Hedgehog

GATED — rebuilt from named Drive source docs on 1 Jun 2026 (5 May 2026 session brief, 4 May internal coach notes v1+v2, 25 May Gemini session notes). Honest and qualitative. Engagement is ongoing/in-progress — no invented outcomes. Pending Tristan review. Note for review: the previous version of this case combined Hedgehog (the marketing agency) and Mechanic Marketing (a separate venture Josh also runs) as a single agency — the source docs show these are two distinct businesses at very different stages. This rebuild centres on Hedgehog and references Mechanic Marketing only as the separate business it is.

Where they started

Josh Berg runs Hedgehog, a marketing agency that has been operating for around a decade. By the time coaching began the business was already in a solid position — predictable recurring revenue, a small team of employees and contractors, and a founder who was no longer fighting for survival. The challenge wasn’t keeping the lights on. It was scale.

In Josh’s own intake, the number-one challenge was named plainly: finding the right people and defining exactly what to scale. He had tried to hire into that gap before — an overseas hire and a local hire that didn’t land the way he needed. The business worked, but a lot of it still ran through Josh.

Josh also runs a second, separate business, Mechanic Marketing, which is at a very different and more fragile stage. Coaching has had to hold both realities at once: a stable agency looking for its next gear, and a separate venture under real pressure.

The real problem

The honest bottleneck was owner-dependence dressed up as a scaling question. Hedgehog had a good model and good demand, but the path to growing it without simply adding more of Josh’s hours wasn’t defined.

Three things sat underneath that:

• No productised ladder. Services were delivered, but not packaged into clear tiers a client could self-select into. Without that, every new piece of work pulled Josh back in.
• Positioning discomfort. Josh was wrestling with how to show up in market. The industry default — a “salesy”, pushy social presence — didn’t fit him, and the lack of a position he believed in was holding back the marketing funnel.
• People and process gaps. Scaling meant trusting the team to run things, but the systems, templates, and management rhythm to make that safe weren’t fully in place — a tension that came to a head around one underperforming team member.

There was also a recurring pattern the coaching named directly: a strong pull toward new, adjacent ideas before the current core work had shipped. Good instincts, but a real risk to focus.

What we worked on

Coaching focused on turning a capable-but-founder-dependent agency into something that can scale on purpose:

• Productising the offer. Mapping services into a clear ladder — strategy, training, ongoing support, and full-service / fractional work — with training identified as the primary scale lever. The intent: let the offer, not Josh’s calendar, carry growth.
• Settling the positioning. Working through the “salesy vs. authentic” tension and landing on a “friendly expert” position built around one-to-one, personalised training rather than one-to-many sales tactics. This also reframed how to compete — serving a more sophisticated client rather than copying a louder competitor.
• Building the funnel and creative. Moving from scattered blog posts and newsletters toward a structured funnel with lead magnets and a consistent video series, including bringing in dedicated creative/video support.
• AI and automation as a scale lever. Separating internal operations from a client-facing agent stack (their “Hilda” build), and shaping an AI / “marketing engineering” service line — delivered online-first for scalability.
• People management and accountability. Working through a genuinely hard personnel decision — building a formal, fair performance-improvement plan for an underperforming team member rather than defaulting to either keeping or firing — and naming a pattern where Josh was carrying concerns sideways through the team instead of addressing them directly. The coaching framed this as a leadership-skill investment, not just a staffing problem.

Where they are now

This is an active, in-progress engagement, and the honest picture is mixed in the way real businesses are.

Hedgehog itself is holding steady in a strong position. Lead flow is resilient and increasingly driven by AI-search inquiries (ChatGPT, Claude, and similar) ahead of traditional Google search — a genuine edge most agencies don’t have yet. Training services are in demand, a recent workshop landed well, the team has been booking multiple new sales calls in a week, and a team member secured a standalone implementation project. The positioning has clarified, and the move to an online-first, training-led model gives the agency a scalable path rather than a founder-capped one.

At the same time, the work isn’t finished. The separate Mechanic Marketing business is under real strain and absorbing a lot of attention, the people-management situation is still being worked through via a formal plan, and several of the strategic foundations (long-range vision, formal annual goals and metrics) are still being put on paper. Coaching has deliberately triaged the live fires first.

No revenue multiples or headline numbers are claimed here, because the engagement is still underway and the source records don’t support them. What’s true today: a long-running agency has a clearer offer, a position its founder actually believes in, a real lead-generation advantage, and a more honest plan for scaling without simply working more — with the harder organisational pieces still in progress.