, and the one that took me the longest to really believe. A business is a chain of steps. Every order passes through all of them, one after another. And the whole chain can only go as fast as its slowest link. Not its average. Not its best. Its slowest. You can make every other step twice as fast, and if the slow one stays the same, nothing comes out the other end any faster. You've just built a quicker road to the same traffic jam.

"Otto," said Doctor Owl. "Where is it slow?"

"Everywhere, on Tuesdays," said Otto.

"Then let us find out where." Doctor Owl stepped out of the line. "Walk with me. From the front door to the dock. And look for one thing: where the work is waiting."