What Is Intrapreneurship? How to build an entrepreneurial culture inside your organisation: Entrepreneurship expert, Stephanie Melodia, on the Productivity Mastery podcast by Stoyan Yankov

What does it really take to build a culture where people think and act like owners - whether they're running their own company or working within one? In this episode of Productivity Mastery, host Stoyan Yankov sits down with entrepreneur, speaker and corporate trainer Stephanie Melodia to unpack the often-misunderstood world of intrapreneurship. Drawing on her experience building and running a marketing agency that served over 100 startup clients, Stephanie gets refreshingly honest about the brutal realities of entrepreneurship - the sleepless nights, the people who let you down, and the projects that crash and burn - before turning those hard-won lessons into a practical playbook for leaders who want to unlock entrepreneurial thinking inside their organisations. From her signature framework on hacking luck, to the right way to hire a founding team, to why your best employee leaving might actually be a win, this conversation is packed with insight for founders, managers, and anyone who wants to stop pointing fingers and start making things happen.

SY: So why don't we start from there? Because today we'll talk about that. What is "intrapreneurship"?

SM: Yeah, love it. Okay. What a great way to kick off the interview officially. So with intrapreneurship you've got an official and you've got an unofficial definition, right? So the "official" intrapreneurs that I have had the pleasure of meeting are, let's call them venture builders. That's another term that's often used in this kind of linguistic terminology, right? They're venture builders. They are basically founders, they are startup entrepreneurs. They're testing out new ideas. They're running experiments. They're getting customer interviews, user feedback. They're getting enough validation to see whether or not it's worth pursuing with an idea. The difference is, is they're doing it within the environment of this larger corporate, which has a lot of benefits to it. It has the benefits of the funding, the stability, and we'll get more into this, but I think there's a really interesting debate around whether, you know, which route is right for you because yes, pressure can create diamonds, but if you're an entrepreneur out there eating what you kill and hunting and you know, that doesn't always mean that you're making the best business decisions. The stress can really get to you. And so, going back to the official kind of intrapreneur in corporate innovation, venture building, that pressure is taken off of you. And I think for some people that is a much more comfortable situation to be in that allows you to play, to take risks in a smart, strategic way. And then what you've got is the unofficial intrapreneur, which is anyone at any level in any department of the organization, which means that you can still adopt the entrepreneurial traits, which I do categorically firmly believe are deeply rooted in like our human purpose. Like I believe that as just any, we're all different, but like at the core of our humanity, like we need to feel freedom, autonomy, creativity. And so there are ways that you can still do that within an organization. As long as you're given enough autonomy and as long as, you know, the boundaries are clear, the expectations are clear, then give your employees, empower them to kind of have a little bit more of that freedom and there's so many fantastic things that come of it which we can get into.

SY: Beautiful. By the way, those of you watching us live, if you have any questions, let us know. Or if you enjoyed something, just post it in the comments. We'd like to also check you guys and see what's going on. Stephanie, we forgot to mention that you've been an entrepreneur yourself. You've built your own company, agency. How big was the agency? How long you've been? Give us a little bit of a perspective about your entrepreneur.

SM: Yeah, well, so I call my the marketing agency that I ran from 2017 to 2023. I call that my first proper business because prior to that, I was sneaking into the basement of my art school with a load of cheap t-shirts that I bought from the shops to screen print my first like fashion brand. If you like, it was called From the Heart Designs. Anyway, that didn't go very far. I use my sister as a model and again, I use Facebook to like promote this business anyway. So that was kind of one of the first pancakes we called them. So the first proper business was incorporated 24th of November 2017. First time I officially launched out on my own, which was this marketing consultancy. You asked how big it was. I mean, at its height, we had about 12 people in the team and then obviously a bigger roster of freelancers and talent very much in that kind of elastic form is what they call it. And over a period of about five and a half years, my team and I counted, we actually worked with a hundred startup clients in that timeframe. And so I'm actually undergoing like an analysis of like all of those hundred clients and how many of them today are still standing, how many of them failed, how many of them exited, how many of them pivoted, how many of them got funding. And then what's really interesting now I'm diving into is the correlations between those metrics, right? Between, for example, is there any bearing on having a co-founder and exiting your business? Is there any bearing on getting funding and exiting, for example, right? So I'm kind of going through that process. It's been on my to-do list for a while, but that's been an interesting kind of exercise going more through the data. What I can definitely talk about for now is like the experience and anecdotally all the observations from that chapter in my life.

SY: What were some of your biggest struggles as an entrepreneur? I've been on the journey now more than 12 years and something that I observed early on is how little we actually show the real face.

SM: Yeah, which is exactly why my show is called Strategy & Tragedy, because it's only for that reason.

SY: Strategy & Tragedy. By the way, everybody, Strategy and Tragedy, top 20 in business in the UK. You should check it out as well. You know, it's been for me also, like when I entered the business world as an entrepreneur, it was like, oh my God, it's so much harder. It's so much like because you look at Instagram and Facebook and like whatever LinkedIn, everybody's posting the cool stuff, funding round. Yes, there's a new award, I'm pitching on stage and you're like, that's cool, man. I want to do that, man. And then you start to do it and it's like, they didn't tell me the whole story. It was definitely part of it, but it was a very little part. Most of it was, you know, struggling to make the bills, pay the bills and issues and like the whole, you are the CEO, the chief everything officer, right? But I wonder about your story.

SM: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stoyan, you absolutely took the words right out of my mouth. Exactly the same. I was going to say exactly the same thing. It's so much harder than it looks. And I'll give you a few examples of like some of the biggest struggles, which was your first question. But what I just want to quickly do is link it back to what I was saying about where I'm such a fan of intrapreneurship these days, because the pressure that you are under, whether you are a bootstrapped founder or you've got investors like one way or the other, like one genuinely is not better than the other because if you're bootstrapped to your point you're trying to make ends meet you're trying to figure out where's your next paycheck coming from you're out there hunting hungry wondering where that next you know where their next payslip is coming from and as I said like yeah okay for some people pressure can create diamonds. And I do believe that like you need enough pressure and enough hunger to like motivate and get out there and make these things happen. But you can't operate successfully like that over a sustained period of time. It's just way too stressful. And again, you're not going to make the best business decisions. You're not going to be operating as your best self. You're not going to be creative and all the rest of it. Right. And so that's if you're bootstrapped, if you've got investment, then you've got investors breathing down your neck and you've got somebody else to turn to. So of course within corporates, you still have your other stakeholders and you still have people to report to, right? But I think it's the closest we can get to having the best of both worlds because you have got enough of that safety net, you've got your salary coming in, you've got the resources, hopefully, and yet you've got the freedom if you're in that, especially more in the venture builder space to go and build your own kind of startup within the organization. So yeah, I think it's, I don't think we glamorize that enough. I feel like the world of corporate innovation like isn't glamorized. Anything corporate definitely has that label of being like slow moving and boring and like Luddites and I'm like actually, I've been very, very, very impressed by a lot of entrepreneurs that I've met in corporate innovation. Anyway, I kind of went off on tangent there. Shall I answer your question? Some of the biggest struggles I had as an entrepreneur.

SY: Let's do it, let's do it.

SM: One of the biggest was being let down by other people. And I think one of the hardest things is, that you said to me earlier that like you went to the gym this morning, right? And what was your workout in the gym? If you don't mind sharing, was it like cardio or weights or what were you doing?

SY: Weights, okay.

SM: Okay, perfect. That perfectly ties into what I'm about to say, right? So you're going to go off and do weightlifting. And like I've been deadlifting for the past like year or two, right? What type of weights were you doing? Deadlifting as well or?

SY: No, no, it was bench press. I did chest and triceps today with a little bit of exercises for belly and you know, like, but it was nice and easy. It was like a 40 minute exercise.

SM: Okay, nice. With the bench press or deadlift, any sort of like weightlifting, my example here is that you go to the gym and you're prepped for it, right? Mentally and physically, you're prepped to go into the gym and whether you're going to have like a super intense hard workout or you're going to try and deadlift, I don't know, for me, like a hundred kilos, right? I haven't got there yet, right? But that's what I'm working towards. You've got the gear on, you know, you've got the right clothes, you've got the right footwear, you've got the right playlist, right? Maybe you've got some tunes lined up that are like super like angry pumped up music, right? The difference in entrepreneurship is that you may suddenly be required to deadlift a hundred kilos at the drop of a hat. Like you might not be in the mood for it. You might not be ready for it. So this was my biggest struggle was yeah, when you're starting out, you've got all the energy and you're excited and you're full of naive optimism. Or when things are going well, you've had some good news or you're getting some traction. It's easy when it's easy. Everything's fine when it's fine. But it's when these spanners in the works, these things that come out of left field that you're not expecting. You haven't pumped yourself up for. You're not in the right workout gear. You haven't got the tunes on, but you still need to deal with it. And so for me specifically, it was kind of getting let down by other people was something that really kind of emotionally like cut me the deepest. And yeah, it was honestly really tough. It was really, really hard. I've been licking the wounds on my own entrepreneurial journey for the past two and a half years now, Stoyan. And I don't know, you know it's going to take me a while to get back into it. Now what I'm having much more fun with and having much more impact is putting all those lessons learned to good use. So whether it's mentoring, coaching, my corporate training, public speaking like you do as well, it's more just kind of like, look, this is what to do, this is what not to do. I'm probably not quite ready to get back in the ring just yet, but you still have so much to learn from my journey.

SY: Can you make it more real? Can you share some examples of the hardest moments?

SM: Yeah. Yeah. I'll give you one. I'll give you a good example. Okay. So, okay, this was terrible. We had one particular branding project live for a client. And again, this was a, you know, like a brand marketing consultancy for startups. Honestly, Stoyan, I made things so difficult for myself, right? Like my own bootstrapped agency, working with startups. It was, I'm like, this is why I still need to recover. Anyway, so we had this one branding project for one particular client. And I mentioned that we had this wider roster of talent, of freelancers, and we had this freelance designer work on the project. Now look, obviously budgets were always an issue as well. This was like a huge thing with startups. And so trying to make it work, this was like a big, big lesson of mine was I spent way, way too much time, energy and effort just like trying to make things work, trying to make things fit. And I'm just in such a space now, Stoyan, where I'm like, if it's just not a fit, it's just not a fit, like just don't try and force it. So in this one particular scenario, again, budgets are tight. So that's definitely a factor. We had this designer that was not the cream of the crop. It wasn't the best designer ever, but we're like, okay, trying to make it fit with the budgets. And this project was just not going well. And it was also during a time in the business where we were super busy, right? We had lots of clients going on. And I was really getting into a space as well where I was trying to delegate much more as well to be able to scale up the business. And I really enjoy business development as well. I enjoy sales and a bit of the hustle and getting out there. And so for me, I was very much like delegating and like giving these projects to my account managers while I am out there, public speaking, getting on stages, networking, meeting with clients and everything else. That was like, what I want to be doing, what I should be doing, right? Anyway, this account manager was, it was just a recipe for disaster. Like I didn't, you know, equip them enough to deal with this project. And it was just terrible. Like every single round of creative that they were delivering for this branding project was just awful Stoyan. And it was like the worst I've ever seen in my life. It was really, really falling short. Like nobody here was the right fit. No one was set up for success. And we're going back and forth, back and forth, trying to work on like these different concepts and getting on calls. And we were having like brainstorming sessions together and really trying to do what we could to like get this back on track. And this project, and this has become like the project that's like keeping me up at night and stressing everyone out. And the client is like, where's the concepts, where's the work? And then this one particular day, and it is the specific moment that is stuck in my memory, is I was out and about, I was running around town here in London. And I remember I was like rushing to a meeting. So this is another thing, right? Like your plate spinning, your chief everything officer. So this is another thing, right? You're running around. And I remember getting a call from my account manager. This is like a client services person, right? And she was like, Steph, I'm really sorry. I've got some bad news. I was like, okay, well, you know, this is again, I'm not quite in the zone for deadlifting a hundred kilos right now. I'm on my way, literally on my way to go and meet a potential client, right? And you get hit with this bad news. This designer decided to hold us ransom. Was withholding the work and this like next round of creative that we needed to show the client like tomorrow, that had already been delayed and we were already managing expectations with the client and trying to placate them, wanted full payment for the whole project that they still hadn't delivered on — like paid right now, like today — was not going to turn up to our meeting, was not going to release the work, holding us ransom, we're in the middle here as an agency. Honestly, so Stoyan, that, as you can tell, I haven't relived that moment for a long time. But as you can tell, that's what I mean about people letting you down is like, I appreciate, look, this just was not a good fit from the get go. Like we were trying to make something work with the budgets and everything. But then it's like, when you're in that situation, what do you do to try and improve matters? So this is where it's like, let's have a brainstorm session. Let's pull together different references, resources. Let's go back to the client brief. Let's like, we're trying all of these different things and so to get that level of unhelpfulness, that way of doing business is just honestly disgusting to me, right? And so yeah, that project just crashed and burned.

SY: This is the reality. Those of you listening, you could never be fully prepared for entrepreneurship, for running your own thing. I've had maybe several dozens of unicorn founders joining the podcast and go listen to these episodes. Christo Burris, the founder of Payhawk, it's the first Bulgarian unicorn company, built it from scratch with a couple of his buddies. He came on the podcast, he said the first five years he would barely sleep. He would just wake up at five, you know, do what he has to do, work, work, work, 9pm home, sees the family a little bit, take a shower, sleep. And then he said, you go to the office and you immediately get a hit from somewhere, right? And then you work on it, you kind of recover in the early afternoon, there's another hit. And that's every day, that's just every day. We don't wanna scare people off from becoming entrepreneurs, but that's the reality. You gotta be ready for it. You gotta be ready for it.

SM: Yeah, and it depends on, again, the type of person you are, because for me personally, I think I fall into the category of, have you heard the saying once bitten, twice shy? So it's basically once bitten, twice shy is like, you could get a hit, but it's like, are you going to pick yourself back up again? And things like that, like they hurt me so much and they cut so deep that like it did the opposite for me. Like I'm very much, I need like positive reinforcement. If things are going well, I'm going to do even better. I'm that sort of person, right? Which is probably a lot easier, right? But it's like, if I succeed at something, I'm just going to want to succeed even more at it. If I get knocked, I don't have that same chip on my shoulder. Like a lot of these founders do where they've got something to prove, where they're like, I'm going to show you like vindication. I'm like, no, it just, it was just like damaging. So maybe I do need to thicken up my skin, but situations like that are hard to bounce back from. And that again is another core entrepreneurial trait. Whether you are an entrepreneur or an intrapreneur in corporate innovation, you need to have resilience, it's just a non-negotiable.

SY: How do we hack luck?

SM: Ah, my favourite, okay. Let's dive in. All right, my favorite topic, hacking luck. All right, first let me back it up. Stoyan, let me ask you, what do you think matters the most when it comes to achieving any type of success? Talent, effort, or luck?

SY: Effort.

SM: Okay fantastic. So this is a question that I always ask my audience and again if you're tuning into this live please leave a comment before I do the reveal. Let me know what do you think matters the most, talent, effort or luck? Send us a message. Write in the comments please. So I always ask this question whether I'm doing a webinar or an in-person event and more often than not that's a top answer that comes back and Stoyan I'm gonna give you half a point. Because you're not completely wrong, okay. The number one factor that has the biggest bearing on our success or failure is of course luck, hence my whole topic here of hacking luck. Now this isn't just an interesting conversation starter or pure conjecture, it has actually been proven, it's been scientifically proven by psychologists, by physicists, by economists and even a magician. So I've been doing a lot of research into this space, which is really interesting. Okay. The good news is that where I can give you half a point, Stoyan, is that effort is a very close second. Talent is right down at the bottom. Like talent only matters a little bit, but it's the luck which has the biggest influence on whether we achieve or not, right? Because unfortunately, regardless of how much effort you put into something, like we were talking about in entrepreneurship, there are other things that are going to come your way. There are externalities that just, you know, the economy, a client, bad news, accident, whatever it could be. Right. But the good, so that's the context to my signature topic on hacking luck. Cause I'm like, okay, wait, we want to feel like we're in control as human beings. And I want to empower us to take control and do what we can, even though we're spinning hundreds of thousands of kilometers per hour on a blue marble through space, we like to feel that we're in control. So that's kind of the context to hacking luck. And basically what I dive into in my keynotes in particular is focusing on controlling the controllables because I'm not completely deluded that like we're not going to start trying to control the economy or the weather or these, you know, true externalities. So it's focusing on controlling the controllables. What I'm going to do is, can I, is it possible to share my screen on Riverside? Can I show you something really quickly?

SY: Give it a try. It should be. Is there a share button?

SM: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because an image is worth a thousand words. Okay, so can you all see this Venn diagram? So an image is worth a thousand words, which is why I want to share this. Apologies if you're just listening in on audio, but what we've got here is a four leaf clover where we've got the four kind of circles overlapping and intersecting. I told you, not a morning person, we should do this at midnight and see how we go. All of these kind of overlapping factors. So if we start from the top left here, we've got the accountability. I think this is one of the most genuinely empowering things that we can do as individuals is especially as entrepreneurs, you have no other choice but to be accountable. So whether you are starting your own business or you are in a corporate, being accountable, taking that responsibility not only means that you kind of shoulder a burden, but it means that you've got that autonomy to do what you want, right? To make your own decisions, to take control of the situation. What that feeds into is the proactivity overlap, right? Being proactive, getting out there, kind of making decisions, taking chances. That overlaps with vision, like having that clear vision for the future. The gratitude along the way and the positivity of what are going to energize you and keep you going because as we've discussed, it is very hard. You're always going to get knocked down. That then naturally overlaps into the resilience that you need to keep going. So it's the gratitude, the positivity that helps feed the resilience and it's the resilience and commitment that if you're following me around the Venn diagram, this makes more sense. It's the resilience and the commitment that you also need to take risks. If I have to pick, obviously they're all very important, but if I have to pick just two from this list, it's the risk and resilience that you need to be able to overshoot and overachieve basically and do things that are outside of the norm and achieve what others do not. It's taking risks. People don't take enough risks and people aren't resilient enough to keep going because you're going to get knocked down along the way. Anyway, the overlapping of all of that in a nutshell is kind of the secret to hacking luck. It's this formula here. So I'm going to stop sharing for just a second. I can go on for much longer. But there are lots of ways to stack the odds in your favor basically. So that's what I dive more into in corporate trainings and keynotes.

SY: So you're saying these are the four elements in a way, it's like accountability, vision, positivity and risk.

SM: It's all of them really. It's the risk, it's the resilience, it's all of that. So this is where it's easy to show as a Venn diagram because they're all of these separate components that go into stacking the odds in your favour.

SY: Still though, I'm thinking the more effort you put into it, it's positively correlated with creating luck, right? Generating luck.

SM: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%, 100%. And so this is where there's kind of like the plot twist, where it's a little bit circular, because of course hacking luck is really about taking luck out of the equation, you know, it's actually about saying, okay, how can we utilize our effort going back to that, to be more proactive, to take accountability, to energize ourselves through positivity, to keep going, have that resilience and take risks, of course, that is your own effort you're putting into it. And it's kind of that effort, that second place you're putting into to hack luck, which is the number one factor.

SY: No, I can totally see it. It's through all these incredible, super intense people, I had a chance to interview and chat with and be around. Like you can see this kind of patterns. It's not that they're necessarily smarter than anybody else, but they have this kind of aura around them. They're intense. They make decisions super fast. They're visionaries. Some people call them delusional. By the way, I saw some research that being positively delusional is, was it you? I was checking you this morning. Something about the, maybe it was you actually, because I was researching on you and there was something about some kind of research on if you're positively delusional, it's actually can get you places. I don't know what's the exact research, but the thing is honestly, I mean, think about the people of the highest caliber, like the unicorn founders, the CEOs that are making a real transformation. These people are there, the way they make decisions, I mean, when you get an email from them, it's usually two, three words, right? They're not wasting time for it. They're just like, move, let's go, let's move.

SM: Exactly. You've really done a great job on your research. I'm just going to read out on the delusional thing. If it was my substack that I just posted last night, I'm just going to read the last paragraph because I think it's a good summary of what we're talking about here. So delusional optimism is not toxic positivity. It's the best strategy for resilience. And we all know resilience is a non-negotiable for any kind of success. But resilience isn't about holding on for dear life. It's about energizing yourself to keep going. And the best way to energize yourself is to be delusionally positive until it's no longer a delusion. So if it was my post that you saw, that is an excerpt from it. You did a good job on your research.

SY: Delusional optimism. I love it. And it's not toxic positivity. It's not like, we don't have a problem. No, you do have a problem. We can fix it, man. Let's go and let's work. So it's not the victimhood, which is another thing we can talk about. Like it's a big topic for me. It's like, you know, people pointing fingers and always something else. We'll get back to that. Let's not get into that now, but look, let's talk about intrapreneurship and I think there's two perspectives there. One is the perspective of the employee, which is what does it take to become an intrapreneur? And the other one is the perspective of the manager. How do I build and grow with intrapreneurs? Which one do you wanna start with?

SM: Let's do the manager because especially if it is like middle management, then I really empathise because you've got upwards and downwards management, right? You've got people on top, you've got people below in air quotes, right? And so I think that there's a couple of things, right? One is kind of like what I was saying with that catastrophic branding project that crashed and burned, right? Sometimes you're trying to make something fit and it's not a fit. The number one biggest blocker to real successful innovation in a corporate is the culture, like first and foremost. So yes, of course, like culture can be absolutely developed and improved upon. This is where we do have so many culture consultancies and trainers that come in and help it, right? But first and foremost, your table stakes is you've got to want it in the first place. So as a manager, this is the first thing I think, ask yourself, are you Sisyphus trying to push that boulder uphill in an organization that maybe says that they want to be forward thinking or entrepreneurial and cultivate this like internal, you know, intrapreneurship. Are you saying that because it feels like a good thing to say and it's like word art that you've got on the walls in the office? Or is it actually inherently integral to your culture, to the culture of your organization? The number one poster child, the best example that everyone uses in these scenarios is of course Amazon, right? Amazon, of course, built up. It's a founder led company. You've got that entrepreneurial DNA right from the very, very beginning. But one of the best case studies here is AWS, which is now four times bigger than the core e-commerce side of Amazon. AWS is the most perfect example for successful intrapreneurship. That idea came about from an employee, from somebody internal to the organization. It was on an away day. They were having this brainstorming because already number one, it's inherent to the company culture that we want to breed breakthroughs, that no idea is a bad idea, that you've got the psychological safety to throw things out there and see what, you know, does it land? Should we run an experiment? Like, let's just put it to the test. And it's not decision by committee. It's not a decision made because you've managed to persuade your manager or your stakeholder. It's a decision made because you've had the freedom to go and get market validation and prove the real external market demand for it, then you can then bring back internally for your case study, right? So I think that's another mistake, another trap that a lot, if not all of us fall into is we're too busy placating upwards management and we're too busy doing this like decision by committee with internal meetings and around the boardroom table when actually the most important person in that meeting room is not even in the meeting room. It's the customer, it's the market. So I think that's number one from the manager perspective. Is there anything else on that from the manager side of things? If you're a manager in corporate innovation, leave us a message or a comment. What are you struggling with? Because it's obviously easier to give advice when I know kind of the specific situation.

SY: But let's put it into a kind of a hypothetical, like it doesn't need to be somebody specific, I'm going a little bit broader. In corporate innovation it could be just a manager, you know, in a department, whatever, but they want to incorporate intrapreneurship. I mean, how many times Stephanie, you're working with many organizations, how many times you hear this from a team, a manager, I want more people to be more proactive. I want more people to be more accountable. I want like all these kinds of things and you're like, okay, interesting.

SM: Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do we do that? How do we do that? Okay, so this is where there are practical and cultural fixes that are not going to happen overnight, but they do happen with a little bit of time. So first of all, your employees, if you want them to be more entrepreneurial, they need to have the psychological safety that they can have the freedom to experiment, to be creative, to be playful, to say, I've come up with this idea, maybe even if they don't need permission, right? Maybe there's a bit of like seek forgiveness, not permission. Maybe they go out and put something to the test, right? They need to have the autonomy, the freedom to go away. And the hardest thing as a manager is they need to be allowed to make mistakes because there's a much, much, much higher chance that it's going to fail, that they're going to make mistakes, than it'd be a tremendous success. I use the AWS case study with Amazon as the poster child of, you know, a success that's come from within an organization. But the truth is, you know, I don't want to give off this survivorship bias because the truth is the failure rate is much higher than the success rate. So you need to be okay with that. And this is where I completely empathize because you need your upwards management to also be okay with that. You need to be able to stomach the failures, the energy, the resource, the time that has gone into doing that. But you need to recognise that inherent to the experimentation, inherent to taking risks is accepting those failures along the way. Right? I actually have a risk assessment framework that people can take, that they can use to actually strategically assess what risks they can take and what they can't, right? The other practical thing I just want to say, if I can do like these two main things, that's number one, is the freedom, the psychological safety and the permissions to go away and make mistakes. The other thing, and this is where I want to get really real here as well, is as someone who has run their own business, I will never now perform in the same way that I will if I'm on someone else's paycheck. If you want your employees to be proactive, to take risks, to put their neck out, to maybe spend a few more hours putting in some legwork, whatever the case may be, they need to be remunerated and rewarded accordingly. You can't just expect it. You need, if you really, really want to cultivate like true intrapreneurship, they need to be rewarded accordingly. They need a slice of the pie. And that can be structured in a number of different ways, but people aren't idiots. And especially with the rise of entrepreneurship, they're going to be thinking, well, hang on a minute. If I'm going to go out there and take these risks and putting all this legwork, I stand to make 10 times more doing it for myself on my own buck. Sure, it's part of the risk, the risk reward, but it means I also get the freedom. I don't have you to answer to. I get to run my own thing and I get to reap all the rewards because I've taken the risk from doing that. So how do we start to bring that more into their remuneration within the organization? Do they get a cut of, is it a revenue share? Do they get, are they incentivized in different ways? Is it more of like a sales commission structure? There's loads of different ways that you can do that, but we've got to be real here and we've got to reward them accordingly.

SY: These are two incredibly good points. And I think it's also the points that could be tricky. The first one you said, I've seen this so many times, managers or leaders, they say, I want my people to be more entrepreneurial, proactive. And it's like, okay, what if they don't deliver? What if they experiment and it doesn't work? Oh no, no, no, it has to work. It's like, but what do you want? If you want them to be more entrepreneurial, then you have to accept that percentage. Maybe it's 30%, 40%, maybe it's more, I don't know, depending on the intensity, but like this percentage of the projects that are not going to work out and you have to be fine with that. Like if you're not fine, just, and then there's the other issue as you mentioned is maybe this manager, they really want this to happen, but then the higher management, they're more traditional, more conservative and that is not really allowed, these endeavours. So it's not easy.

SM: Yeah, this is where depending on the organisation and the culture and you know, what's going on is, are you able at the, I don't like using that term, but like the lower levels, are you able to use that actually to your advantage and say, we're just going to go under the radar here. And with whatever kind of resource is available, it's not going to be much because obviously then you'll need to get sign off and approvals and it's obviously going to turn some heads and get some attention. But is there something that you can do that's like under the radar? Do people need to know? Can you go out there and do your own experimentation? And as I say, I think one of the biggest, biggest, biggest, most common mistakes in entrepreneurship is thinking that it's about your idea. It actually has nothing to do with your idea. It is all about serving a market demand, serving a market need, solving a market problem. That's what it's about. How many people are like, the classic scenario is where like you go out for drinks with friends, you know, you go down the pub and you're like, you should do this thing or why doesn't this thing exist, how, why has nobody thought of this before? My God. Are we gonna create this business together? And like you get all excited and especially after a few pints you're like, oh my God, we're gonna become entrepreneurs. And you haven't spoken to anyone. You haven't interviewed one single customer. You haven't done one feedback session. That's the biggest mistake. How many times between us two, Stoyan, we could easily come up with 50 new business ideas right here, right now, you and me right now, we could easily come up with like 50 ideas. The ideas are jack shit. They are worthless. What matters is, are you solving a problem for someone that's painful enough that they are willing to part with their cash for it? And so going back to a corporate and again, I keep saying innovation, you could be in a completely different department, right? But if you genuinely want to be more entrepreneurial, then what is stopping you genuinely asking the question? Like what is stopping you going out there and running your own tests, running your own experiments, conducting a few customer interviews? And this would be my strategy is then take that evidence and take what you found out and use that to kind of put a case forward internally to then be like, hey, I just went and did this thing because number one, it's showing that you've got the proactivity, right? Like you didn't ask for permission. You just went and did this. You're proactive. I just went and did this thing. And actually here's what everyone is saying. I think that given these resources, we could run this next level of experiment. And these would be the milestones that we would have to hit within six months and then we kill the project. That's another thing. You need to have your kill switch moments, right? And say, look, give me six months. These are the metrics. We're not going to expect paying customers or six figure deals or whatever it might be, but these are the metrics that are the leading indicators to show that we're onto something that could have product market fit here. And then it's on them. And then it's like, then you're putting it back to that upwards management. You're saying, do you actually want to be cultivating intrapreneurship, do you actually want to be taking risks? Because I've already got everything here. All you need to do is say yes.

SY: Actually I wanna put you into a hypothetical situation. Let's imagine that Stephanie is kind of tired of the whole world and she's like, you know what, I'm going back to work for a big tech international corporation and the person who hires you is like, Stephanie, I want you to build a team, I want you to lead a team and I'll have your back. So I want these people to be really proactive, a team of intrapreneurs, right? Like we're fine with that, go. And I want you to think about what will be the step-by-step, like you get the deal, now you have a budget to hire a bunch of people and to train them. Go, let's go.

SM: Can I ask, okay, what kind of company is this?

SY: Well, let's see, I don't know, computer production, I don't know, something.

SM: Okay, okay, okay. Look, at the moment, it's got to be AI, right? I don't know, that's like, you shouldn't put the tech before the solution. But the truth is, is that this is a real seismic shift that's happening in market behavior. So that first of all, if it's in tech and some compute, we've got to do something in AI. What I would then say is, I love this game, Stoyan, I love this. I want to do the same with you. Okay, what I would do is I would bring in a very, very small initial founding team. Now I've talked a lot about, we need to prioritize the market validation, customer interviews, testing the need. But if we want to build a team that's got the autonomy and they've got ownership, then I'm not going to come up with an idea and do the steps myself and then build a team around that. I'm going to do the opposite here, which I know is like, well, controversial, but we'll bring in, let's say three people. I wouldn't feel comfortable with any more than three because then it's like three's a crowd and we want to get that culture fit and we want to get that real sense of ownership between the first handful of people. So they're going to have to have complementary skills. One is maybe going to fit more into kind of the technical expertise, the other one is maybe more kind of like sales, BD, growth. And then the third one is, I'm not sure, right? But maybe something in the middle there. And then we need to bring them all into the fold together. And I think also it's about, you know, I mentioned skills. They're not going to be fully formed, like perfect professionals, right? What I also will test for in addition to those hard skills like technical or business development or whatever, is the soft skills around curiosity, around kind of taking risks, creativity, playfulness, like more of those entrepreneurial skills is also what I'm going to be looking for as well as the hard skills, right? I'm going to bring them into the fold. And the first thing that we're going to do together is commence that market validation together as a team. I don't want to get that started before that kind of team to make sure that they get that sense of ownership with that. What we're going to do is together come up with a series of hypotheses that we're gonna put to the test. What we also need to agree is an ICP, an ideal client profile, because that actually needs to come before and hinge our hypotheses around the ICP, because otherwise you've got too many moving parts. So you wanna have that as a stake in the ground. You wanna have that as your first anchor to cast around the ICP and then get into the experimentation. We're going to actually do experiment design. And it's similar to what I said before, where we time box an experiment. So we give it three months, six months, nine months. And we set out before we do anything, what does success look like? What are these metrics we're going to be measuring in order to then be able to make more objective decision-making when we come six months down the line? Because invariably, someone, at least one person is going to be more in love with the idea than someone else. And we're all human and we're going to get more attached to something. We're going to believe it. And look, if you're a solo agent and you're an entrepreneur and you're just like, I'm obsessed with this idea, then that's going to drive you to just make it a success if you've got the resilience for it. And I definitely know some amazing founders who have done it that way. But if we're doing this in a much more kind of like rigid methodical way, as part of a larger organization, then those are the steps that I'm gonna take.

SY: I love it. Love it. I mean, it actually makes a lot of sense. And on the one side, on the other side, I just love your passion when you talk about that. I mean, you're almost there. Like you just, you know, just building it already in your head. This is awesome. This is awesome. And I honestly think everybody listening, I hope you listen to the last five minutes because there's a lot of great lessons. Whether you are building a team in a corporation or your own team, or you're building your startup, whatever, you can use some of these ideas. Because you have to be productive. And the way to do that, there's certain steps, not hiring all the people and then let's figure out what we do with them. Like you gotta be more strategic, a little bit more methodical on the one side, like the culture, what are the kind of values and characteristics, you mentioned some of them that I want my people to have on top of the technical hard skills, because you can't change values, right? Like you can't go and say, stop being like this because no, but like you already have this person that that's their nature. And by the way, this is another thing that I want to touch upon a little bit, is some people just have a team, you know, they don't have the luxury to build a team from scratch and to bring their own people. They're just getting promoted to a team or maybe the team is already existing and they still want to incorporate this entrepreneurial spirit. Like what are we doing when we are in a more kind of traditional conservative organization and we want things to be a little bit more, you know, proactive?

SM: Yeah, it's definitely more of a challenge when you don't have that blank, you know, carte blanche to like put together your own dream team. If you're inheriting another team, do you know what, I'm going to get really real with you because I know that you'll appreciate this. My best friend, there's this really funny meme where like we know about like the workplaces with our best friends and it's like this telenovela, you know, it's like this like TV show. We know all the characters, don't have a clue what they do as their job or what they do for a living. But my friend is actually in this situation. So as I'm listening to her, I'm thinking, as the saying goes, one bad apple spoils the bunch. And if you've got, whether it's more of a toxic team member or someone that's more negative or someone that's more of the status quo, they haven't caught up as much. It's not always going to be so perfect that you've got this dream team of entrepreneurs. And so she's really, really struggling with this situation. And I've met loads of clients that have this as well. One particular client where it worked was, okay, this is going to sound really bad, but it's almost like if we use a rotten apple as the analogy, we continue with that analogy. It's about almost stopping the infection spread and putting up like putting on masks, putting up barriers, locking the door. And it's kind of a bit of containment to make sure that if you have got these A-star players, these entrepreneurial people with the energy, the last thing that you want is for any of that negativity to contaminate what they're doing, what they're working on. And what I've seen work in not all organisations, but some organizations is their energy, it starts to become more infectious than the bad apple, but you need to allow it to flourish first. If you don't do that, this was also something I wrote in my substack last night, you need a lot more positivity to counteract negativity. So an example that I use was like, if you get one bad review, you know, like a Trustpilot or Google review, you need 10 positive reviews to counteract that. If you get one insult, you need 10 compliments to rebalance it out. So it's a similar analogy here with organizations. You want to kind of do a 10x counteraction with someone who's like, it's not quite working, to make sure that the positive one flourishes to then get to a situation where these other people then see it. Because like we were talking about before with delusion, you know, inherent to being a visionary, you're seeing things that people are not. And that's where, of course, it's going to look delusional because you have a vision that's inherent to the definition. And so it needs to kind of flourish to provide, to then become, the delusion becomes a reality. So it's then that harder evidence for the other people to then see it and then say, okay, I get it now. And then it starts to click and they're like, okay, that looks like fun. They succeeded doing that. Okay, let me try a little bit of that as well. But again, these problems, you can't come in and wave a magic wand and solve it the next day, right?

SY: No, no, it's so much easier to talk about it than to actually do it, especially with all the... But again, you can be proactive, you can do your best. And that's what you can do. The best you can do is the best you can do. This is one of my mantras. The best you can do is the best you can do. Which leads me to the employee angle as well. Going back to the event that I told you about, this lady, who is by the way, Vicky Blaževa, if she's watching. She's vice president of marketing at Unicredit Bank here in the region, CE region. And she's awesome. And she has this mindset of, I'll figure it out. Like she doesn't always have all the resources to do the projects she wants, but she's just being flexible. She's making projects happen that are nothing under her remit, like she's making things happen. And her message to everybody else in this room was, we should stop pointing fingers and we should just take ownership and say if I want something to happen I do have constraints but if I only point fingers nothing's gonna move, you have ownership, you have a responsibility.

SM: That's exactly it. That falls right in the accountability leaf of the Venn diagram. Like I was saying before, it's taking ownership. Yeah, I love that. And I actually just saw on the note of the "I'll figure it out" mentality, I saw a fantastic quote by James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, who I love. And it was about dealing with uncertainty. And this quote was about accepting that it's not that you'll have the answers when these things come your way, but it's that you've just got that mindset to deal with uncertainty because it's just impossible, you know, it would change the definition of the word uncertainty, right? It's impossible to know. Like I was saying before with our entrepreneurial journeys and getting something out of left field, like it's part of it, the uncertainty, you don't know, but you know that you've got the mindset to handle it when it does come around.

SY: If you were an employee, not a manager, an employee in an organization, now after all your experience, like being an entrepreneur and a trainer and a consultant and so on, how would you be? I'm just curious, compared to, I don't know, eight years ago, what would have changed?

SM: Yeah, such a great question. I do actually think about this like, wow, it's been such a long time since I've been like, employed, you know, am I still employable? Would somebody employ me? I think that it's, I think, you know, there's so much that I've learned in entrepreneurship that I'm not suddenly going to forget. And I'm going to put so many things to good practice. I think one of the many things is scaling up your capacity. This is where I think so many organizations and employees go completely wrong. And this is where the world is changing and it cannot come fast enough, Stoyan. We need to move away, this would be the number one thing, right? We need to move away from time-based Monday to Friday, nine to five. Okay. That is absolute BS. If I get my work done, and not even that, not even get my work done, if I achieve my goals, which is all that matters. If I manage to do that in one hour because I work efficiently, because I'm leveraging agentic AI tools, because I've got automations, because of this, that and the other. And I can scale up my capacity because I've had to do that as a business owner. I've had to remove myself as a bottleneck because there are never enough hours in the day and so busy and the weekend isn't long enough. No BS. You can scale up your capacity and have the most productive one hour as opposed to showing up at the office at 9am at my desk and clocking off at, you know, 5, 6pm. Like, ridiculous. It's so ridiculous. It serves no one. It doesn't serve you as the employee because literally the most valuable resource we have is not money. It's our time. You'll never get this time back. It will never be the 4th of February, 2026 again. Never again. I'll never be the age I am again. You'll never be the age you are again. So why are we spending our days, our lives in a cubicle, at our desk, in the office when you don't need to? That's from the employee side. From the organisation side, why do you give a flying fuck if they're there or they're not there at their desk? What you actually care about, and this is where, we had to do, you know, the art of the brief with clients in my agency, the amount of clients you can imagine that would come to a marketing agency and be like, we want this to go viral. What do you actually want? Do you want a million followers or do you want a million pounds in your bank account? What do you actually care about? Because the strategy is going to change very drastically depending on which one it actually is. So it's like the art of the briefing for the clients as well, for the organization. What do you actually want? Do you actually want your personnel to be at their desk or do you want to be increasing your revenues and profitability by I don't know x percent in a year? Okay well let's think about things differently, how are we going to achieve that? What we need to achieve and why we're achieving it are thousands times more important than how we're going about it. So that would be the number one thing I would do differently. If I got a job offer tomorrow, I'd be like, right, how are we going to achieve the goals? Forget about whether I'm in the office or not, and it's Monday to Friday, that doesn't matter. How are we going to scale up the capacity, the resource that we've got to achieve your goals? That's all that matters.

SY: Another question, maybe we can wrap it up around this topic. There's so many, I guess, managers and entrepreneurs and leaders that are struggling to A, attract the best performers, B, to keep them for a long time. And this is so real, right? Let's put the compensation aside. Let's assume that they're well compensated. There's some kind of a structure with commission, whatever, right? Like that's out of the way. What do we do to get the best people to work with us? And then how do we keep them? Because there's some of those really cool people, like we build them to be intrapreneurs and then they leave because they wanna open their own thing. And I'm gonna give you the opposite perspective as well. Like I had Steve Cadigan, I don't know if you know him, he's the first chief HR officer of LinkedIn. He is a great dude and he has a different perspective. He's like, do we have to think this way? Because let's be honest, people stay in their jobs for one, two, three years max. How about we just assume that as a constant, if they stay more, that's fine. But what if we start from actually reverse engineering, keeping in mind that they're not gonna stay more than two, three years. And even from the interview process, we have a one-on-one and we're like, dude, let's put our cards on the table. You're probably gonna stay here for that long. I want to build you, I wanna grow you, but I need you to deliver some results. Can we have a, like, would you be here for two years? I need you to be here for, if you stay for 10, that's amazing. But I need to have your word. I'm just curious what's your take because again, that's the thing. It's like you get somebody, you attract them, they start delivering, you train them, you coach them. Finally they're in a place that's amazing, and then in one month they leave. Not because they don't like it, but because maybe they have an idea or...

SM: Exactly. If they're that good, why wouldn't they? Before you started talking about Steve Cadigan, that is where my mind went initially. I was like, let them. I mean, I'm not going to do the whole Mel Robbins "let them" thing, but it's like, let them. With relationships, my partner and I, we've been together for like 16 years and I've always been like, my rule is, you can always do whatever you like, there'll just be different consequences. I think operating from that standpoint of freedom, you know, and again, it goes back to like not forcing these things. Carte blanche, you've got the freedom, if it's meant to be, it's meant to be. If this is a right fit, fantastic. If it's not, then fine. Like you have to accept that. So yeah, I think I'm more on the side of Steve Cadigan. And I think, do you know what? Like I've worked with some incredible entrepreneurial organizations before I set out on my own and one of my previous employers was potentially interested in purchasing my company, right? So that's another way of thinking about it. Like, what if they can go off, if they're that good, and have this tremendous success? And then who knows, if you've cultivated such a great culture, you've got the relationships, you respect them, you encourage them. And maybe even if you support them on their own entrepreneurial journey, because they've just got an itch to scratch because they've never done it before, they want to see what it's like, they're already ambitious and proactive, why wouldn't you then maybe support them in doing that? And who knows, maybe it becomes a merger and acquisition or a partnership for you further down the line. Or another fantastic scenario is they've gone and learned so much more from going and doing it by themselves. And then if it doesn't work out, hopefully you're the first they think of to maybe come back and get a job. And they bring all this experience that they wouldn't have got under your roof otherwise.

SY: No, I think it's a great point. It's a great point. Just to add a little bit on top of that. I mean, first of all, it's great that somebody wants to leave at some point. Cool, let's support it. But let's do it in a way that for these two years or five years they've been with us, let's really create an experience for them. Let's invest in them, in their learning and development, in their skillset, giving them projects, network, whatever, to the level that maybe they wanna do something else, their own thing or just change role, position, whatever, but they're so happy, they're so grateful that they become your ambassadors. It's kind of the good old McKinsey model, right? Like they become, they're like, they believe in what you do so much that like you keep on supporting, like you build this army of ambassadors around you, but it comes from day one, you care for your people. They're not your asset, they're not here for, you know, I get somebody, they will do stuff for me. Cool, yes, we need stuff to get done for us, but it's more like, how do we make it a win-win? How do I get them to be productive? And how do I get them to grow as humans and to have a great experience? Because when you have this mindset, at the end of the day, you know, if it's the right person, they might leave, but you know, they refer people to you, I mean, all this kind of stuff, it's a flywheel.

SM: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It becomes a flywheel. Yeah, definitely.

SY: Love it, love it. Stephanie, the hour is over, we're at 66, 67 minutes already. It's crazy how fast it went, but just want to kind of wrap it up a little bit with, you know, what are you excited about these days? What are you up to? What are you passionate about and how do you serve teams and organizations?

SM: Yeah, great question to end this on. I am very excited about sharing everything I've learned. You know, I said to you before, like, I'm not quite ready to get back in the saddle yet. But what I'm very, very happy about and what I've already seen so much impact and progress on is helping others. I still have all this knowledge, all this learning. I've got all the battle scars. I want to help others who have that grit, who have that tenacity, who have the ambitions. And so whether that comes in the form of one-to-one coaching, mentoring, or delivering corporate training is what I'm very excited about. The signature topic on hacking luck is something that has got some eyebrows raised and people interested and curious, which is great to see. And so I'm doubling down on that as a theme as well. So if anyone wants to talk about hacking luck, especially within the context of intrapreneurship or entrepreneurship, then I'm your woman.

SY: And if you are interested to listen to another cool podcast go check out Strategy & Tragedy.

SM: Thanks, Stoyan. Appreciate the plug.

SY: Available everywhere, right?

SM: Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, you name it.

SY: Amazing. Steph, thanks so much for being with us today. We'll definitely be in touch.

Thanks everybody for listening, making it to the end of the episode. This is episode 232, meaning there's 231 more episodes. So go subscribe on your favorite platform. This is the only ask I have for you guys because the more subscribers we get, the easier it is for us to attract incredible people like Stephanie to join us on the podcast. Yeah, what can I say? It's been a great month. I hope it's been for you as well. Let's go, let's be productive. Let's keep going. It's gonna be awesome. Ciao.

SM: Bye everyone.

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