I'm currently working as a software engineer in a smallish, flatish, privately owned company that is transitioning from consulting to software only and our CTO is having a extremely hard time to explain why the company should invest any money in our janky CI and nonexistent test automation, or even moving away from the stupidly manual deployments that we are having. Anything that is not delivering some feature for customers and therefor brings in money is a though sell.This problem is an interesting one for me and I've been thinking about ways to give a concrete value proposition with clear monetary gains by automating tasks, but I wanted to see if anyone else have tackled the same issue, and how might have presented the issue for executives without technical understanding of modern development processes.Some details that might matter is that the CEO is also the founder and most of the executives have all been in the company for multiple decades.