Beth Mazza

Beth Mazza has co-founded and sold two consulting firms, Ashton Partners and Clermont Partners, each acquired by a global consulting firm, FTI Consulting and Riveron. She is a serial entrepreneur, author, and keynote speaker with more than three decades of experience in business and finance. The second, Clermont Partners, sold at an industry-leading multiple for the professional services sector.

Beth is also the co-author of Entrepreneur Like a MOTHER: Build a Company That Buys You Freedom, Not Owns Your Life, written with her business partner Victoria Sivrais and published by Wiley on September 22, 2026. The book is built for women running services businesses without venture funding, and it is organized around five Power Moves, the Kitchen Cabinet advisory model, and three tracks: Concept to Cash, Launch to Profit, and Scrappy to Scalable. It is less a memoir than a set of instructions, drawn from two exits and the twenty years of decisions that produced them. The argument underneath it is that most founder-owned services businesses cannot be sold, because they cannot run without the founder, and that fixing this is structural work that takes years.

With Victoria Sivrais, Beth also co-founded Female Mavericks, a content platform for women building and scaling million-dollar businesses.

Beth is also the co-founder of Retrevia Advisory, a firm that builds and operates the system that makes a company’s expertise findable, trusted, and chosen by buyers.

Beth led Ashton Partners and Clermont Partners from formation through acquisition. Across the two firms she counseled Coca-Cola, The New York Times, e.l.f. Cosmetics, Transocean, Five Below, and The RealReal, winning and holding enterprise accounts with teams considerably smaller than those of the firms she competed against. She has spent most of her career in Fortune 1000 boardrooms, advising executives and boards through high-stakes transactions and the communications decisions that come with them. The approach was the same in both firms: build a business that runs on systems rather than on its founder, then sell it to a buyer who can see the difference.

Her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, CFO.com, Crain’s Chicago Business 40 Under 40, NACD Directorship 100, and Board Agenda.

Beth Mazza speaks on female entrepreneurship, building a business that can survive without its founder, breaking into male-dominated industries, and how women crack the seven-figure ceiling. Her keynote and workshop sessions include Respect the Pivot and The Kitchen Cabinet, and she works with women’s leadership conferences, corporate employee resource groups, MBA programs, and founder cohorts. She is a 1989 graduate of the University of Notre Dame. She has four amazing children and lives in San Francisco and Chicago.