How Do I Get My Manager To Support My Idea?

Money talks. At the end of the day, when you commute home (or walk out to your living room from your home office) money is most certainly one of the main reasons you spent all or part of your day working. Granted, many of us absolutely love the work that we do. We hardly even call it work, because we're so passionate about doing it all the time. But, to keep the lights on at home and the kids fed, we have to get paid doing it.  Scale that up by 5 or 10 people. Now you're talking about a small business or a team at a large business. If you want to get something done at work, talk about money. Specifically, you need to talk to your manager about return on investment. Here's what I mean.

Let's assume for simplicity's sake that your company only does one thing to earn a profit - let's assume that the company has come up with an amazing algorithm to read the stocks/bonds/commodities market to ensure that no matter what, any money put into the algorithm will net 10% year-over-year. This means if the company puts $1000 into the algorithm at the beginning of the year, at the end of the year the company will have $1100 coming out. Again, for the sake of simplicity I'm making the argument that the company you work for can predict the value of all its investments making a 10% return. In reality, calculating year-over-year returns is a bit more tricky, but it's also mostly not necessary to know the exact ROI your company expects for getting your manager to do something you want/need to do.

Now let's assume (again for the sake of simplicity) you want to buy a one year license of OMG This Is The Best IDE Ever Made!!! Assuming that you're talking a fairly standard licensing fee, let's say that one year for this IDE costs $250 a seat. Let's also say you want to do this for yourself and 4 people. Wait, that's $1000 (see what I did there?!) So, now you have to convince your company with the slogan "We make 10% on all of our investments" that spending $1000 on an IDE will be worth MORE than $1100 to the company after one year. How can you do this? The easiest way is to determine how much added productivity you'll gain on your team by using it. Let's also assume that your 4 person team averages $50 per hour. That's $200 an hour spent on developer time. In order to be worth more than $1100 to your company, the IDE has to be able to obviously save 6 hours of development time, per year, to be worth it to your company. 6 hours, $200 per hour, $1200 ROI. If you can prove to your boss that this IDE will in fact, on average, give you 6 hours of development time back per developer - then the ROI of getting the IDE instead of just investing the money is worth $100 more to the company.

While I intentionally reduced all of the made up examples for simplicity sake, it really isn't all that much more complex in the working setting. All you have to do is figure out how much it's going to cost to do whatever it is you want to do, and then also figure out how much it will save on expenses or earn extra in doing so. If you can prove your idea for a book/IDE/training/feature can genuinely surpass the rest of the company for ROI, in real dollar value, then you're highly unlikely to see much of an argument from your boss.  After all, the point of running a company is bottom line, at the end of the day.

If you want some help coming up with ways to determine ROI for something, let me know. I'd love to brainstorm on the less than obvious ROI values on things that it's not quite so evident, so that you and your company could both benefit from them.