Let me congratulate you on your first job. Usually a machinist's first job is very enriching, but not in dollars, it is in the knowledge gained on estimating costs for future projects. It teaches you to examine the job more critically, and estimate accurately the difficulty and special tool costs. It also can help in teaching you different approaches at any task.
I would likely look at this job and take a different approach than most of the GOOD ideas here. Step one would be annealing the tool. Then the machining operations (which would be HSS-friendly on annealed steel), followed by a hardening and tempering. This is the same order of operations the manufacturer of that tool used (although they might have skipped the annealing phase, as they likely bought the steel stock already soft). Then the finish would have to be re-worked after all that is done. But then, I started making knives back in the 1970s, so heat treating steel is less daunting for me. Do you have any knife smiths in your area?