Why Mae North?

In June of 2022, I sat down and wrote a blog post that opened with a confession: when I was assigned the title of Director of Operations, I couldn't have told you what a word of that truly meant. I was, at that point, the Director of Operations of a marketing agency I'd cofounded. I had the title and not much else. I wrote that piece on the Beam Content blog and I called myself, in print, completely unqualified for the job

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Four years later, that woman built Mae North. So let me tell you what happened in between, because the bridge between those two people is, more or less, the entire reason this consultancy exists.

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The 2022 version of me didn't know what operations meant.

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By 2022, Beam Content—the B2B SaaS content agency I cofounded—was on its way to a million dollars in top-line revenue, profitable, with a small team and a growing roster of clients. I was the operations lead. I was also figuring it out as I went. I conceptually understood marketing, sales, fulfillment, basic HR, basic finances. Operations as a discipline, as a body of knowledge, as a craft? I had no idea.

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What I had was the ability to figure things out. That's a real skill, and I don't want to be dismissive of it—it carried Beam through years of growth. But there's a ceiling on figuring things out. At some point, you stop being able to outpace your own gaps, and the business starts paying for what you don't know.

What changed

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I invested thousands of dollars in learning and coaching. The single most valuable program I went through was Natalie Greenidge's at the Ops Authority. I'm now certified as a Director of Operations through this program, and the Strategic Mapping Method I license through that program sits underneath how I work today—I've rebuilt the Strategic Mapping Model as as the Northbound Mapping Model.

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What I learned wasn't tricks. It was a discipline. Operations has foundations—project management, people management, financials and KPIs, planning—and once you have them, the work stops being a guessing game. You can actually see the system underneath a business, name what's broken, and fix it on purpose instead of by instinct.

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The other thing I learned is that I love it. The figuring-things-out instinct that kept me afloat at Beam turns out to be exactly the instinct that makes someone good at operations once they have the training to back it up. Today, in 2026, I can confidently tell you what Operations is. I can nerd out with you about systems and rhythms and KPIs and how to build a business that doesn't fall over when the founder steps away. That's not a small thing for the person I used to be.

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Why I left what I built

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People sometimes ask why I left Beam when I'd helped build it from the ground up. The honest answer is that I outgrew the team I was on. I wanted the freedom to do operations the way I'd learned to do it, with the people I most wanted to be doing it for.

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Beam serves B2B SaaS companies, and SaaS is its own ecosystem—companies that sell software to other companies. There's good work being done there. But my background is in social services and education, and when I imagined the next ten years of my work, I didn't see it pointed at software-selling-to-software. I saw it pointed at small businesses doing the kind of work that actually transforms something in the world. Coaches. Healers. Therapists. Educators. Creatives. People building something good and getting buried by the operational weight of trying to keep it running.

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So Mae North isn't a pivot away from operations. It's a pivot toward a different person to serve.

Who I built this for

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I built Mae North for the founder whose entire business lives inside her own head.

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She's successful, by most measures. The work is good, the clients keep coming, the revenue is real. But she's the one signing every signature, holding every process, remembering every detail. She's up at 2 AM. She works weekends. She hasn't taken a real vacation in longer than she'd like to admit, because if she leaves, things break. Her business can't survive without her—and a business that can't survive without one person isn't actually a business yet. It's a job with overhead.

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I call these founder-dependent businesses, and I want to be precise about that phrase, because I don't think it's a personal failing. It's a structural stage. Most businesses go through it. Some never come out of it, because nobody ever helped the founder build the systems that would let her step back. That's the work I do.

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There's a specific moment that taught me how to do this work the way I do it now. Early on, I was hired by a client who had no documentation—nothing written down, no SOPs, no shared understanding of how anything ran. And I was being handed tasks like a VA. The trouble was, the tasks had no container around them. No process to plug into. No framework that would let me do them efficiently or hand them off later.

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So I stopped doing tasks and started building the system. I build systems around delivery roles, not people or names, because people change and life is too unpredictable to design a business around any single brain. 

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One of my clients right now is caring for a sick family member. She's working in a different time zone than usual, under a different kind of stress. The fact that her business can keep running while she does that—that's not luck. That's because we built it that way. Same goes for single parents. Same goes for neurodivergent founders. Same goes for anyone navigating the regular and inevitable curveballs of being a human.

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I also bring something most fractional operations people don't: a marketing background. Beam Content was a marketing agency. I understand how content, sales, and operations actually connect—so I'm not just building project management infrastructure. I'm building marketing and sales systems too, the kind that keep a business growing while you're not heroically holding it together.

What I won't compromise on

Here's the one I'd defend even if it cost me a client.

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Before I do any operational work with you, we establish mission, vision, values, and boundaries. We create an annual plan with a strategic goal. We name your North Star.

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Without that, I'm just helping you do work, and I have no way to know whether any of it is moving you toward where you actually want to go. The plan isn't bureaucracy. The plan is what makes everything else mean something. I don't take this on as a preference. I take it on as a precondition.

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This is also where I differ, intentionally, from a lot of the coaching world. There are coaches who'll talk with you for an hour and cheer you on and send you back into your week with vibes and no resources. 

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That has a place. 

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It's not what I do. 

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I want to see you actually achieve the North Star you set—personally and in your business—and that means real plans, real systems, real follow-through. I'm not here to be your hype woman. I'm here to be your strategic partner.

On hustle, honestly

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I'm not anti-hustle. Anyone who's run a business knows that some seasons require it, and pretending otherwise isn't doing anyone any favors.

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What I'm against is hustle as a permanent state. The internet sells it that way—a hundred percent hustle, a hundred percent of the time—and that's not a business model, it's a path to burnout. I think of hustle the way I think of training for a hard race: you need the hard efforts and you need the recovery, and the recovery isn't the part you skip when things get serious. It's the part that makes the hard efforts possible.

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I'm telling you this because I live it. I'm a single mom. I have a chronic illness. I'm a competitive runner—I'm training for a marathon and two ultra-marathons this year—and I coach cross country two mornings a week. For the first time, I'm experimenting with planning my work around my menstrual cycle, which has become a more popular idea recently and turns out to make a great deal of sense. I work best early in the morning, before my kids wake up. I wrap up emails in the afternoon. I rest when my body asks me to. 

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I hustle when there's something worth hustling for.

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If you and I work together, this is the lens I bring to your business too. I want to know your boundaries. I want to know your rhythms. I want to build systems that respect both, instead of pretending you're a machine. Especially if you have a chronic illness, or a neurodivergence, or kids, or any of the other entirely normal conditions of being a person in a body. Your business should fit your life. Not the other way around.

Why "Mae North"

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Mae is my middle name. With my most long-term friends, my nickname is Becca Mae. I'm using Mae almost like a pen name, as a writer would.

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North comes from something I wrote about a long time ago as a freelance writer—the idea of a North Star in business. One metric, one direction, one clear point on the horizon that every part of the business is pointed toward. The companies that get this right tend to be the ones that compound into something real, because every decision has something to be tested against. The ones that don't, drift.

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Mae North. My name plus the thing I most want to help businesses do. The compass-rose mark above the M is doing the same work—pointing the way.

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It's a small thing, a name. But when I tell you the North Star is the foundation of how I work, I want you to know I mean it down to what I called my company.

What I want for you

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Underneath the systems and the project plans and the KPIs and the annual planning sessions, the thing I'm actually offering is freedom.

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Freedom to step back from the business and watch it run. Freedom to take a vacation and have it still be there when you get back. Freedom to be sick, or be a parent, or move through a hard season, without the business buckling. Freedom to spend your best hours on the work that actually brings you joy—the reason you started this—instead of on operational fires.

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That's the real deliverable. Everything else is just how we get there.

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If any of this sounds like the kind of partnership you've been looking for, I'd love to talk.

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Schedule a Disco Call 🪩

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