Often what springs to mind is the $300 that you paid the tech to come out and resolve an issue.
Perhaps you got technical and pulled up the expenses paid to your current tech support company, over the past few years and recognised that you paid them $9,000 a year on average. Perhaps that causes you to think that $9,000 is way better than the $10,000 - $18,000 that it may cost to implement a service like ours for your 10 machines and 1 server for that same period.

If over the year you paid your tech support company in total $9000 at a rate of $150 an hour then you or your staff were not generating income effectively for at least 60 hours. If on average 6 persons are affected by these outages, and the average wage rate of your organisation is $35 an hour with productivity reduced by 50% for each person concerned, then your actual cost is really closer to $9000+($35x(6x50%)x60) = $15,300.
What if we could reduce your downtime by 40 hours and increase your productivity to 70% during equivalent outages over the same period, then you would have spent...$11,520+($35x(6x30%)x20) = $12,780. Of course, this assumes that consistent monitoring, reporting and maintenance will cut down costs. These calculations also do not take into consideration things like customer satisfaction or employee morale, who knows how improvement of those will positively affect your bottom line!

Consider then the value of consistent monitoring, reporting, backups, managed security and networks, all designed to mitigate downtime proactively!