March Update from Hedgehog Growth 💨🍃⛈️

Happy March to my friends and partners!

After almost 4 months of iteration, I'm excited to share a clearer vision of my work with you.

Apologies to so many who’ve innocently asked “So, Michael, what do you do?” only to be regaled with a half hour long of narrative of my career. My incredible luck has been to work in and with some incredible organizations across a wide variety of contribution and leadership. My range of professional experiences turns out to be both a boon and a challenge.

Here’s what I should have told you instead:

Simply put, Revenue Engineering accelerates revenue and drives capital-efficient innovation while in under 90 days through the implementation proven frameworks in a non-disruptive.

It's the marriage of financial engineering and organizational design, balancing how teams collaborate with the outcomes they target.

More functionally, Revenue Engineering is “the practice of surgical execution across a diverse portfolio of bets, using clear metrics and a shared operating cadence to accelerate business outcomes “

I'm writing a Strategic Narrative on Revenue Engineering, publishing to my Substack later this week. Subscribe there to be notified.

I’ve been helping a few couple companies raise capital. This involves explaining unconventional capital structures clearly. I’m enjoying the creativity in this work. Let me know if you need help along these lines,

🦔 I attended the Nashville EC’s Spring Mixer where I met many entrepreneurs and service providers. Great to see everyone under one roof. I hope the EC continues to host these.

🦔 Kelley Griggs and I talked all things Nashville Startups. She provides immeasurable support to the Nashville startup ecosystem via StartupNash. She’s also building BritePeer, a tools for managing slack communities, which drives 10x engagement on key topics.

🦔 Kate O’Neil talked about how Opré is making performance management what it should be. Management => Leadership. Performance Reviews => Opre. Awesome tailwinds for them as Chief People Officers like MSFT’s Kathleen Hogan are promoted into positions leading “Office of Strategy and Transformation” directly reporting to Satya. 💪 

🦔 Dave Ford told me that the cost of capital is going up, which means business is good for BLC. The companies they talk to are looking for saving everywhere. They’re even wondering if they’re well served by hyperscalers, or should considering going back to co-located infrastructure.

🦔 Case Bloom of Tucker-Bloom is pioneering a no-middleman “cut and sew” model powered by the cottage industry. With scale-economy prices on bespoke items and no minimums, he’s creating a new way of working that brings creative problem solving to navigate the “blink and it’s changed” tariff regime. From DIY automation to a mobile factory in a CONEX, he’s brimming with ideas about how to achieve high quality + low cost, all the while cutting labor in on the upside.

🦔 Zach Gemignani believes your data deserves a better (and better looking) story and buildng Juice Analytics to make it happen. Zach’s a veteran of the analytics space, working with public and private entities big and small to help them tell more compelling stories with data. Their blog has a wealth of info on data visualization, taking me right back to the Edward Tufte books.

🦔 Kemp Maxwell is working with the team at Gun.io, helping developers and companies meet to connect talent instantly. He’s been developing a curriculum and sales playbooks across his career which get better each turn. Maybe one day soon he’ll let me sit in on a training session.

🦔 Jaythan and I reminisced about our time in the Edney Innovation Center, when we worked in the same building, but didn’t know each other. He’s now building Jointly, a growth and design agency which does gorgeous work. With broad range and sharp entrepreneurial instinct, I’d recommend them to any team looking for a crisp visual identify.

🦔 Jon Eisen and I met at Present Tense, then later connected for coffee where he told me about his company, Cumberland Growth. He’s connecting entrepreneurs with capital, resources, and networks. We discussed Services-enabled-SaaS as well as SaaS-enabled-Services and pondered how the differences will be underscored as the marginal cost of software radically declines.

🦔 Melissa Jones and I chatted after she got back from SxSW. She’s building 3816creative, a full service design agency, offering branding, web design, content and marketing services.

🦔 I worked with over 10 entrepreneurs at CEDNC to tighten their pitch for the Venture Connect 2025 conference (starting today!). I’m impressed with the caliber and focus of CEDNC on innovation businesses. This also sharped my pitch-review skills. I refreshed my own Pitch Checklist. I was also inspired to write down a messaging canvas for capital investment, a tool for organizing your thoughts.

🦔 Joey Viola and caught up on all the latest Interlaced.io developments. We discussed the benefits of small, cross-functional teams. I was too busy conducting the lean train (looking at you, Bobinski) to remember Amazon does this too with “2 Pizza Teams”

🦔 Victor Brown is raising capital for Xcellent Life. He’s using health data to gamify staying healthy with “Wellness-as-a-Currency” rewards. Reach out if you’re interested in investing in this space.

🦔 Hana Elliot and I got together to talk about basically everything but Solutions by Text, except her new awesome role in product strategy and her recent trip to India. I also had my first Yeast Nashville Kolache (Sausage and Jalapeño 🔥)

🦔 Eric Hendrickson and I talked about how Provisions Group is aggregating your work life and indexing it in a LLM-friendly way to unlock powerful new ways of working with AI agents. Keep your eyes on this team.

🦔 Jon Sukhia told me about moving to Nashville, gave me great food for thought on the work I do (inspiring much of the positioning above). We also chatted about Topkey which automates finance ops for property managers. It’s lonely being a 10-100 person SaaS CEO in Nashville. I’m considering putting a monthly coffee together for folks at this stage. If you’re interested, drop me a line for details.

🦔 Cynthia Henderson is solving an $10B problem in healthcare for care navigators. This time-consuming activity affects everyone from individuals to institutions and is a great fit for LLM efficiency. Health Concierge is the consumer expression of her solution. She’ll be in Nashville occasionally over the coming months if this is interesting to you.

🦔 Bill Rubino and I had breakfast (twice!) where he gave me helpful feedback on positioning and messaging. Bill’s focused on coaching high-potential leaders both in their careers and across job transitions. We need more of his brand of human-first, outcome-driven leadership in the world. I encourage anyone considering mentorship for themselves or new/growing leaders on their team to connect with him.

🦔 Hill Dickerson is building the work management system for home builders. They understand both buyers and builders are looking for more efficient, digitally native ways to collaborate. BuilderPad is taking the right approach with a “delight-centric” experience. We could all use more business apps that are beautiful and intuitive.

🦔 Read Ezell invited me to Present Tense for a community crowdfunding event. Present Tense is using WeFunder to bring their community along on their entrepreneurial journey. I love WeFunder’s premise of bringing communities together to build new ventures around products and services they love. One more reason brand and audience matter more than ever.

🦔 Sean Steigerwald caught me up on CustomerIQ and their recent killer feature of using call recordings to automatically draft follow up emails. In in your drafts folder ready for review & send. What a time saver! Sean’s also a deep expert on all things RevOps - If you’re looking for support, I recommend dropping him a line.

🦔 Ruth and Amr are building Talent Connection Protocol - A placement agency bridge the gap between top technical talent and innovative companies. With a “by-engineers-for-engineers approach”, I’m excited to see what smart tooling they think up.

🦔 Jeff Caplan is growing AlensiaXR, an augmented reality solution focused on medical learning. Their tech models anatomy in 3D leading to 40% better information retention by learners while accelerating learning nearly 2x despite 1/3 less study.

🦔 Elaine Warren shared her journey building Survivor Plan which enable cancer centers to assess patients unique needs, and provide personalized care plans. This improves clinician efficiency, increasing patient satisfaction and increasing billable encounters for follow-up services.

I’m eager to further develop the Revenue Engineering practice. Please connect me with any companies in your network pursuing revenue acceleration or seeking capital efficiency and quickening in their innovation process.

Wishing everyone the best, until next month.

Warm regards,

Michael

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