The barber’s line

One chair. The barber cuts three heads an hour and he is good at it. Five people walk in every hour.

The line does not get long. It grows, forever, and it never catches up. Not because the barber is slow. Because five is bigger than three.¹

The same arithmetic, in a shop

A comfort advisor can physically run three, maybe four appointments in a day. That is not a measure of his effort. Each appointment is an hour to two hours in the house², plus thirty to forty five minutes of driving, and Surprise to Mesa is an hour on its own. Nine hour day, three presentations, three drives, lunch. The day is gone.

And today’s calendar was filled last week. He does not wake up with an empty Tuesday. Tuesday got booked on Thursday and Friday, off turnovers that came in then.

So six turnovers arriving today do not compete with an empty calendar. They go to the back of a line, behind last week.

Nobody decides to skip anyone

There is no meeting where somebody says skip these three. Dispatch has five notes and a ringing phone, so she calls the two that sounded biggest. She calls one more, gets voicemail, and nothing anywhere tells her to try again. Tomorrow there are five new notes, and new always beats old, because new feels urgent and old feels stale.

Three people never got called. Not rejected, not deprioritised. Never reached.

There are three ceilings, not one

Owners talk about having enough techs as though the company has a single limit. It has at least three, and they move independently.

Enough techs can be completely true while sales capacity is the thing holding the company down. It usually is, because the tech shortage is loud and the sales ceiling is silent. Customers wait, phones ring, the board fills up. Nobody stands in a lobby to complain about a presentation that never got booked.

The kitchen version

A backed up kitchen with a full dining room means seating more people only makes everyone angrier. That is a company maxed on install. An empty kitchen with one waiter means a room full of hungry people holding menus and nobody taking the order. That is a company maxed on sales, and it is worse, because the kitchen never even knew they were there.

Which ceiling a company is touching decides what its old quotes are worth. That gets settled before anything else.