"Profit" means you're overpaying (i.e. the amount of money you exchange for goods or services exceeds the cost of providing them). Failure to operate at a profit (even if it may be indirect in cases like VC-funded disruptors undercutting established competitors for early growth) means the business will fail.

Business transactions are exploitative. That's the entire point of them. Otherwise it'd just be tit-for-tat or a gift economy. You don't want to recover your investment, you want to grow your investment. And beating inflation is the baseline.