Building a Business Case that actually works: How to do it in 10 steps

22 October 2025 Reading Time: 5 minutes

Mike Klein:

Building a business case for internal communication shouldn’t require advanced mathematics. 

Yet IC professionals freeze when asked to justify budgets with numbers. 

But what kind of math do you really need to create a viable business case?  

The simple basics – addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division – and some degree of clarity about what you’re trying to achieve and how your initiative can help achieve it.

Here’s how to build a compelling basic business case that can unlock real resources.

Step 1: Identify the Problem or Opportunity

Every business case starts with a clear, quantifiable problem. 

Is your organization hemorrhaging money through inefficient processes? 

Are compliance risks creating potential liabilities? 

Is misalignment between priorities and behaviors stalling critical projects or generating wasted effort?

Quantify it. 

What’s the annual cost of safety incidents? 

The value of strategic initiatives being delayed? 

The dollar cost of compliance failures?

Sometimes a stakeholder will come to you with a problem they want to address – and it’s ok to ask them what fixing the problem is worth to them or the organization.  

Other times, it takes some initiative to match a worthy initiative with a dollar figure that can be attached to its success.

The number doesn’t have to be perfect – but the number is the critical place to start.

If you can’t come up with a dollar figure for the problem you’re working to solve, then it’s impossible to demonstrate the value of your efforts to start with. 

Step 2: Define Your Intervention

Be specific.

Think about actual interventions: a two-day management conference for 100 leaders, an employee survey reaching 8,000 people, target behavior change workshops in manufacturing.

Clarity about scope enables accurate costing and helps stakeholders understand what they’re actually approving.

Step 3: Calculate the “costs of time involved”

Start with your time investment. Hours required multiplied by your hourly cost. Add your team’s time using the same formula.

Then add the time involved in actual employee participation. One hundred managers at a two-day conference? That’s 16 hours each at $100 per hour = $160,000 in productive time. Half of your eight thousand employees completing a 30-minute survey at 50% response rate? That’s 4,000 completed surveys times 0.5 hours times $50 = $100,000.

These aren’t theoretical numbers. They’re real organizational investment.

Step 4: Account for expenses

Beyond time, what else gets spent? Travel, accommodation, catering, materials, technology.

That management conference? Figure minimum $600 per person for travel and hotel, plus $300 per person for venue and catering. That’s $90,000 right there.

Employee survey? With a decent vendor charging, say $5 per completed response with the above-mentioned 50% completion rate (4,000 completed surveys), that’s $20,000.

Be thorough. Underestimating expenses destroys credibility when actual costs emerge.

Step 5: Include Vendor and Support Costs

External support, platforms, design, facilitation—all cost money. Get realistic quotes. Survey vendors, conference venues, facilitators—use actual figures, not wishful thinking.

Lowballing vendor costs to make proposals palatable backfires spectacularly. Present accurate costs upfront or return later begging for more.

Step 6: Calculate Total Cost of Action

Add it all: your time, team time, employee time, employee expenses, vendor costs.

Management conference example:

• Your time: 160 hours × $100 = $16,000
• Team time: 320 hours × $75 = $24,000
• Employee time: 100 managers × 16 hours × $100 = $160,000
• Travel & accommodation: 100 × $600 = $60,000
• Venue & catering: 100 × $300 = $30,000
• Vendor support: $10,000
• Total: $300,000

Employee survey example:

• Your time: 80 hours × $100 = $8,000
• Team time: 160 hours × $75 = $12,000
• Employee time: 4,000 responses × 0.5 hours × $50 = $100,000
• Survey vendor: 4,000 responses × $5 = $20,000
• Analysis support: $30,000
• Total: $170,000

These numbers surprise IC professionals who’ve never calculated comprehensively. But in corporate terms? These are generally quite modest investments – particularly when they can be paired off with impact on tangible and quantified objectives.

Step 7: Determine Your Comms Factor

Here’s the biggest question that rarely gets asked when IC leaders attempt to make business cases. What percentage of the problem can effective internal communication realistically solve?

This is your “Comms Factor”—between 0% and 100%. Be conservative. Addressing a $100 million productivity problem? Claiming IC solves 50% is fantasy. Claiming 0.5% to 5%? Defensible.

Your Comms Factor reflects IC’s genuine contribution, not total responsibility. Safety improvements need equipment, training, supervision—not just communication. Compliance requires systems, not just awareness. Strategic alignment needs leadership commitment, not just messaging.

Conservative estimates build trust. Aggressive estimates invite deserved skepticism.

Step 8: Calculate Value of Intervention

Multiply problem size by your Comms Factor. This is your intervention’s potential value.

Size of Problem × Comms Factor = Value of Intervention

Problem worth $100 million annually with a 5% Comms Factor? Your intervention delivers $5 million value. Even at 0.5%, that’s $500,000.

This formula is the core of your business case – the “ROI (Return on Investment) – the figure that everyone’s talking about, and the one you’re showing you can actually deliver.

Step 9: Present Your Business Case

Your business case is simple subtraction:

Value of Intervention − Cost of Action = Net Value

Intervention delivers $5 million, costs $300,000? Net value: $4.7 million.

It delivers $500,000, and costs $270,000? Net value: $230,000.

Frame it as risk/reward: “Is investing $300,000 to address a $5 million problem worthwhile?” Most leaders find this compelling.

Present both cost of action and cost of inaction. What happens if this problem persists? What’s the ongoing annual cost of doing nothing?

Step 10: Track and Adjust

After approval, track actual costs against estimates and measure outcomes against Comms Factor assumptions. Did you achieve projected impact? Were costs accurate?

This serves two purposes: validates your methodology for future proposals and builds institutional confidence in your ability to estimate and deliver value.

Use learnings to refine your approach. You’ll develop more accurate Comms Factors for different interventions and better cost estimation.

Keys to Success

IC interventions are cheap in corporate terms. A $300,000 investment addressing a multi-million-dollar problem represents extraordinary leverage. Don’t undersell this.

Don’t underestimate employee time and expenses. These are your largest cost components. Calculate thoroughly and defend vigorously.

Be conservative with Comms Factors. Under-promising and over-delivering beats claiming unrealistic impact and losing credibility.

Appeal to leaders’ inner gambler. Frame your case as a bet: small investment, large potential return. Executives understand this logic.

Rank interventions by value. Not all IC activities deliver equal business value. Prioritize resources toward highest-impact work. Stop low-value activities.

A Final Reality Check

Most business cases—not just IC ones—rely on estimates. As the saying goes, “More fiction was written in Excel than Word.” Don’t be intimidated by elaborate financial models from other functions. They’re guessing too.

What matters isn’t mathematical sophistication. It’s about logical thinking, honest estimation, and clear communication of what will deliver value.

Master these simple fundamentals, and you’ll get the resources to make a genuine – and bankable – difference.

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If you want to build a stronger business case – or measure the impact of your communication so that it strengthens your case as a leader and contributor, let’s talk.  Book a chat with Mike at http://changingtheterms.youcanbook.me

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Mike Klein is Editor-In-Chief of Strategic and a communication consultant with more than twenty-five years of internal, change, and social communication experience. He is the author of From Lincoln to LinkedIn and an MBA graduate of London Business School. 

Written by: Editor