In today's turbulent environment, development and investment in employees is becoming the key to keeping them, but it also creates an opportunity for companies to achieve business success and excellence in return for satisfied and quality employees. Research so far on investing in employees has shown that some companies are hesitant because recoveries are not always present. A model for analysing the impact of investments in employees on business excellence is proposed in this paper. Financial indicators of 20 successful Croatian companies from various business areas were analysed for the period from 2016 to 2020. Financial indicators are used in the model definition: instant liquidity indicator, current ratio, own financing coefficient, coverage of total liabilities from EBITDA, turnover coefficient of total assets, EBITDA margin, ROE, ROA and return on invested capital. The indicators were compared to the indicator, the share of staff costs in business revenues using the simple linear regression method, and the significance in terms of model definition was considered based on a p-value lower than 0.05. The analysis has shown that the share of staff costs in business revenues is closely correlated with the indicator with the coefficient of own financing, the turnover coefficient of total assets and EBITDA margins. This analysis helps to point out to entrepreneurs that additional investment in their employees in terms of increased income and other investments of the company would achieve better turnover of total assets devoted to existing assets would generate more revenue and that investment in employees actually achieves higher productivity resulting in higher profit margins.