You guys must have free labor working for you to be able to do these at $6 or $7 a board, or you're running yourself into the ground working 60-80 hour weeks (which I've been guilty of myself many times to finish a job
). 5 min 20 seconds per board + 2 minutes load machine and reload/stack would be 7.5 minutes per board. That's only 8 boards per hour. Let's say your worker is paid $14 a hour, average us benefits/admin cost per work is 30.7% for the private sector according to bls.gov, this tends to be higher with lower wage earners because the benefits and admin expenses make up a higher percentage of their salary. So let's just call a $14/hr worker true pay with benefits/admin expense factored in $20/hr for simplicity.
At $7 a board x 8 boards an hour you're only making $56 an hour. Subtract $20/hr for the employee running the machine $5 for all your electrical/lights/blower/ac etc so now you're down to potential profit of $31/hr. Subtract your machine rate. I think we'd all like to make a minimum $20/hr on the machine itself (I'd rather make triple or four times that per hour), which means on a $10k machine you'd have to run it 500 hours with no downtime or parts needing replaced, or 2000 hrs on a $40k machine just to pay it off and break even (and we all know you cannot run a machine and jobs 100% perfect all a time so this is optimistic). Factoring that in and your potential profit is now $31/hr - $20/hr = $11/hr for you. Congratulations you've just made $687.50 if everything goes perfect over the course of 1.5 weeks (62.5 hours to complete). Add in setup time, mistakes, defects, and any other things that might make the job take longer or cost more and you're probably at more like $587.50. At $587.50 every 1.5 weeks your annual profit for that machine for the entire year at this rate is $20,366 assuming everything goes perfect on every single job, and nothing ever breaks (very unlikely). If you are a sole shop that $20/hr for the worker goes to you, but we're also not even factoring all the other expenses that go into running a business, or other things that come up and take your time, so you cannot work and earn that extra $20/hr all the time.
My point is a $20,366 expected return if your machine and 1 worker is kept busy 100% of the time, no downtime, is really low for all the risks you take. It's never going to run 100% of the time, maybe 90% of the time in a really efficient shop, plus the wear and tear on the machine. Factor in all the real world stuff that happens and you're even lower, maybe making 2/3rd of that potential profit number. Just my two cents for what they are worth.