My name is Mary Melissa Webster. I am an IBCLC, a business coach, and the founder of Lactation Business Academy. And before any of that, I am someone who has sat in the hard middle of life and chosen to keep building
I am not the coach who figured it out easily.
I am the coach who figured it out anyway.
That context matters. Because the women I coach are not just building businesses. They are building businesses while they are exhausted, underpaid, stretched thin, and quietly wondering if they made the right call. I have been there. Not a version of there. Actually there.
My background
Before I ever assessed an infant. I spent a decade in events, marketing, and sales.
I learned how businesses actually work, how offers get positioned, how systems get built, how clients find you and why they stay. I learned the difference between a business that runs and a business that drains. I learned what it costs when you skip the structure and try to outwork the gap.
That decade is not just a line on my resume. It is the reason coaching with me is different from coaching with someone who learned business from a course. I know what it actually takes to build something that holds and I know how to translate that for the clinical world you live in. Most business coaches understand marketing. Most IBCLCs understand lactation. You do not have to choose between the two. I am both.
Then I became a mom. Then I became an IBCLC. And I looked around at the lactation world and saw something that stopped me cold.
The clinical training was extraordinary. The business side was a disaster.
Nobody with a real business background was inside this profession fixing it. So I decided that was going to be me.
The Real Story...
Here is what the bio does not usually include, but mine does.
The seven years before I launched LBA included chronic stress, financial hardship, loss, and grief I did not have words for yet. In January 2024 I had a miscarriage. I was diagnosed with PCOS. I was carrying more than most people knew and still trying to show up fully for the women in my care.
What held me through all of it was my faith. My trust in Jesus Christ is not a footnote in my story. It is the foundation of it. I am not here to preach to you. I am here to tell you the truth and the truth is that the strength I have access to is not mine alone, and I would not be standing here without it.
I have also lost nearly 90 pounds. I am stronger in my body right now than I have ever been. I tell you that not as a before-and-after moment, but because it is part of the same story of a woman who stopped surviving and started building. On purpose. From the inside out.
Why this works
I built Lactation Business Academy because the lactation profession deserves better than guesswork.
You spent years earning credentials, building skills, and learning to serve families at one of the most vulnerable moments of their lives. You should not have to white-knuckle your way through a business you built by accident and cannot figure out how to fix.
I have coached over 30 lactation providers and birth workers. I have watched women who were about to quit private practice build practices that gave them their lives back. I have seen the moment a scattered, burned-out IBCLC looks at her intake system running on autopilot and says this is what I built this for.
That moment is why I do this.
A note to you
If you are reading this and something in you recognized itself, the exhaustion, the almost-launched, the waiting to feel ready, I want you to know something.
You did not come this far by accident. And you are not stuck because you are not capable. You are stuck because nobody handed you the blueprint.
I have the blueprint. And I would love to walk through it with you.