What a forklift taught a founder about fixed thinking

There is a particular kind of decision that looks boring on the surface but turns out to be quietly revealing. Not the big strategic pivots or the hiring calls that keep you up at night. The smaller ones. The ones you make almost on autopilot, because “that’s just how we do things here.”

Buying a forklift is one of them.

It sounds like a purchasing decision. A line item. A thing you price up, approve, and forget. But for a surprising number of founders and operations managers, the moment they actually stopped and interrogated that choice, something clicked that went well beyond the warehouse floor.

The psychology of owning things you don’t need to own

There is a well-documented bias in human decision-making called the sunk cost fallacy. Researchers have spent decades studying why people persist with past investments even when the rational path is clearly to change course. The research is uncomfortable reading if you are a founder, because it maps almost perfectly onto how many small and medium businesses make capital equipment decisions.

The pattern goes like this: you bought something, therefore you must justify it. You own it, therefore you must use it. You committed, therefore reversing course feels like failure rather than clarity.

A forklift bought five years ago to handle a contract that no longer exists still sits in the corner of the warehouse. The maintenance schedule still runs. The insurance still renews. And nobody quite asks the question out loud: why do we still own this?

The same logic applies in reverse. A growing operation keeps hiring casual labour to move pallets by hand because “we’ve never had a forklift.” The cost of not having one never gets calculated the same way the cost of buying one does. The status quo is invisible. The change is scrutinised.

What the numbers actually look like

A new 3-tonne counterbalance forklift in Australia runs from roughly $45,000 to $75,000 to purchase outright. Over five years, the total cost of ownership including fuel, servicing and maintenance can land anywhere between $100,000 and $135,000 for LPG and diesel models. That is a meaningful commitment for any business that does not have consistent, predictable, year-round demand.

The crossover point most operators cite is around 1,200 hours of use per year on an ongoing basis. Below that, hire almost always delivers a lower cost per hour. Above it, ownership or hire-to-own starts to make more sense. The decision is not complicated once you lay it out. What is complicated is that most founders never lay it out. They go with their gut, and their gut is shaped by what they have always done.

Under Australian tax law, operating lease payments are generally fully deductible as business expenses, and hired equipment does not sit on your balance sheet as a depreciating asset. That has cash flow and reporting implications that vary by business structure, but it is a factor that rarely enters the informal “should we just buy one?” conversation.

Australia: the land of warehouses, and the forklift question

Australia runs on logistics. The warehouse and logistics segment accounts for over 37% of forklift rental demand nationally, and the rental market itself was valued at over $126 million and growing at around 5.6% annually. That is not a niche industry. That is infrastructure.

What is interesting is how that market has matured. The old assumption was that you hire when you cannot afford to buy, and buy when you can. That has shifted considerably. Businesses across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Newcastle and Adelaide are now choosing hire as the deliberate option, not the fallback, because it preserves capital and keeps operational costs predictable.

Companies like All Lift Forklifts have built their model around exactly this with their forklifts. As an independently owned, family-run Australian company with over 40 years in the industry, their offer covers everything from short-term hire to long-term fleet arrangements, rent-to-own options, operator supply, and full servicing. The breadth matters because the actual decision is rarely just “hire or buy.” It is a question of what configuration matches your operation right now, knowing that it may look different in 18 months.

There are situations where the numbers clearly favour hiring:

• Seasonal operations or project-based work where demand spikes then disappears
• Businesses scaling quickly where equipment needs will change as the footprint changes
• Companies that want maintenance, compliance and breakdown support included rather than managed in-house
• Operations running below that 1,200-hours-per-year threshold where ownership erodes rather than builds value

And there are situations where purchase or hire-to-own makes more sense:

• High and consistent utilisation running two shifts a day, five days a week
• Businesses with stable, predictable demand and the capital and team to manage a fleet
• Operations where having the machine on-site at all times is operationally critical and cannot depend on delivery windows

The point is not that one option is smarter than the other. The point is that the answer should come from your actual situation, not from what you did last time, or what the business up the road does, or what the equipment salesperson made feel like the obvious move.

The question that unlocks the decision

Here is where it gets less operational and more useful for how founders actually make decisions.

The reason the forklift question is clarifying is that it forces you to answer something most business owners avoid: what do I genuinely need to own, versus what am I holding onto because ownership feels safer than flexibility?

That question shows up everywhere once you start asking it. Premises. Software. Staff roles structured as permanent when project-based would serve better. Marketing channels you are paying for because you always have. The forklift is just the version of the question that comes with a visible price tag.

Founders who think clearly about resource ownership tend to share a few habits. They review their fixed costs with the same scepticism they apply to new expenditure. They separate “we need this capacity” from “we need to own the asset that provides it.” And they are honest about whether their current setup serves the business they have, not the business they originally planned for.

This matters more now than it did. Nearly half of Australian businesses reported increases in operating expenses in recent ABS survey data, with supply chain pressures staying persistent. The businesses absorbing those pressures best tend to be the ones with flexibility built into their cost structure, not the ones carrying the most assets.

The cost that does not appear on any invoice

One more thing that rarely gets counted: the management overhead of owning equipment you did not need to own.

When a machine breaks down, someone in your team deals with it. When a service is due, someone schedules it. When a compliance check is needed under Australian workplace health and safety law, someone tracks it and signs off on it. When the machine is sitting idle for three months because your big contract ended, someone still looks at it on the balance sheet.

None of that shows up as a line item. But it is real cost, paid in time and attention, and time and attention are the things founders are most short of.

Hire agreements typically include full servicing, maintenance, compliance checks, and in many cases backup machine arrangements if something goes down. That is not just a financial convenience. It is a genuine reduction in the number of things a founder or operations manager has to carry in their head.

Fixed thinking versus useful flexibility

The forklift is a proxy. The thing it is actually pointing at is whether you have examined your assumptions about what your business should own, or whether those assumptions have just accumulated over time and solidified into something that looks like a strategy.

Fixed thinking is not the same as having a clear plan. It is what happens when a plan stops being examined. When the rationale for a decision was made years ago and the conditions that rationale was based on have since changed, but the decision remains.

The useful version of this is not endless re-evaluation of everything. That is its own trap. It is a periodic, honest audit of which resources serve you in your current configuration, which ones you have grown out of, and which ones you were perhaps never quite right about to begin with.

Sometimes that audit leads you back to the same answer. Sometimes it frees up $80,000 of capital that was sitting on four wheels in a warehouse, doing very little. Either way, the exercise is worth running.

Working with a business or career coach can be a useful way to create the outside perspective that makes these questions easier to see clearly. It is genuinely difficult to audit your own fixed thinking from inside it.

The forklift just happens to be a particularly honest mirror. It has a price on it. It takes up space. You either use it or you do not. And that clarity, that lack of ambiguity, is exactly what makes it such a good place to start.