After ten years, Tiit Tammiste steps down as Chief Executive Officer of Levira this autumn. He leaves behind a company roughly twice the size of the one he joined, and a team he describes, without hesitation, as the thing he is proudest of.
When Tiit Tammiste walked into Levira in 2016, the balance sheet was not what persuaded him to take the job. It was what he found inside the building.
"There were very good engineers with very good competences who had been in the company a long time. There were three main competences: how to deliver content over the air, media technology, which is quite unique in our region, and IT infrastructure. Thinking back to 2016, it was a really unique combination. That was one of the factors that turned me on to the job."
The problem was not talent. It was the lens the company looked through. Levira saw itself as a technology business and nothing else, and it showed in how it read its own market. The biggest threat at the time was commercial television companies leaving free-to-air, and when Tiit asked why, the answer came back in engineering terms.
"They said, we do not know exactly, but I think our picture quality is not very good. Let us make the picture better, then they will not leave."
The real story was a commercial fight between operators and broadcasters over the cost of reaching viewers, with the free-to-air licence sitting in the middle of it. Nothing at all to do with picture quality.
Scale was the other constraint. "The company was too small, which meant there was not enough money to invest, and not enough genuinely interesting projects to engage the engineers, to let them innovate and play and test things." So he set a vision that sounded, at the time, faintly outrageous: make Levira twice the size. A decade on, the company has done it.
That is the tidy version. The untidy version is that the first years were lean. Revenues were falling as commercial broadcasters left, an anchor customer departed from the media services business, and the pockets were close to empty at precisely the moment the company needed to invest in itself.
What had to change first was not the numbers but the culture, and that took longer than anything else. "I needed to understand what the culture actually was. And it was quite old-fashioned. Business mindset is not popular, and that is very common among engineering people."
Levira behaved, he says, like a collection of small companies sharing a car park. Media did its own thing. Television and radio did theirs. Bringing marketing, sales and technology together met real resistance, particularly from people who had been there since Soviet times. Some left. Many stayed, and two colleagues have now been with Levira for fifty years, a fact he mentions with obvious pride.
He brought in new people and gave the young engineers working monitoring shifts somewhere to grow into. And the company wrote its values properly, through a long series of exercises rather than a workshop and a poster. Agility, cooperation, trust. ACT.
He knows it landed because of a moment at the opening event in Leeds, when a customer stood up to speak and recited the values back to the room without ever having been shown them. He said, "I have known these guys for four years and they act like that. That means it works."
Agility, for Tiit, was never a methodology. It was a preference, and a firmly held one. "I do not believe in processes. You need your vision and your goal, and every day you think about how you get closer to it, and you change quickly when the circumstances change."
Which is roughly how Levira ended up running hackathons, with startup founders brought in to moderate and engineers from across the business thrown together for two days. His favourite moment came halfway through the first one, when a colleague found him and said: there are other people in this company, and they have really good ideas, and I think we should talk to them again tomorrow.
The commercial results followed the cultural ones. One international customer, worth a few thousand euros a year when he arrived, is now a multimillion euro account. The wider customer mix has shifted underneath it, Estonian public broadcaster ERR remains the largest customer, as it always was, but the satellite business is now close behind. Growth in Estonia ran at double digits, year after year.
The moments he returns to most readily, though, are not the wins. They are the crises, and what the company managed to turn them into. In March 2020 Levira moved to home working in a single day, which he is quick to point out was only possible because of six months of hard work in IT beforehand.
Then came Ukraine. Estonia had spent two decades believing in itself as an e-country, with the internet as something permanent and unbreakable.
"Then everybody recognised that mobile service and internet do not last very long if a country loses electricity. And it is not only a military crisis. It is a flood, like Latvia a few months ago. It is an electricity failure, like Spain. It is a big storm. Now everybody understands that broadcast television and radio are the last chance a state has to communicate with its people. Yes, it is one direction. But you can still communicate."
Convincing the shareholder took years, and the argument was won partly by security and defence customers who already understood what Levira could deliver. Out of it came the two Nordic Stars strategy that Tiit hands on to his successor: resilient infrastructure for Estonia on one side, export growth in the United Kingdom and Europe on the other.
"Yes, war is not something you should say you make business from. But we are strengthening our country and our enterprises. We got the momentum and we turned it into our success."
The satellite business, now one of the company’s strongest, began with a loss. Levira had been hunting for something to acquire and finding nothing. Then it lost a tender that mattered, and he and Indrek looked at each other and decided to buy the company instead. That was early 2024, before anyone knew what was coming for the satellite industry. The business they bought was in poor shape. Two years later it has grown five times over. Tiit gives the credit away immediately: finding those opportunities, and seeing which ones will grow, is "Indrek’s superpower".
None of it is what he names when asked what he is proudest of. That is the team.
"When I joined in 2016, Levira was not a very attractive employer. From the outside it looked a bit arrogant, a bit like it wanted easy profit. Today, if you say you work for Levira, people say it is a dream company. Change the team, bring in the right values, and you can turn an ugly duckling into a dream company."
He is clear about where the instinct comes from. In 2001 he joined a team building Estonia’s first mobile network, and that group still travels together and still holds an annual management meeting, decades after the work finished. "You want to repeat something, because you have good memories." The same transparency he learned there became the habit that held Levira’s strong personalities together: financial detail shared openly, shareholder conversations passed on, very little kept upstairs.
He leaves with the ambition intact. He would like Levira to continue its financial growth, and expects Levira Media Services to become bigger than Levira itself within a few years. He is proud that research and development is now funded through external programmes rather than out of the company’s own pocket, with 5G Broadcast work running on that basis.
His advice to his successor begins with the old joke about the three envelopes left in the drawer, and ends seriously. "Keep the team happy. Really take care of the team and make them happy. That is the first and the major advice. Everything else is just fun, and it comes."
In November, Tiit and his wife fly to Queenstown and travel the length of New Zealand to Auckland. Three weeks, and neither of them has been before. After that, a pause, and then most likely consultancy, helping other companies build strategy and grow. He is in no hurry. There is family news around Christmas he is looking forward to rather more than a new job.
As for how he sums up the decade, he refuses the sentence and offers a word instead: fun.
"Now, you need to take your time, and you need to trust your team. And then it becomes fun."
Ten years, a company twice the size, and a team that will miss him. Not a bad way to leave.