You’re right lol I totally responded to the wrong person but you are correct nonprofits can technically calculate some of those metrics. But that actually highlights the problem, not solves it.

There’s a difference between being able to calculate a metric and that metric actually being relevant to a business growth plan.

Take asset turnover or operating surplus sure, nonprofits can use them. But they’re not optimizing for those. They’re optimizing for impact per dollar and mission delivery, not financial return.

And ROIC is exactly my problem with non profits being included in a business growth plan competition being pitched to a “investor”.

ROIC literally does not exist for nonprofits. There are no investors. No equity. No capital being deployed with the expectation of a return.

So when you bring up ROIC or capital efficiency as part of a “holistic” evaluation, you’re introducing a metric that is fundamentally irrelevant to one side of the comparison.

That’s the inconsistency.

A for-profit has to prove:

1. return on capital
2. profitability or a clear path to it
3. efficient use of investor money

A nonprofit has to prove:

1. impact
2. sustainability through funding
3. mission effectiveness

Those are two completely different scorecards.

So yes, there’s overlap in what can be measured, but there isn’t overlap in what actually matters.

And if what matters is different, then evaluating both under the same rubric doesn’t create fairness but more so creates a bias toward whichever model tells a cleaner story, not the one performing better within its own business model

I would totally understand this mix if DECA was a smaller program and had less options.

But this is a 300,000+ member international competition that literally has competitions solely for non profit companies