Self-test
The Two‑Number Self‑Test
Ten minutes. No call. No email required. Two numbers you already have.
Pick your core unit of work.
An invoice, an RFP answer, an engineering change, a hire, a claim. The thing your business produces all day.
Cycle time:
how many working days from request to done? Door to door.
Touch time:
how many hours does anyone actually work on it? Honest hours, not booked hours.
Divide.
Cycle time in hours (working days x 8), divided by touch time.
Reading your ratio
Tight ship. You don’t need me.
Normal, which is the problem. The gap is queues, handoffs and waiting, and it’s paid out of delivery margin.
Your unit of work spends more than 90% of its life waiting. Someone is paying for that wait. The diagnostic’s Leak Ledger tells you who, and how much per year.
A US collision-repair chain was built on exactly this gap: eighteen days of cycle time around six to eight hours of work per car. Compressing it built what was then the largest operator in the sector. The gap is schedulable capacity nobody is invoicing.
Want the worked version?
I’ll send you a one-page scoring guide for running the read across functions, and The Lever, my occasional notes on what breaks in scaling businesses. Unsubscribe anytime.
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Or skip ahead: if your ratio is over 15, you already know.
Bring the two issues costing you the most time or money.
Book a 30-minute call