[abtinf]

Everything was always that expensive, it was just less obvious.

What if you had moved to outsource the office tasks sooner? Could you have better invested that time and stress elsewhere?

The $100k per year improving hardware? Was that the best way to spend the money? Maybe it would have been better spent on marketing, or investing in reducing production costs with better tooling. Whatever the differential from what you spent was lost at 3x.

Gains often compound over time too. Cost reduction begets cost reduction.

Of course, thinking like this results in madness and moral hazard. I’ve seen companies do crazy, catastrophic things gearing up for sale.