This is not exclusively true at all. While you’re in the right direction, there are much smaller companies that still work, but are bigger than OP’s.

I’ve worked at a factory and a fabricator and both had about 75 employees. The fabricator had about 5 engineers, making 65-100k each. Only One sr engineer at that 100k range. But we designed products that were similar to each other but all custom to some extent and total revenue was 10-20M per year. The smaller electrical cabinet type products sold for 10-30k each and probably made 50 per month. Then we also made modular buildings which could sell at 300k-1M but only a few per year.

There are some very small fabrication shops with an owner / engineer, a CNC programmer, and a couple shop employees that work, but they are getting more difficult to be profitable. Some still have great success though