“Ed, I pay them anyway.”
This five-word reply to what I had considered an artful demonstration of perceived value, halted the processes in my brain. “What?” I muttered.
“Ed, I pay them anyway,” my interlocutor repeated.
I had just followed a syllogism that I had traversed hundreds, maybe thousands, of times previously with a prospective customer.
“If I understand correctly, it takes your accounting team, on average, about 23.6 hours to produce your monthly profit and loss statement. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“We have just been able to demonstrate that this time will be cut to an average of 1.8 hours per month, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, so if I subtract 1.8 from 23.9 then multiply that by the average wage in the accounting department of $45.67 then multiply that by 12, I estimate we can save you, $12,111.68 per year! How does that sound?”
The five words then shattered what I had thought a magnificent embankment of logic that had led me to victory so often in the past.
I never recovered my composure during that meeting and the deal went down to an ignominious defeat.
It was not until more than a decade later, when reading Dr. Reginald Tomas Lee’s earlier book, Lies, Damn Lies, and Cost Accounting, that I began to comprehend what had happened and allowed myself to rethink and retool my algorithm to account for what I had missed—I was not “saving” them anything, because the “savings” wasn’t CASH!
In this book, Project Profitability: How to select, justify, and implement projects that achieve maximum cash ROI, Dr. Lee applies his profound thinking to the internal company project and pleads with us to look beyond the ROI spreadsheet that is ofttimes considered mightier than the sword in far too many organizations.
He challenges us to ignore the legions of cost accountants who think they are the arbiters of profitable decision making by applying their manifold methods as if they were incantations etched in the stone of Mount Sinai.
In true iconoclast fashion, Reginald shatters the stone and slays the mysticism that has been spewed from the mouths of MBAs for the past few decades.
In its place, he crafts for us new bulwark. One impenetrable by the forces of faulty decision making. In short, this book will assist you in making the best possible decisions for you and your organization when considering whether or not to implement a new project in your organization.
—Ed Kless
Senior Fellow, VeraSage Institute
Co-Host, The Soul of Enterprise with Ron Baker
Senior Director, Sage Accountants