A kitchen doing deliveries across Malé with four bikes belonging to four riders, all different, all serviced somewhere different, and a delivery service that stopped whenever one of them broke.
They came in for two more bikes and left with a plan for seven.
The first decision was to make them identical. Six working machines and one spare, all the same 125cc automatic, which meant one set of parts on our shelf, one service interval, and a rider who can take any bike on any evening without adjusting to it. Identical also means the spare is genuinely a spare rather than the worst one.
The second decision was the seventh bike. The owner resisted it, understandably, because it is a machine that earns nothing on most days. We worked out what an evening of one rider standing still costs him and it was more than the monthly instalment on the spare. He has used it, on average, six days a month.
The third was the service schedule. Delivery bikes in this city do enormous numbers of very short trips at low speed, which is the hardest life a small engine has here: it never gets properly hot, and it sits in salt air all day. We service them every ten weeks rather than by kilometres, two at a time on a rota so the business never has more than one machine off the road, and we keep chains, sprockets, brake pads and rear tyres on the shelf, which are the four things that go.
Seven machines at 39,500 each, a third down, and the balance spread over twenty four months. We sent the figures in writing the same afternoon he asked, then he took them to a financier and came back nine days later.
Eighteen months on, all seven are running and none has been off the road for more than a day.