The Company Moves at the Speed of My Signature

Abstract

In most growing groups, the slowest station isn’t the kitchen or the supplier. It’s the owner’s desk. This is a letter from a brother who has sat in many offices like yours, with one number you can work out yourself: how many days does a decision wait with you?

Before you sign off the next wave of openings, ask: do your reference branches run for a full quarter without you managing their daily operations? That is the Playbook’s condition before the first wave is funded.

When to come back to this episode: When papers pile up on your desk, and before every wave of openings.

My dear brother,

I’m writing this because I respect what you’ve built. You signed the first lease on a personal guarantee, stood in the kitchen on opening night, and you know every branch manager by name and by his father’s name. Nothing I say here takes away from that. If anything, it’s because of it.

An ordinary Sunday morning

Composite example, not a specific company

Nine o’clock on Sunday morning, and you’re in Jeddah meeting a supplier. In Riyadh, the area manager is waiting for your approval on a replacement fryer for a branch whose fryer broke on Thursday; that branch has been switching off the delivery app at peak for three days. Marketing is waiting for sign-off on the Ramadan plan. Expansion is waiting for your answer on a site offer that expires Thursday, and the landlord has another tenant lined up.

Three people, three messages, and under each one, two grey ticks.

The two grey ticks

We all know this from WhatsApp. One tick: sent. Two grey ticks: delivered to his phone. Then the wait until they turn blue, meaning he’s read it.

What you can’t see from where you sit is that your whole company moves at that speed. Not the kitchen’s speed, not the supplier’s, not the market’s. It moves at the speed at which two grey ticks turn blue, and then blue turns into “OK, go ahead”.

The slowest station in the company

In The Goal (1984), Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox showed that a system’s output equals the output of its slowest station.¹ In season one we applied that to the kitchen: the grill, the till, the riders’ shelf.² Today I’m applying it somewhere Goldratt never pointed: your desk. That application is mine, not his example.

The arithmetic is simple. In 1961 John Little proved that the average number of items in any queue equals their arrival rate multiplied by the average time each spends in it.³ It holds on average and in a steady state, not for any single week.

Illustrative arithmetic

if twenty decision requests reach you each week, and each waits a week and a half on average, then on any given day about thirty decisions are pending. Thirty branches, managers or suppliers waiting for two blue ticks.

ChartIllustrative example

Thirty decisions waiting for two blue ticks

On average, in a steady state, not for any single week

Source: John D. C. Little, Operations Research 9(3), 1961. Numbers from the letter's illustrative arithmetic.

Data as a table

	Value
Requests a week	20
Weeks of waiting	1.5
Waiting on any day	30

You can see a drive-thru queue from the street. The queue at your desk lives on your phone.

The formula also explains why it gets worse the more you succeed. Every new branch adds requests, which raises the arrival rate. Your day doesn’t get longer, so the waiting time grows too. Both numbers rise together, so the queue grows faster than the branch count. What one phone call handled at five branches becomes a long queue at twenty-five.

You can see a drive-thru queue from the street. Nobody sees the queue at your desk, because it lives on your phone.

I know what you’ll say, because I’ve heard it in many majlis conversations: the owner of the house knows best what’s in it. That’s true, and I won’t argue with it. You do know best. But that’s exactly why you should write down what you know. A house where only the owner knows what’s inside stops every time he travels. A house whose owner wrote its rules keeps running while he’s in Jeddah.

This isn’t sentiment. The Saudi Scale Playbook sets an explicit condition before the first wave of openings is funded: the reference branches must run for a full quarter without the founder managing their daily operations.⁴ And beyond thirty branches, every management level needs written decision rights.⁵ I’ve watched groups go from 3 branches to 33, as Riyal Albarakah did with Sultan Group, as reported by the group.⁶ At that size, not every decision can cross one desk.

What the waiting costs you

Waiting never shows up as a line in the P&L. But it’s in every line.

The fryer that waited four days switched off the app through four peaks. The site that waited for your answer went to someone else. The Ramadan plan approved two weeks late launched with no time to test.

There’s a deeper cost. An area manager who waits for your approval on everything learns not to decide. A year later you say, “I have no one I can rely on.” The truth is you had someone. He learned to wait.

And the hardest thing I’ll tell you: many of the decisions waiting for you, you’ll approve exactly as submitted, without changing a word. Those decisions never needed you. They needed a written limit.

The Sunday question

How many days does a decision wait with you?

Question	“How many days does a decision wait at my desk?”
Metric	The last 10 decisions requested from you: days from the first request message to your approval, taken from WhatsApp and email. Plus: how many you approved as submitted, without changes.
Decision rule	If the median is more than 3 working days, or you approved more than half without changes: write delegation limits this week. Any decision below a set value that doesn’t touch a new site, the brand, a senior hire or a branch closure goes to a named manager with a written limit. Your first limit is the highest value among the decisions you approved unchanged.

There’s no published Saudi figure on how fast founders decide, and I won’t hand you an imported average. Your number is on your phone right now, and it takes half an hour to work out.

SimulatorIllustrative

How many days does a decision wait with you?

The last ten decisions requested from you on one timeline. Drag the marker day by day and watch two grey ticks turn blue… or not.

Decisions entered

The first rows up to this count enter the maths.

Decision requests reaching you per week

a week

20 from the letter's illustrative arithmetic.

Day (the scrubber)0.0 working days

1. Replacement fryer