Very True Catch,
To a majority of Companies (especially small to midsized) IT and Computer Jobs are a very complicated area for them to spend any type of money on. Most IT Jobs, pay more than the average employee in the company, and IT does not produce any type of Monetary gain or profit. All they see is, money going out for payroll, and servers, and cabling, and equipment, and blah blah blah... and nothing back.

Show them that this could in turn make their investment and money more secure...

Try showing a positive side to something if possible, like if you are trying to get a new or better firewall, maybe if VPN has not been done, show them the possibilities of like a Cisco Pix with VPN software, then they are getting security, you get your firewall, and now people can work from home.

You can make presentations, graphs, print thousands of files about security to try to scare them, but until they see it first hand, they will not open there eyes. It took the last company that i worked for until someone was hosting porn on the servers before they did anything.....

Hope some of this helps.