Hi friends - I hope you enjoyed the first of a four part series from Richard Washington last week - 5 GTM hiring mistakes.

This week he’s going to convince you why you need to recruit intrapraneurs for your business.

And I am pretty sure this is a term Rich made up…but I love it so much. When he explained it to me many months ago, I couldn’t agree more with his definition and framework for this employee archetype.

Enjoy!

Why Entrepreneurs Need Intrapreneurs Around Them

When you start a company, you’re the entrepreneur.

You carry the vision, you’re doing the selling, you’re the problem-solver-in-chief.

But if you want to scale without burning out, and without stalling, you need intrapreneurs around you.

These are the people who think like founders inside their lane. They take the weight off your shoulders, multiply your impact, and make the business bigger than you.

Every founder hits a point where their own capacity becomes the ceiling. Even the most driven entrepreneurs can’t do it all. And “yes people” will only amplify your blindspots.

As Jess put it on our GTM Multivitamin pod “At this stage, you can’t afford to bring on people who need constant direction. You need hires who see a gap, own it, and figure it out, without waiting for you to tell them how.”

The reality:

The wrong GTM execs, leaders, or sellers don’t just fail to help you scale, they actively kill momentum. I’ve seen it, I’ve made those hires in my own teams, and I’ve learned the hard way “what not to do.”

What makes an Intrapreneur

Intrapreneurs aren’t just “good employees” or “high performers.” They’re Multipliers.

And the Multipliers, especially in leadership, share four core traits:

• Collaborative - They work through people, not around them. They know that trust and influence build faster than control.

• Ownership - They don’t hand problems back. If it lands on their desk, it’s their problem until it’s solved.

• Resourcefulness - Give them a brick, they’ll build a wall. Give them a wall, they’ll build a house. They find a way.

• Execution - Ideas are worthless without output. In early-stage, pace is the strategy.

Miss any one of these and you don’t have an intrapreneur. You’ve got an Adder, Subtractor, or Divider, someone who may not actively kill momentum, but won’t multiply it either.

I’ll talk more about this matrix in the last article in this series 👇️ 

A Story From the Trenches

On a recent call, I found myself telling a brilliant exec I’ve been coaching in their job search, about how I first learned the term “intrapreneur.”

My old CEO mentor used it to describe the rare people who could be a founder’s right-hand. Not just helping run the playbook, but creating it, adapting it, and scaling it, without needing constant direction or taking the same personal risk as the founder.

These people are hard to find. As I said to another client, they’re often “too busy building to look up for five years… until they need to start again.”

You don’t always spot them in the wild because they’re deep in the work, not on the stage. But when you do find them, you guard them with your life.

How to Spot an Intrapreneur in the Hiring Process

Knowing what you’re looking for is one thing, finding it in an interview is another.

Here’s what I’ve learned works:

• Look for Curiosity and Questions - The best intrapreneurs can’t help themselves. In the interview, they’re already diagnosing. They’re asking about your mission, your biggest blockers, and why you haven’t tried X or Y yet. They’re not just looking for a job, they’re looking for a problem to solve.

• Ask for Problem-Solving Stories - My go-to is: “Tell me about a time when you solved a problem without clear direction.” True intrapreneurs light up here. They’ll share examples where they built from scratch, navigated ambiguity, and made something work with very little.

• Gauge Their Energy - Energy matters. If they’re flat in the interview, they’ll be flat in the business. Look for people who are energised by challenges, whose presence lifts the room, and who project a “we’ll figure it out” mindset.

• Test Resourcefulness - Throw in a real-world scenario from your business, one without an obvious answer, and see how they approach it. I love when a candidate walks me through their thinking in real time, even if the solution is unconventional. It shows they’re comfortable solving without a script.

Letting Go to Grow

One of the hardest founder lessons I’ve learned, and taught, is that you can’t scale if you grip everything.

Hiring intrapreneurs means trusting them to run with things their way. And if you’ve hired right, that’s exactly what accelerates you.

I’ve lived the opposite too. Early in my career, I hired smart, capable people, but they weren’t true multipliers. I ended up stepping back in, re-doing their work, and slowing everything down. Momentum died.

Part of the problem is a misunderstanding of responsibility, accountability, and authority. You can give someone responsibility for a target, and hold them accountable for hitting it, but if they don’t have the authority to make the decisions to get there, they will be stuck in constant bottlenecks - usually you, the founder. Nothing kills pace faster than a hire who is forced to wait for sign-off on every move.

Angel Evenson put it bluntly on a recent pod we did on escaping the Founder Sales trap:

“Every founder needs to allow their people to actually make decisions. If you don’t, you’re the bottleneck, and the business will only ever move as fast as you can approve things.”

If you’ve brought in the right people, you have to let them take it and make it their own. Otherwise, you’re just hiring for show, because you’re still doing the work yourself.

Hear the full podcast with Angel here:

The Quiet Heroes of Scaling

Intrapreneurs rarely get the headlines. But they’re the ones turning vision into reality while you’re on stage selling it.

They don’t just keep the wheels turning, they design the next engine while the car’s still moving. And if you’re serious about scaling, you need a tribe of them around you.

Remember, Entrepreneurs start movements. But business isn’t a solo sport. The founders who win are the ones who find a team of Intrapreneurs to help turn their ideas into empires.

Why do I know about Intrapreneurs? 

Because I was one.  My background is 15+ years of leading revenue teams across the UK, with spells in Spain and Miami as part of global expansion from 50 to 450 people.  I ran a 100 person business unit as the Director, working as a 3rd line leader.

And then, like many of you, I chose the hard path to become an entrepreneur.  But without those years of building a business that scaled so much, I wouldn’t have the stacked context to be able to help my clients find the people they need to scale.

If you want to go deeper on spotting and hiring intrapreneurs, I talked in depth about it on an episode of the DNS Unfiltered podcast.

Want to learn more about how I help startups increase their revenue by 150-590%? 👀 

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With love and gratitude,