Lakebeam is a one-person practice acting as a fractional Customer Experience and Operations leader for independent practices in Greater Burlington. The work it does — making the systems that keep customers coming back actually run — is the same work I’ve spent ten-plus years building inside software companies. Now it’s applied locally, to practices that need it most and have it least.
Vermont-based. Burlington-anchored. Ten-plus years in customer-success and operations leadership across four software companies, building and scaling post-sale teams from one person to twenty. The work was always about the same thing: making sure customers stay, succeed, and come back.
After a stint in New York and 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 →
Ten-plus years building customer-success and post-sale operations teams at four SaaS companies. Each one taught a different piece of the lens that Lakebeam brings to a practice 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.
Across those four, 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.
Independent dental practices are the cleanest place to bring this craft home. The whole business is built on patient retention — the same discipline that drives a healthy SaaS company. Practices already pay for the software (Dentrix, Open Dental, Weave, NexHealth, and so on). They just rarely have anyone whose job is to make it run. That’s the work I do.
Vermont because the independent practices 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 a dental practice 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.
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.
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