The ROI Number That Holds Up
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Overview
Most business cases don't fail because the investment was wrong, they fail because the number behind them can't survive one good question from finance. This piece breaks down the method Optivance uses to build ROI numbers that hold up under real scrutiny, not just in a slide.
Year
2026
Industry
Business Case, ROI, Financial Modeling, Advisory
Challenge
Teams build a business case around a number that "feels right", a rough sense that a tool, a process change, or a hire will obviously save time and money. It usually holds up fine in the room where it was born, because everyone there already believes the idea is good. It falls apart the first time it leaves that room. A CFO or a finance lead asks where the number came from, and the honest answer is often "we estimated it" dressed up to sound more certain than that. The case doesn't get rejected because the idea was bad, it gets rejected because the number was a claim, not something built to be checked. Most ROI math stops at one multiplication (time saved × salary) and treats that as the answer, which is exactly what makes it easy to poke a hole in.
Impact
The fix isn't a more impressive number, t's a number built to be interrogated. Every benefit gets deliberately discounted: not every minute someone saves turns into real output, so the model caps how much of that time savings actually counts, typically 50-75%. Every cost gets padded upward for the same reason, to account for scope creep and the things that always cost more than the first estimate. And whatever the model can't reliably price, morale, faster decisions, the stuff that's real but fuzzy, gets named outright instead of stuffed into the total to inflate it. The result is a business case that gets more convincing the harder someone stress-tests it, not less. That's the difference between a number people argue with and one they trust enough to act on, and it's why we hand clients a working model with visible, sourced inputs, not a static slide with a total on it.