In A Company, Join A Revenue Center
Any company can be boiled down essentially to two parts:
- Revenue Centers
- Cost Centers
Cost Centers are everything that's needed to run the business, but that don't necessarily benefit the business -- in ways other than fulfilling obligations required for the company to exist.
In most cases, that means everything not related to primary revenue-generating activities: human resources, I.T. staff, legal, customer support, cleaning staff, and so on.
From the point of view of the business, increasing profit means spending as little as possible in its Cost Centers without running into trouble.
(As a side note, I'm not advocating that any of these areas aren't essential or important, and nor am I saying that the work they do doesn't have the ability to deliver huge upsides for the company -- just see how Amazon changed the retail game through industry-leading customer service. I'm just describing how I see things usually being treated in the general case. Exceptions are, well, exceptions.)
On the flip side, there are the Revenue Centers.
In most companies, that means the sales staff, the marketing team, and, primarily, every employee related to the company's primary activity and reason for existing: in a law firm, the lawyers; in an engineering firm, the engineers; in a tech company, the R&D staff; and so on.
From the point of view of the business, every resource directed to its Revenue Center has the ability to bring back even more money than it was spent.
Spending money in Revenue Centers can easily be justified for the business and seen as an investment, a well-calculated bet, an experiment.
On the other hand, spending money in Cost Centers, even with the best of intentions, well-meaning as things may be, can only be seen as overhead, the cost of doing business, and something to be minimized if at all possible.
This is the difference between working on I.T. at a school versus being an I.T. professional at a technology consulting firm.
In practical terms, even when employed to do the exact same kind of work, for the first case the business can only justify paying enough; while in the second case the business can afford to present a progression track and career incentives.