Jack Calder should be celebrating the best month in his plumbing company's history. Instead, payroll is barely covered — and he doesn't know why. K-Bar Plumbing is busier than ever, its trucks running dawn to dark, and the company is quietly growing itself broke.
The 50% Problem follows one service business through a year of discovering where its real constraint hides: not in sales, not in demand, but in the hours its skilled technicians actually spend in front of customers turning work into paid, finished jobs. Every supply run, missing part, and avoidable delay steals from that hour — and no one is measuring the theft.
Written as a business novel, this first book in The Trades Constraint Series turns Theory of Constraints into a working playbook for any company that sends skilled people into the field: plumbing, HVAC, electrical, and beyond.
Read it as a plumbing story if you like. Then go count your own hour.
