There’s a plaque hanging on the wall of a restaurant kitchen in The Bear that reads:
EVERY SECOND COUNTS.

I think about that line more than I probably should.

If you haven’t watched The Bear, the show follows a group of people trying to build and operate a high-end restaurant in Chicago.

But one of my favorite episodes doesn’t really take place at The Bear.

In Season 2, Episode 7, “Forks,” Richie is sent to spend a week working at an elite fine-dining restaurant.

At first, he’s polishing forks.

Then he gets a chance to see how the restaurant actually operates.

And that’s the part that caught my attention.

From the dining room, everything looks almost effortless.

• Guests sit down.
• Courses appear.
• Plates disappear.

Servers move quietly through the room.

Behind the scenes, it’s anything but.

Reservations are staggered so the kitchen doesn’t get overwhelmed. Tables are constantly monitored. Some guests eat faster. Some eat slower. Dietary restrictions have to be accounted for. A cancellation creates an opportunity to move someone off the waitlist.

And standing in the middle of all of it is someone coordinating the flow.

Watching that scene, I immediately thought:
That’s dispatching.

Not exactly, obviously.

We’re moving packages around Portland instead of plates around a dining room.

But the underlying problem is remarkably similar.

Most people only see the finished product.

They call us and say:
“Can you pick this up and have it there by 2:00?”

Absolutely.

From their perspective, that’s pretty much the whole transaction.

• What they don’t see is everything happening behind that answer.
• Where are my drivers?
• What direction are they moving?
• What do they already have onboard?
• What deliveries are coming due?
• What’s traffic doing?
• Which customer has a hard deadline?
• Which stop has some flexibility?
• Can I combine two deliveries without jeopardizing either one?

And then, five minutes after I’ve figured all of that out, another order comes in.

Now the plan changes.

That’s the world of on-demand delivery.

You always have a plan. You just can’t become too attached to it.

There’s certainly a science to dispatching.

Times. Distances. Routes. Capacity. Traffic. Deadlines.

But after doing this for 27 years, I’m convinced there’s an art to it too.

You develop a feel for it.

• You know your drivers.
• You know your customers.
• You know that one location takes five minutes to get in and out of while another can unexpectedly take twenty.
• You know which deadlines are truly immovable.
• You learn when you can squeeze one more delivery into a driver’s route — and, probably more importantly, when you shouldn’t.

It’s hundreds of small decisions.

And one bad decision early enough in the sequence can ripple through the rest of the day.

That’s another reason the restaurant scene resonated with me.

The objective isn’t simply to move as fast as possible.

It’s to control the flow.

Sometimes going faster is the answer.

Sometimes waiting five minutes is the answer.

Sometimes the driver who appears closest on a map isn’t actually the best driver for the delivery.

Sometimes you deliberately send someone in what looks like the wrong direction because you know what’s coming next.

The individual decision doesn’t always make sense unless you can see the entire board.

And when it’s done well, the customer shouldn’t see any of this.

That’s the strange part.

Operational excellence is often invisible.

The dining room looks calm precisely because someone in the kitchen is obsessing over the details.

A delivery arrives at 1:47 for a 2:00 deadline and nobody thinks much about what happened before it got there.

That’s how it should be.
The chaos is ours.
The calm belongs to the customer.

Maybe that’s why that little plaque in The Bear stuck with me.
Every second counts.

Not because every second requires panic.

Quite the opposite.

Because when time matters, small decisions compound.

And our job is to make hundreds of those decisions behind the scenes so that, from the customer’s side of the counter, nothing particularly interesting happens.
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The package simply shows up when we said it would.

After 27 years in the delivery business, Stacey and I have learned something:
There’s almost always a workaround.

Not always. Sometimes circumstances really are beyond anyone’s control.

But before we tell a client, “Sorry, we can’t do that,” we’ve learned to ask a better question:
What can we do?

That may be one of the biggest advantages we have from deliberately staying small.

We don't have layers of management, a call center, or a giant corporate rulebook telling us what we're allowed to do. When something unexpected happens, we can make a decision, change the plan and get moving.

And after 27 years, we've come up with some pretty unusual plans.

Not long ago, a client had closing documents that needed to get signed and returned in time to complete a real estate transaction that day.

There wasn't enough time to pick up the documents, drive them to Vancouver, get the signature and bring them all the way back.

So we changed the plan.

The client emailed us the document. We printed it at our office, drove it directly to Vancouver, got the signature and immediately sent a photo of the signed document back while the original was on its way.

Problem solved.

Sometimes the workaround is much simpler.

Maybe a delivery can't reasonably be completed that evening, so instead of making promises we can't keep, we arrange for it to be the first direct delivery the following morning.

Other times, things get considerably stranger.

A few years ago, a customer called late in the afternoon because toner was desperately needed at a wildfire command center in Goldendale, Washington.

So I picked it up and drove it there.

Apparently, fighting wildfires requires more than firefighters and water. It also requires toner.

And then there was the time a ship couldn't leave without a replacement part.

I didn't deliver that one to a receptionist or loading dock.

I boarded the ship, found the chief engineer and handed him the part so he could install it and the ship could leave.

After enough years in this business, you learn that the package is rarely the real issue.
It's what happens if that package doesn't get where it needs to go.

A closing doesn't happen.

Someone can't do their job.

Equipment stays down.

A ship doesn't leave.

That's why when something unusual happens, our first instinct isn't to reach for the rulebook.

It's to look for the workaround.

We can't promise that we'll always be able to say yes.
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But we can promise that before we say no, we'll look awfully hard for another way.