Include the purchase or lease of the land, and a tangled web of permits and licenses. These of course vary with each State and locale, but you have all the EPA permits for chemicals, some sort of certification/permit/license for all of your effluent waste (solid and liquid), fire protection certification, probably some kind of chemical facility operating permit/license, all of the various forms of insurance, construction permits for the facility and certification of it when complete; OSHA compliance program for industrial safety (especially chemical hazards but it even gets down to the storage shelves and ladders).
It's an awful big "land of the free"; I'd bet that within a week of working the telephone, I could come up with one (or two, or three) venues that would be more than glad to have such a venture in their area, and would be of great assistance in greasing the skids, cutting through red tape, etc. (And these would be areas that were already at the "low overhead" end of the regulatory spectrum, with a readily available supply of low-cost labor.)
And then there is all the consulting fees that you will pay people to guide you through all of the above. Its a necessary evil because all that massive amount of regulations is beyond what one person can learn in an entire career. Far gone are the days of simply throwing up a building and starting to work.
Another couple of days on the phone, and I can put together the right "consultation team", and I doubt the cost would be prohibitive.
Is it any wonder that business moves overseas?
And there's
another option!
If we begin with a "we are defeated" baseline, then it
is hopeless.
But this stuff isn't rocket science. It's
1930s science!
The fact that 21st century technology can so easily dovetail
with "1930s science" only makes it easier!
Right now I'm thinking about how Xerox shooed S. Wozniak out of the office when he offered them his plans for an inexpensive home computer. Too much bother, too little market, etc. They couldn't waste their resources on it.
So, he built them by hand in his garage, and the rest is history.
Stuff that is inherenly "unthinkable" to BigCorpThink is
not necessarily nonviable in the real world.
From what little I know of the bits and pieces I've picked up from reading these and other threads, my "second hand" knowledge of "machinist stuff", and my former career in the software world, I am of the belief that a usable coating system could be built and debugged "on the cheap" for
far less than a functionally similar system would cost "big business" to produce.
Entrepreneurs think and work a whole different way than "corporate" people.
"Corporate America" has increasingly seemed to model itself on the federal government. Now
there's a paragon of efficiency, LOL! Instead of just
doing something, they bury themselves in "procedure". Mountains of paperwork, endless "meetings", a hierarchy of "committee" assignments, etc., etc., etc.
It's a great formula for full-employment for people with no
real skills (other than pushing paper and driving desks), and when
those are the sort of folks empowered to engineer the
systems (the
management "systems"), well, that's what you get.
Look at NASA, and then, look at the "small" operations that have recently attained suborbital flight (and could just as easily accomplish orbital insertion).
Then, look at the budgets.
There's the government way, and then there's the real-world way.
Big business has embraced "the government way", and therefore,
everything is "difficult" to get off the ground.
It doesn't
have to be this way -- and iIt
wasn't always this way, but this is one reason the rest of the world is eating our lunch.
You can design and build an airplane like Boeing (or any other contemporary airframe house), or, you can design and build an airplane like "Flight of the Phoenix."
Somewhere in-between those two extremes is a highly optimal scenario.
Sure, bureaucrats can come up with endless justifications for their procedures, insisting that all the hip-deep red tape
must be part of the process. But that's far from an unbiased source.
There needs to be a bit of the "cowboy spirit" if something is to be done in a market dominated by corporate-think wonks. Otherwise it's an endless parade of "proofs" that it
can't be done.
Well, I guess it really
can't be done, when the artifices of the bureaucracy are imposed upon the process from the getgo. But, should someone with a genuine entrepreneurial spirit decide to get into the game, kick the jams out of the way, and get something
accomplished (rather than play the paper game), then lookout world! (Isn't that basically what Kodak is trying to do, in a roundabout way, with their "ink revolution"? Shake up the way things are done, yank the rug out from under the competition, cut through the layers of nonsense, cut to the bone, etc?)