Try presenting improvements as adding easy to understand business value. Start with something easily quantifiable that you can quickly improve on. Then you can

Try presenting improvements as adding easy to understand business value. Start with something easily quantifiable that you can quickly improve on. Then you can say 'while this change that will take about X hours, it will end up saving the company Y hours per developer per month'. This would be harder to do if your company directly passes on your hours to a customer, so they don't care about making you more efficient. In this case, find something that would increase your billable hours (eg: starting/rebooting the environment isn't billable, so shaving minutes means more billable time). I did this to get SSDs in all the dev machines where I work, as we spent ~30 minutes a day compiling, SSDs cut that time in half or more, thus netting the company 15 minutes more productivity a day per dev. I presented this to management as an investment that would pay for itself in under a month (any reasonable business should leap at something like that).