Return Of Capital

As in...you want to get your capital back first. After then, you go into profits and probably have a much more smiley face on. See: IRR; See: ROI; See: Hurdle Rate. Pithy example: Seattle raised minimum wages massively. McDonalds, Starbucks and other employers of low-skilled labor had to redo their math on deploying robots to replace burger flippers, barristas and the like. Suddenly, against high cost per hour human labor, the robots became affordable. They returned the cost of their capital in just one year, before then producing better profits to shareholders on the bottom line.