About Lakebeam

Big-company operational craft, brought home to small businesses in Vermont.

Lakebeam is a one-person practice acting as a fractional Customer Experience and Operations leader for independent businesses in Greater Burlington. The work it does, rebuilding the systems that capture revenue from the customers you already have, is the same work I spent the last decade building inside B2B SaaS companies. Now it’s applied locally, to the businesses that need it most and have it least.

Matt Kearns, Lakebeam Operations
Behind Lakebeam

Matt Kearns

Vermont-based. Burlington-anchored. The last decade was spent building and leading customer success and operations teams across multiple B2B SaaS companies, scaling those teams from one person up to twenty plus. The work was always about the same thing: making sure customers stay, succeed, and come back.

After a long run inside venture-backed SaaS, the question that wouldn’t go away was whether the same operational craft, customer lifecycle, retention, account health, the systems that quietly compound a business, could matter even more applied somewhere closer to home, to businesses that actually employ the people who live next door. Lakebeam is what came of that.

Matt is direct, plain-language, and honest about what he doesn’t know. The promise on the table is craft, attention, and a system that still works after he’s gone. More on LinkedIn →

Background

Where the craft came from.

A decade building customer success and post-sale operations across multiple B2B SaaS companies. The categories ranged from customer marketing and reviews, developer-facing infrastructure, people-management and performance software, and compliance archiving for regulated industries. Different products, same operating discipline. Each one taught a different piece of the lens that Lakebeam brings to a business today: how customer journeys actually unfold, how retention compounds, how operations stops being a thing the owner carries in their head and starts being a system that runs itself.

Customer Success Leadership
Built and scaled post-sale teams from one person up to twenty plus
Retention & Renewal Operations
Designed renewal motions, account-health metrics, and customer-lifecycle systems
Performance Management at Scale
Operated structured review cycles, goal-setting frameworks, and team scorecards
Cross-functional Operations
Built the systems and reporting that connected sales, success, and product

Across those engagements, the operating discipline was the same. The customers were enterprises with renewal cycles, expansion paths, and account-health metrics that mattered. The teams I built took customer success and post-sale operations from improvised to systematic. The discipline transfers. That’s the bet behind Lakebeam.

Why this work, why Vermont

The right gap, in the right place.

Independent businesses are the cleanest place to bring this craft home. The whole business is built on customer retention, the same discipline that drives a healthy SaaS company. Owners already pay for the software that runs the customer side. They just rarely have anyone whose job it is to make it all run. That’s the work I do.

Vermont because the independent businesses here, the ones that employ the people who live next door, deserve the same operational craft that venture-backed software companies pay seven figures for. The discipline transfers. What it buys for an independent business isn’t a smaller version of the same thing. It’s the owner getting their evenings back, the staff working on what actually matters, and a business that quietly compounds over years.

About the name

The lakebeam

Lake Champlain runs north to south between Vermont and New York. From the Burlington shore, the sun sets to the west behind the Adirondacks, and on some evenings the last light reaches back across the water in a clean line from the western mountains to the Vermont side. That line is the lakebeam. The practice is named after it because that’s the work: showing an operating business what’s actually there, and lighting the path forward.

Curious if the lens fits your practice?

Send me a note. Twenty minutes, no pitch. Tell me how your practice runs today and I’ll tell you honestly whether the work is a fit.

matt@lakebeam.com