The habit you build at four employees is the one that saves you at forty.
You can run traceability out of your head at one employee. You can't at three shifts and a co-packer. The habit is cheapest to build before growth forces it, not after. What starting early actually looks like: four record-keeping habits worth putting in place before a buyer, an auditor, or a recall makes you wish you had, and why retrofitting a system under pressure costs more.