[erso]

It sounds like the solution here, to respond to both lincolnbryant and nfm, is to find a way to highlight the benefit of a round of optimization but in an external fashion.

I, too, really enjoy performance optimization but that's an area that is especially hard to break into because many times the client wants something that just works. In my experience as a consultant it's rare that you get a client that cares about performance much unless it's a company like Apple that has a crazy amount of money to spend on making everything perfect (where 'perfect' isn't literal perfection but surely of a much higher caliber than the competition in many regards).