I like this glass company, though. Seems like they know what's up.
Their sales and purchase-order process is also still manual; people answering emails by hand and filling out (literal carbon paper) triplicate work orders. But their aerospace customers have gone to zero-inventory kanban-style resource management, and that's a system that assumes a certain level of automation. We're talking companies placing orders by machine that then auto-generates the emails, where an email at 9AM says they need 400 of a widget by next month, an order update at 1PM says to cancel 200 of those, another update at 3PM says add an additional 500, and a final update at 6PM says cancel-whole-order, some planes just got delayed, we'll pay the $100 cancellation penalty.
None of that scales. It just runs the sales team ragged (literally; they're literally running out to the factory floor to find the third carbon copy and yank it from the production queue by thumbing through the queue).
That's basically most German mittlestand companies. They have their niche that doesn't scale.
I don't want a business to make me filthy rich. I want a business that will feed my wife and me.
But I am pretty sure I will have more convenience. I'll have a Matrix server and website where customers, including their employees, can ask me questions. I'm pretty sure it will be maximally convenient for senior developers or a CTO helping to make the purchase if interns never ask them questions about my software.
The market has proven more than willing to lose "Joe, of Joe & Sons Seed, already knows my order and has it waiting on the table for when I stop by on the first Tuesday of April" in favor of "It takes like three clicks to put my order in the online basket and I don't even have to walk to the car to get it; it's dropped on my porch."
This kind of convenience matters, and I acknowledge that as someone who drives to the local bank for a lot of my bank stuff; convenience may not matter to me personally, but I would be stupid if I didn't acknowledge that it matters most too most people.
I am aware of a local glass company with about 50 years of operation under its belt. They have tooling, but the process is heavily manual; no aspect of it is end-to-end automated. Their primary customers are those requiring high precision for industrial applications (electrical, aeronautics).
They are forever capacity-capped because their model doesn't scale; the benefits of adding labor are sub-linear, so there's a "healthy size" for them and they leave money on the table if they scale in either direction from it. But they have their niche, they fit it nicely, and they continue to operate.