Agenda
PART 3 OF 7 · BUILDING AND SCALING A VCU
Agenda
PART 3 OF 7 · BUILDING AND SCALING A VCU
Building a Venture Clienting Unit from scratch is exciting because the potential impact is real, and risky because getting the first steps wrong burns trust quickly enough to shut the effort down before it produces results. This part is the setup playbook: team, budget, internal partners, the three growth phases, a concrete 100-day roadmap, and how to manage stakeholders from the C-suite down to procurement.
The single most common mistake is over-engineering the setup: hiring too many people, building elaborate processes, and spending six months preparing before running a first PoC. The data doesn't support this instinct: a large share of active programs run fewer than five PoCs a year on a budget under €150k and still generate measurable impact. What they have isn't unlimited resources; it's focus.
Start with one motivated person, a modest budget, and three target PoCs.
The team
One person is enough to start. Not a department: one person who owns the VCU, sees it as a career-defining opportunity rather than a side project, and has enough internal credibility to open doors.
That person needs a strong internal network (warm introductions move faster than cold outreach in the early months), comfort operating between startup and corporate cultures, appetite for ambiguity (early-stage VCUs have no playbook, and don't need one yet), and genuine enthusiasm for startups. An innovation manager who finds the work tedious will produce mediocre sourcing and uninspired demos.
As the unit grows, team composition varies; some organizations build fully in-house teams, others use a hybrid of in-house managers and outsourced PoC project management. What clearly doesn't work is treating the VCU as a part-time responsibility for someone whose primary role is elsewhere.
The budget
A Starter VCU running three to five PoCs a year needs roughly €100k–€200k in annual budget. That covers the team (one dedicated innovation manager is the single largest cost; unpaid internal time doesn't produce consistent results), sourcing quality (there's a real difference between a list assembled via search and a professionally sourced benchmark of qualified, enterprise-ready startups), tooling (spreadsheets work for the first three months, then start creating more problems than they solve), and PoC execution costs (typically €5k–€30k per PoC for the startup's side of the work).
One pricing habit worth adopting immediately: always ask startups for two numbers upfront, the PoC price and the indicative annual subscription price. A solution that costs €20k to test but €400k a year to run may not survive the business case, and it's better to know that before starting.
The internal partners you need from day one.
Four functions determine whether PoCs move fast or stall indefinitely, and all four should be onside before the first PoC, not after:
Leadership support
Not required, but enormously helpful. A VCU with visible C-level endorsement moves faster on every dimension, since procurement, IT, legal, and stakeholders all respond differently to a program a senior executive has publicly backed.
Don't wait for it before starting, though: the fastest path to a sponsor is a PoC that solves a problem a senior leader actually cares about.
A practical tactic is running one of the first PoCs for a team that reports directly to a senior leader. If it works, that leader becomes an advocate whose name is worth more than any formal mandate.
What success looks like in year one
Three PoCs run, with at least one moving toward implementation; procurement, IT, and legal each actively worked through a PoC rather than just being informed about one; a positive ROI story grounded in real numbers, even if not a full financial model; and a pipeline of future leads so the program doesn't run dry after its first success.
The one thing that kills VCUs before they get started is taking on the wrong first PoC.
The first PoC sets the template for everything that follows: if it's too complex or fails to show a clear result, momentum dies before the program has any; if it works, it opens doors to every subsequent PoC. Set aside the company's biggest challenge and the most technically impressive startup you've found for later. Start with a real problem, a willing stakeholder, a startup with enterprise references, and a scope that can be tested in four to eight weeks.
Programs that mature effectively build incrementally. This framework isn't the same as the Starter/Growing/Pro maturity levels from Part 2, even though it rhymes with it: maturity levels are a classification of where a program stands today, while phases are a sequence for what to build next. Scale, the final phase, begins at roughly the same €500k budget mark where the Pro maturity level starts.
The 100-day roadmap is the execution guide for the Start phase, not a Gantt chart, but a sequencing guide for what has to happen before what.
Before day 1, three things need to be in place
A named owner with real bandwidth (not a side project), a minimum viable budget of roughly €30k–€100k to cover the first PoC, and one willing problem owner — a business unit with a real problem and a leader genuinely open to testing a startup solution.
Days 1–30: internal alignment and problem definition
Four conversations establish the foundation. With procurement: show a sample PoC contract and ask about approval thresholds for contracts under €50k and between €50k–€200k.
With IT: ask what they'd need from a startup running a four-to-eight-week PoC with limited environment access, and what the approval process is — write down the answer, since this becomes your minimum security checklist. With legal: ask whether NDA and short-form contract templates already exist for startup engagements; if not, say you'll be back within 30 days with a PoC contract for lightweight review. With the problem owner: clarify the business problem in concrete terms and confirm they'll stay engaged throughout.
By day 30, this should produce a one-to-two-page problem brief covering the business problem, what success means, evaluation criteria, and timeline.
Days 31–60: startup sourcing and contract preparation
A well-run sourcing process surfaces eight to fifteen relevant startups, three to five of which merit deeper evaluation, narrowing to one. Run sourcing and contract preparation in parallel, so the contract template is already reviewed by the time a startup is selected; this alone avoids a three-to-four-week delay.
Before launch, define success criteria that are specific and measurable ("processing time for X reduced from Y to Z hours, measured over four weeks," not "improved efficiency") and document them in the PoC agreement.
Days 61–100: PoC delivery and pipeline planning
The VCU's role during the PoC is coordination, not execution: keeping the startup and business unit aligned, timelines intact, and blockers cleared quickly.
The most common blockers are IT access delays, problem owner bandwidth, and scope creep; address all three proactively. By day 90, the PoC should be complete, with a two-to-three-page readout covering what was tested, the results, and a clear binary recommendation. By day 100, identify the next two PoC candidates, not signed briefs, just warm problem owners and rough hypotheses, so there's no gap between the first PoC closing and the second starting.
No VCU runs on process alone — the speed and quality of every PoC depends on relationships across the organization. A solution that could save millions gets stuck in procurement review; an IT security assessment drags a four-week PoC into three months; a business unit loses interest halfway through. These are stakeholder problems, not process problems.
C-level buy-in
Senior leadership support isn't required to launch, but it changes the speed of everything: procurement moves faster, IT cooperates earlier, business units take the program seriously, and budget is better protected during pressure.
Pursue it in two windows: before launch, if there's access to an executive already interested in innovation (a simple endorsement is worth months of relationship-building), and more assertively after the first success, when the conversation shifts from pitching a concept to presenting evidence.
Lead with a problem the executive already recognizes, use business-outcome language rather than activity counts, and be specific about the ask. The fastest path to a sponsor is running a PoC for a senior leader's own team; if it works, they become an advocate organically.
Four stakeholder groups, four approaches
Problem owners are the origin point of every PoC. Engage them regularly with a simple question: what's on your backlog you haven't addressed through standard means?
Enablers (procurement, IT, legal, works council) determine how fast each PoC moves from agreement to launch — engage them before you need them, with pre-agreed templates and frameworks.
Decision-makers, the senior leaders approving budgets, usually respond best to quarterly one-page outcome summaries, not ops detail.
Champions (or ambassadors), people who've seen the model work and now advocate for it, should be checked in with a few months after a successful PoC, given impact data, and equipped with language to describe what happened.
Procurement and IT, specifically, are the two functions most likely to turn a promising PoC into a delay.
- For procurement: have an upfront conversation explaining that a PoC is time-boxed, scope-limited, and low-value; bring a sample lightweight contract template; and get a clear answer on approval processes for small contracts (aim for under ten business days once a template exists, though this really depends on your setup).
- For IT: agree on a tiered framework (a lighter bar for a limited PoC and a fuller bar for implementation) through three conversations on security certifications, the right point of contact, and the path from PoC approval to full rollout.
Roughly €100k–€200k annually for a Starter VCU running three to five PoCs a year.
One person is enough to start, provided it's their genuine priority rather than a side project.
Days 1–30 for internal alignment, days 31–60 for sourcing and contracting, days 61–100 for PoC delivery and pipeline planning.
Maturity levels (Starter/Growing/Pro) classify where a program stands today. Growth phases (Start/Grow/Scale) describe the sequence of getting there. See the glossary for both definitions.
