If they didn’t have work for all the employees for all the hours, couldn’t they have reduced the employee count? And only bring full time contractors that had full cycles in the past? And work with a mix of full timers and contractors to take care of variable load?

It seems like the actual reason they had to go down was because they didn’t have enough customers as opposed to the 20% extra employee costs. Plus every where in the industry the hourly rate of contractors is higher than the the employees because of the benefits. Was the CEO a high schooler?