I used to tell my sales people what they are worth; their gross salary plus 82% costs (health care, unemployment insurance, pension, car & expenses). The average earned about €50K gross plus variable pay (bonus), so the company placed his/her worth at about 90 K. I would then tell them the interest rate at a bank for for 1 year term was around 3%, so if the owner of the company put his 90 K in the bank for a year he'd gross 2,7K per salesperson. Sounds easy, right?

The thing is, though, for every sales person, there were 3 non-sales people that also had to be paid, though the costs were reduced for non managerial staff to around 35%. So now, we realize that the salesperson needs to earn for 4. That means, every sales person now has to earn a gross profit of around 10k just to keep competitive with the bank.

But, the longer one is willing to put one's cash into a fixed term account, the higher the interest. Then, you talk about shareholder value etc. I think you get the idea of where my speeches went. The same goes for the owners of 31 NFL teams.