Jeannie Ruesch wraps up her series on 'Intrapreneurship' this week. Her three articles have outlined how accounting firms are pursuing new lines of business by looking internally within existing ranks to find new avenues that can benefit the firm while offering employees new opportunities for success. In this wrap-up, she summarizes the experiences of EisnerAmper and WEST outlined in the previous two articles and provides key features of successful intrapreneurship.
Intrapreneurship: A Win-Win for Firms and Their Employees; Part 3
Accounting firms are increasingly looking to boost revenue and position themselves as trusted advisors for their clients – and a key strategy in today’s market is to expand offerings beyond traditional bookkeeping and compliance services to provide client accounting services (CAS) or other products.
This opens up a tremendous opportunity for budding entrepreneurs within the firm. While creating a new business within an existing business may sound like a daunting task, it doesn’t have to be. The concept is called intrapreneurism, and it enables current employees to develop new services, business offerings, or innovations within their existing company. This boosts their careers and experience while benefiting the firm at the same time by opening doors for profitable new lines of business.
Of course, there are challenges: One of the biggest can be getting the full support of the firm – without a champion or sponsor, it’s nearly impossible to get a venture off the ground.
So how should intrapreneurs go about getting that crucial support? If you’re serious about turning your new idea into a legitimate business, there are key things you can do to garner the support you need to make your intrapreneurial venture a success.
Intrapreneurship in a Nutshell
Intrapreneurship is a win-win for firms and their employees, enhancing the chances of future success for everyone involved. For employees, intrapreneurship offers the opportunity to pursue new ideas and avenues of success without having to leave their current firm, gaining valuable experience in the process.
For firms, the benefits are many. First and foremost, firms stand to reap the financial rewards of the new ventures, enhancing their revenue streams without having to start new businesses from scratch. Additionally, supporting intrapreneurship is a valuable tool for attracting new talent – showing that your firm is open to new ideas and interested in building the business in innovative ways will appeal to potential and current employees who are looking for more than just jobs and wanting room to grow their careers.
Successful Intrapreneurship
There is no set formula for getting an intrapreneurial venture up and running, but a good place to start is learning from successful intrapreneurs who have gone before you. In the first two parts of this series, we spoke to successful intrapreneurs from EisnerAmper and WEST about the challenges of intrapreneurship and what it takes for both firms and individuals to launch a successful intrapreneurial venture. Several common themes emerged that help to serve as a blueprint for successful intrapreneurship.
The biggest challenge past intrapreneurs have faced is amassing widespread support from the highest levels of their firms. Full firm support means more than just money – statements of support and other indications that the firm is behind the company’s new venture will help it be seen as a serious new business that the firm intends to back as much as its traditional accounting services.
Once your firm decides to support intrapreneurship within your ranks, it’s critical to get your top leadership on board. By acting as a dedicated partner to your intrapreneurs, you can help sell their new ventures to existing clients, increasing both their likelihood of success and your potential revenues.
The following are key steps in gaining crucial support from all levels of the firm.
1. Have a firm business plan.
It’s critical that any intrapreneurial venture is run like an actual business, not simply an experiment or whim. This requires having a solid, long-term business plan that includes metrics and benchmarks that you intend to meet on your road to success and growth. If you’re not fortunate enough to have full company support from day one, a clear plan showing how the venture will ultimately be profitable is a great way to get that support on board.
If you’re looking to do something outside of the firm’s existing business, you may want to look at how the main business is branded and determine if the new venture needs to be rebranded differently to succeed. Branding and marketing need to be tailored to your business model, as does your pricing structure. What works for the firm at large, such as traditional hourly pricing, may not be the best fit for your new line of business.
A strong business plan that takes branding and pricing into account also makes it easier to have a clear message to deliver to clients, which is critical for success in a competitive market. Your team and your clients always need to be on the same page about what it is that you’re delivering from start to finish, particularly if your intrapreneurial venture offers CAS or other less-tangible services.
2. It’s all about teamwork.
Speaking of your team, you need the right people driving your new business. Teamwork is critical to turning your intrapreneurial idea into a successful venture. Many firms place their focus on technology, which is important, but it is your people who will achieve success.
Part of assembling the right team comes from within, as well – convincing the firm to give you the people you need in the time frame you need them to succeed. If you treat your business as a hobby, the firm will maybe give you a fraction of the time of a handful of people, because you’ll never be seen as a priority. When you show them your venture is a real business that offers the firm benefits they won’t see without it, you’ll be given the personnel to get that business off the ground.
Additionally, when you’re looking to build your team, you might find that the right people are not necessarily accountants. There may be other roles that are highly beneficial to your venture – such as IT and technology specialists – that fall outside the traditional ones you would expect to fill. When you’re building a business such as CAS that requires a strong technology layer and workflow, process, and standardization needs, non-accounting skill sets are highly beneficial.
3. Strategic partnerships.
While internal support and teamwork are crucial, it’s important not to overlook your outside partners. These relationships can help you take your intrapreneurial venture to the next level. For both EisnerAmper and WEST, that meant partners like Bill.com or Xero, which were integral to the firm’s success.
It’s important to leverage those partnerships to make sure you have the tech stack you need in place and to see what other resources can help your venture succeed. When you treat your vendors as partners, they’ll assist you in making valuable connections. It’s then your job to use those connections to the best of your ability.
4. Total commitment.
Intrapreneurship is not something to be entered into lightly – again, you’re building a new business, not pursuing a hobby. As an intrapreneur, you need to be the biggest champion of your idea and your venture, and as a firm, you need to be the biggest supporter of your intrapreneurs. Without a complete internal commitment to your product or service, you can’t expect customers and other outside parties to join your cause.
Building a successful new venture requires unrelenting hard work, but the payoff when you succeed is worth it. To get there, you need to be willing to look for every possible opening and capitalize on every opportunity. Failures will happen, and it’s important to learn from them and use them to build the best product or service possible.
The Takeaway
In an increasingly competitive industry, accounting firms are always looking for new ways to boost revenue and grow business. One of the best, yet often overlooked, ways to do just that is to find – and for the firms, support – intrapreneurship opportunities within.
When employees have innovative ideas for new products and services beyond the traditional accounting functions you’ve been offering – be it CAS, strategic advisory services, or innovative new products – nurture and support that initiative. Successful intrapreneurial ventures are a win-win for firms and employees. Strong, forward-thinking leadership can blaze a trail to rewarding careers for intrapreneurs and an increased ability to boost revenue and attract top talent for the firms who foster it.
Jeannie Ruesch, Director of Marketing at Bill.com
Bill-com_Intrapreneur_Author_JeannieRuesch
About the Author
Jeannie Ruesch works as the Director of Marketing at Bill.com and has worked in the accounting industry for more than seven years. She previously worked at Xero and at The Sleeter Group.
Jeannie has more than 20 years in brand creation and strategy, design, social media development, demand gen and customer marketing. She’s a tech geek at heart, loves finding ways to help customers solve problems, an author and an award-winning graphic designer.
Editor's Commentary:
We began this series 6 weeks ago shortly after the start of the Covid-19 crisis and the 'closing of America.' In my Editor's Commentary to the first installment I said that while some people might question Insightful Accountant's timing in running this series, I considered it, "the very best time to run such a series" because Jeannie's series would help us focus on the future, and gives us a positive light at the end of the tunnel.
As we are now emerging from some of the darkest of days and starting to 'Reopen America', Jeannie's series shows us that there is something more we can achieve in not only reopening but rebuilding this great land that we all love. We can indeed look to tomorrow and not only think but plan for all that is possible in our businesses.
Jeannie has indeed given us a glimpse of those possibilities, at a time when we all needed to know that "We will make it through all of this together!"
So once again I want to say to Jeannie, "Thank You" and thanks for allowing Insightful Accountant the opportunity for publishing your trilogy of promise in a time when America needed it most.
Murph