Some of it was probably due to being in a low volume high profit market. We had close to a 10x cost to profit ratio, and the profit per unit was 10s of thousands. Although alot of that went into R&D and quality etc.

There are tons of ways to cut cost often. Another example is one time I bought a device to detect air/gas leaks. It was 1000 dollars. I walked through our production measured the leaks, fixed them(most were push on connectors so pull off, cut tip, reinsert, typically leak was done), took about an hour. Per the sensors software saved about 175k. Also prevented my company from having to buy a new compressor for about 750k as our current one was close to the limit of what it could support.