The Road to Version 1.0, Part 2: One Big Thing

Howell Legal empowers entrepreneurs as a growth partner with legal expertise. This is our Hedgehog Concept — the one big thing that drives our company. Articulating this mission was a hard-fought win for our team, and I hope that sharing our discovery process may help other businesses that are finding their way.

This is the second installment in our series about Howell Legal’s foray into strategic planning. In our first post, I wrote about the reactive loop that trapped us during our first few years and the simple-yet-difficult resolution we made to escape it. But committing to strategic planning wasn’t even the first step on our journey forward; it was just standing up.

I found an indispensable guide for taking the first real planning step in business author Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great. His book is an exploration of the attributes that make certain companies (the great ones) out-perform comparable companies (the good ones) in the same industries during the same time periods. One of the attributes that the great companies possess was the commitment to a “Hedgehog Concept.”

The name comes from philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” which, in turn, draws on the Greek aphorism: “The fox knows many things, while the Hedgehog knows one big thing.” Collins found that the good companies bogged themselves down pursuing multiple goals, which were often disconnected, conflicting, or incompatible. The great companies, by contrast, made decisions and took action in line with a unified purpose, which was dubbed the “Hedgehog Concept.” In particular, Collins found that great companies’ Hedgehog Concepts sat at the intersection of:

(1) What the company could be the best in the world at;

(2) What the company’s leadership was passionate about; and

(3) What drives the company’s economic engine.

Before I finished the chapter on the Hedgehog Concept, I knew that we had to identify ours.

If our Hedgehog Concept was going to be our compass, we knew that it needed team-wide buy-in. To achieve that, it couldn’t be a top-down dictate. It had to be a collaborative effort. With a team of only four, we had the ability to involve everyone in the whole process and only stop when we had achieved enthusiastic consensus.

We began with a design sprint-style team session over lunch. You can see the full slide deck I used for the session here.

My goal was to be pretty close to a final statement of our Hedgehog Concept by the end of this session. Wishful thinking. We ended up with tons of raw material and sparked real excitement about both our passions and our strengths, but we came nowhere near distilling our ideas.

We scheduled another team session a couple of weeks later. Before we met, I shared the full output from the first session with the team and assigned each team-member the task of drafting and presenting their own formulation of our Hedgehog Concept. My plan was to discuss each proposal, pick a leading candidate, then at least make progress toward a “final” version.

Each of us came to the table with a different focus: one formulation was functional, one was inspiring, one was inclusive, and one was abstract. As we discussed, we quickly realized that each formulation had major weaknesses. The discussion that ensued helped narrow and distill the most important passions and strengths, but there was no leading candidate from the proposals for a “final” Hedgehog Concept.

We took a totally different approach for our third session — an unstructured team dinner. We talked at a high level about what the company was to us and what we thought it could be. This didn’t get us any closer to the magical single sentence that we were searching for, but it did help us converge on an intuitive sense of the missing unifying thread.

We scheduled a fourth session and resolved not to break until we had our finished product. We realized that we were circling around three big ideas:

(1) Core function: The distinctive service we offered wasn’t necessarily legal advice — it was empowerment. That included demystifying complex legal issues, developing creative solutions to legal challenges, and negotiating toe-to-toe with professional investors and large corporations.

(2) Relationship with clients: In our best client relationships — the ones we enjoyed the most and the ones where the clients got the most value — we were always a part of the core strategic team. We weren’t just the lawyers who did the law stuff in a silo. We were viewed as one of the company’s key advisors, indispensable to promoting the company’s growth.

(3) Who we serve: We all shared our passion for working directly with entrepreneurs — the leaders of early and growing ventures. We also knew that our experience working with early-stage businesses from the ground-up was distinctive.

It wasn’t long into that fourth session that someone articulated the final product. As soon as it was said, we all knew that we’d done it:

Howell Legal empowers entrepreneurs as a growth partner with legal expertise.

*****

Having discovered our hedgehog concept, we now have an invaluable compass. When faced with any decision about our strategy, operations, management, or client experience, we know to lead with a simple question: Does it help us empower entrepreneurs as growth partners with legal expertise?

The True North that is your Hedgehog Concept is necessary, but not sufficient. Our next task was to zoom out one step and ask: On our path of empowering entrepreneurs, who do we want to be? What values will we commit to for our clients, our team, and ourselves? In our next installment, I’ll recount the process we used to establish Howell Legal’s values and share the finished product.