There’s a lot of conversations about entrepreneurship; in fact, it’s become super cool to call yourself an entrepreneur. However, no one ever takes about intreprenuership and navigating internal politics and creating new businesses within a construct of a larger company.

Large corporations are always looking for people that are innovative and ready to build new businesses that the company is not thinking about yet. Companies are also looking for people with expertise that the company needs to help steer them into the future.

Become the in-house expert.

Take a step back and reflect on your company’s strategy and ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the company’s existing strategy?
• What is an exponential trend that the companies existing strategy is not considering?
• Where has the company made investments, and where has it not made investments?
• What does the company need to capture the opportunity by this exponential trend?
• What expertise is the company desperately lacking?

Once you identify the exponential trend, be obsessed, and learn everything that you can about it. Become the de-facto head of X.

If you work at an architecture firm, learn about all the ways that virtual reality can help your firm’s business.

If you work at an auto manufacturer, learn about all the ways that self-driving cars will impact transportation.

If you work at a fintech company, learn about all the ways that they should consider cryptocurrencies and blockchain in new products and services?

How do you become an in-house expert?

• Join a meet up where people exclusively talk about the topic at hand
• Read every book and article you can find
• Network and reach out to experts and learn from them directly

The beauty of becoming an in-house expert is that you don’t have to know it all. All you need to know is 20-50% more than your co-workers about the topic or trend. Your job is to educate your co-workers internally about why this trend is significant and why we should be taking advantage of it as a company. As you learn more about the topic, you educate your co-workers about the subject.

As you educate your co-workers, you will notice that whenever there is a question about your expertise, they will come to you even though its not your job. For example, the compliance team came across an issue, and now they are reaching out to you because you are the only person with that area of expertise. Helping your co-workers will not only help you develop your political capital but will help build advocates for your projects.

Every company you work for will have politics, and just becoming the in-house expertise is not enough to make a tangible change in your companies’ business. If you want to form any change or business at a company, you need resources, budget, and approval from the powers that be.

There are people at your company today that are decision-makers and are ultimately the gatekeepers for profound change at the company. They have the power to help you create the business you want internally.

But how do you get in front of these people and pitch your idea?

Power mapping.

Power mapping is an exercise to create a diagram of how decisions are made at a company to create change. If you’ve worked at the company for a while, you may intuitively know how decisions are made, but you may be surprised what you would discover as you go through the exercise to map this out.

For example: How are new development projects initiated at your company?

1. Write out requirements
2. Get an estimate of how much the project will cost
3. Pitch your manager of the cost/benefit of your project and get their approval
4. Review the cost with finance
5. The initiative now flows to your manager’s manager
6. Etc..

Do this project in detail, and if you get stuck at any point, ask the person involved with the last step on what you need to do next to get it moving or approved. The larger the company, the harder this will be to do as it is likely that there multiple processes and gatekeepers that are required to get anything through.

Some questions to consider:

• Who determines what initiatives are the priority and not priority?
• How do I convince this person that this is a priority?
• Who determines resourcing and budget?

In summary, we talked about the following:

1. Identify your company’s gaps along with an emerging trend
2. Become the in-house expert on that trend
3. Educate your co-workers
4. Map how decisions and power is distributed at your company
5. Develop the strategy and project you want to pitch
6. Pitch it

The last two steps are probably the hardest part and the most critical.

Keep in mind, your company is not well-versed on this topic and so will likely push back on it not because they don’t think it’s a good idea because they don’t know enough about it and will perceive it as a risk.

Start small and work your way up. Two great motivators for change in a big company are fear and greed.

How will not investing in your idea will negatively impact the company’s business long term?

How will investing in your idea will positively impact the company’s business long term?

Always support your claims with data like revenue, growth rates, etc..

Some companies have built a culture where it is easy to start new businesses, and some companies will have so much pushback that it could take years for you to make your idea out.

It’s essential to decide for yourself how important this mission is for you and if successful, does the company you work for have the ability to make a significant impact in the direction you want to take it in.

This post is a crash course on some of the high-level steps to create your niche internally at your company. Do not expect it to be easy. There will be some tough days and some great wins. If this is important to you, continue plowing forward. If it’s too complicated or you’ve been permanently blocked, you have at least accumulated skills that will make you super valuable for your career and your next employer.

Just because your company says no, doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. You can also leave the company and build your startup and show your company why they missed out on investing this idea earlier.

“The best revenge is a massive success!” – Frank Sinatra