What It Takes to Be a Successful Intrapreneur: A Discussion with John Delalio of EisnerAmper

An introduction to Intrapreneurship: A Win-Win For Firms and Their Employees; a 3-Part Series

More and more, accounting firms are looking to expand their offerings beyond traditional bookkeeping and compliance services. Whether through offering client accounting services (CAS) or other products that can benefit clients outside the realm of traditional accounting, most firms are eager to find new avenues for boosting revenue and positioning themselves as trusted advisors for their clients.

This three-part article series will outline how firms are pursuing new lines of business by looking internally within existing ranks to pursue intrapreneurship to find a new avenue that can benefit the firm while offering its employees new opportunities for success.

The series will specifically highlight two firms, EisnerAmper and WEST, who have done just this and share their insight and tips on how to do this successfully.

Part 1 - What It Takes to Be a Successful Intrapreneur: A Discussion with John Delalio of EisnerAmper

Creating a successful new business venture doesn’t necessarily require starting a whole new company from the outside. More and more these days, we’re seeing entrepreneurs emerge within the ranks of the companies where they already work—a concept known as “intrapreneurism.” An intrapreneur is one who creates innovations, services or business offerings within an existing company, with the goal of creating an all-new profitable line of business for that company.

One individual who has been highly successful at doing just that is John Delalio, managing director of business advisory firm EisnerAmper’s Cloud Accounting Services Group. We were lucky enough to have Delalio share with us some valuable insights on what makes a successful intrapreneur and how to get an intrapreneurial venture up and running.

A Case Study in Successful Intrapreneurism

John Delalio has taken more than one spin around the intrapreneurial block while at EisnerAmper. The first was in 2000 just after the dot-com bubble, when Delalio and his team created an application service provider offering within EisnerAmper that outsourced enterprise resource planning software, at the time a brand-new industry in a brand-new market. They built the venture inside the firm at a time of significant growth, figuring out through trial by fire how to grow a business off existing revenues. Eight years later, they spun the venture out of EisnerAmper. Today, Velocity Technology Solutions is a large multimillion-dollar international company and a major player in ERP and application outsourcing.

Delalio is filling a similar role today, as EisnerAmper looks to expand its advisory services. He was brought in to take what was then a fledgling concept practice and turn it into a lucrative business. Delalio’s team is building out cloud accounting services for the firm’s clients, including record keeping, advisory services, dashboards, and analytics for small to midsize businesses as well as family offices. Delalio’s addition to the firm marked the point at which senior management saw the market potential and decided to invest more seriously in the project. So far, there has been a strong appetite for the new services. In the first year, Delalio’s team has doubled the number of offices from which they’re operating and doubled the revenue EisnerAmper is receiving from the service.

Secrets for Success

Delalio identified some of the key factors that have led to success in his intrapreneurial ventures. The first is having support from the highest levels of the organization. Even more than money, a single comment of support at an annual meeting can help send a message from the top that your venture is not an experiment or whim, but rather a real business to be taken seriously.

Following that, the second key to success is running your new business like an actual business, with metrics and a solid plan. You need to have a clear message to articulate to clients about what you’re selling in the market, so that everyone is on the same page, from marketing and sales through contracting and delivery. This is particularly important when your venture involves something less tangible, like advisory services.

Third, you need to have absolute trust in your team. In a partner-based accounting firm this is particularly true. Accounting partners tend to be very protective of their clients, their books of business, and their staff. Additionally, partner-based firms typically don’t operate from a command and control structure. Intrapreneurs need to accept the fact that they will have minimal direct control. Assembling a team that can be trusted to deliver and satisfy clients is critical to getting support both internally and externally. People are everything, but it can be easy to forget that. Too often business leaders get distracted by market hype or technology trends, when in fact it’s the people who get things done.

Getting Up and Running

Once you’ve got the idea for your intrapreneurial venture, how do you actually go about getting it off the ground? The first step is to garner support from your outside partners. For Delalio, that’s been Bill.com and Xero, partners that he considers critical for everything his team has done so far. Both these companies understand how important advisory firms are in the ecosystem that supports their customers’ businesses. Therefore, they offer significant help to firms trying to expand their services. This ranges from training and marketing all the way to coaching and advice around business plans. Both organizations also had very strong brands that are trusted in the market. Bill.com and other partners were instrumental in making the product tangible, and its brand in the industry helped Delalio land critical new leads and spread the word to potential clients.

Once you have the support of outside partners, it’s time to turn your sights inward, starting with building a team you can trust. Critical for an intrapreneurial venture are people who put the team, not the individual, first. Team-focused thinking is a major differentiator in building a real and scalable business. While you don’t want to kill the initial spark in someone’s mind to develop something great, there comes a point when employees, customers, and the overall business all need to be aligned for success. A beautifully designed product that isn’t out in the market is ultimately worthless, so cultivating a trustworthy team that’s focused on running a successful business is essential.

After you’ve assembled the right team, getting the support of management is the final step in allowing you to run your new business like a business. Some people are lucky to have this from the start, while others have to work harder to get there. Winning critical support is a matter of developing trust with management, through both personal relationships and demonstrating that you’ll succeed. Often this involves a lot of face time, backed up by strong metrics showing that the venture will be viable and profitable over the long run.

What Makes a Successful Intrapreneur?

There’s no magic wand that will make an intrapreneurial venture a success. There are, however, a number of traits that Delalio has come to recognize in successful intrapreneurs over the years. The first is being the biggest believer in and supporter of your venture. You want to be known for whatever service you’re offering, to the point that you’re evangelizing for it and continually convincing people that they should support it, too. You also need to be good with people. At the end of the day, you’re an inside salesperson who has to positively influence people to join your cause.

At the same time that you’re advocating for your product, you have to understand that you’ll have no direct control over anything, yet still will need to find a way to make things happen. In the end, it comes down to total determination. It will be a lot of hard work that just never stops, and you need to make people believe that you won’t quit until the venture succeeds and you’ve capitalized on every possible opening. When failures happen—which they inevitably will—you need to look at them and talk about them honestly and figure out how to not let them happen again.

Advice for Budding Intrapreneurs

There’s no set curriculum for being an intrapreneur, but Delalio offered some sage advice for getting started. First, intrapreneurs are leaders who need to understand their own strengths and weaknesses. It’s equally important to try to understand the psychology of the people around you. Too many people fixate on a given situation, rather than the people involved in it. Because intrapreneurs are ultimately salespeople, they need to focus on the people if they want to successfully sell their ideas every step of the way. At the same time, you need to accept that you have no direct control over those people, and instead must appreciate different personality types and recognize the different values they can all bring to the table.

Intrapreneurs need to be continually learning and challenging themselves. There are many resources available from people who have been there and done this before, and it’s important to learn from them. Learning also involves leveraging relationships with trusted partners like Bill.com. Those partners want to see you succeed and are an excellent resource for trusted feedback on what is and isn’t working. Leaning on that trust without breaching it is a great way to build even more trust for your new venture going forward.

Go Forth and Innovate

Being an intrapreneur is a challenging but rewarding job. With the right team on your side, enough determination, and the support of your management team and crucial outside partners, you’ll be well positioned to turn your idea into a profitable business and help your company bring in new streams of revenue.

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:

In light of all that is going on with Covid-19 there will be people who will wonder why we are running a series like this right now. To those people I say, "this is the very best time to run such a series." A series like this helps us focus on the future, it gives us a positive light at the end of the tunnel, and shows us that there is something more that we can achieve. We don't need to focus upon the darkness of 'these days', we can look to tomorrow and think about all that is possible in our businesses. Jeannie gives us a glimpse of those possibilities, and for that I would personally like to say, "Thank You!"

Murph