Steve

The firm has a long history with hedgehogs. I used Finland’s beloved Cursing Hedgehog in our communications, and early versions of it carried the word somewhere in the name. When we rebranded, our CEO wanted an Easter egg on the site that nodded to the attachment, and she named him Steve. By the time we built a Telegram bot, we all already pictured him: short, pudgy, mild, bespectacled.

Then we asked him for bolder work, sourcing companies and finding operational improvements, and he started hitting blockers and producing output nobody could act on. Correcting him cost more time than doing the work ourselves, so people stopped writing to him, and he stopped growing. The fix ran against instinct. We taught him to stop at a blocker and ask a person for help until someone resolved it.

The biggest change was giving him the acquisition playbook, lifted out of a pile of Google Docs and decomposed into skills he can act on and we can still edit by hand. Every step that brought him back made him less autonomous, not more, and the team grew attached to him again. There is a fan art channel now, full of Steve driving the Stevemobile and winning employee of the month.