Early on when I was coming up with characters for the cartoon project I am working on, I had decided that I wanted to have a businessman who is a little too into the social media side of things and posting about what any and everything can teach us about B2B sales. I liked the idea of having this role filled by an Australian Shepherd wearing a slightly outdated style of business attire. So hence the Australian Shepherd Businessman was created.

During a long and unpleasant job search I made various sketches of new characters on paper while sitting in my old backyard during the summer of 2025 while I was searching for a new job and taking a break from tailoring the endless cover letters and resumes of that summer, I created this quick sketch of a new character for my cartoon. Unfortunately, I misplaced the original during a move a couple of states over, but I did manage to save this quick scan I made. Most of the time I work with creating characters models directly in the animation program I use, but the unnamed Australian Shepherd Businessman was one who I drew on paper first, then used in a couple of shorts where he partakes in as many LinkedIn post cliches as possible. The first video I had with him has him almost being crushed by a macro wolf, though Ollie's takeaway is to be vigilant about making B2B sales.

Recently while writing and reworking the script for an upcoming cartoon project, I landed on a name for him, Oliver "Ollie" Shepherd, after finding myself typing out Australian Shepherd Businessman several times in the script.