I was a sales rep for Atlantic Lottery in Newfoundland (in another life, it seems) and I recognize that experience provided more real “education” than three university degrees have done for me since. A great lesson came one summer’s day in the town of Lawn on the province’s south coast. These were the early days of the lottery and we were an advance team, trying to get the product into the market. A particularly stubborn shop owner was testing my Xerox and Dale Carnegie sales training techniques to the limit. It didn’t seem he was going to buy into this plan until I finally asked him to tell me what it was he really wanted.

“At the end of the day,” he says “I want to be richer, smarter, or both – you show me how what you got makes me that, and I’ll buy it”.

It seems that you don’t have to be a big or sophisticated business to understand “Return on Investment”. But many businesses and their developers, accountants, and consultants use ROI calculation as a way to prove a decision they have already made about a project or investment. That’s what I call decision-based evidence-making – where you build evidence around the decision instead of collecting evidence to make a decision.

ROI calculation is not easy - but for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) it is more important than ever to do it as well and as objectively as you can. There are some excellent applications out there to help you to do your own, or to support your decision systems when working with a consultant or advisor. Some of the best tools available to Canadian Businesses can be found on the Strategis website at the link shown below. A particularly good one is the ROI Calculator from the E-Commerce Institute of Montreal. In addition to helping guide you through a well-developed analysis, the tool generates a report to calculate your Total Cost of Ownership, Net Present Value, Payback Period and your Return on Investment for any project (technology or otherwise) that you may be considering. It’s simple to use and needs only MS-Excel to run. I do recommend you engage a consultant or accountant in any serious ROI exercise, but regardless, ROI tools like this really can help with evidence-based decision-making. WARNING: this tool could make you richer, smarter, and likely both!

ROI Calculator – http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/ebizenable