George B. Thomas
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Some stories punch you in the gut before they lift you up. Danielle Urban’s is one of those. Laid off from her first job four months out of college. Told, to her face, “You just don’t get it.” Pushed into trade show booths where she barely understood the product. Staring down childcare bills that looked more like a second mortgage.
And yet here she is. Co-founder and CEO of Cartographer Consulting. Ops leader to B2B SaaS teams around the world. Mom of two girls. A human who chose to design her work around her life, not the other way around.
This is not a girl boss story. This is a real, messy, human, “I’m just doing the damn thing” story. Let’s walk it out.
From Babson To Building An Ops Foundation
In college, Danielle did not have a neat five-year plan. She had questions. She liked psychology, but not enough to stay in school for a decade. She liked business, but did not want a vague “business” future.
Her dad gave her a simple direction. Split the difference.
Study business and psychology. Aim for marketing. So, she enrolled in a Business Administration degree program at Babson College, where entrepreneurship is evident in everything, including science classes. Every assignment forced her to ask, “How could this be commercialized?” which quietly planted seeds she would not recognize until years later.
Early in her career, she kept landing in the same pattern:
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Early marketing hire, often the first one
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Tiny team, giant expectations
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A mandate to “make marketing happen” without a safety net
To meet the demand, she built systems that made one marketer feel like ten. That pulled her again and again into HubSpot implementations, campaign architecture, and data flows. She did not realize it at the time, but she was laying the exact operations foundation she uses with clients today.
If 22-year-old Danielle could see her now, she would be proud that she is, in Danielle’s own words, “just doing the damn thing” in a way that lets her kids sit at the very top of the priority list.
When Setbacks Become Fuel Instead Of Shame
There have been valleys. The first one came fast. That early layoff after only four months. Honors degree. Multiple internships. Then, she was suddenly unemployed and told, “I just don’t think you’re getting it.”
Financial stress hit hard. Identity took a hit, too.
What pulled her forward were humans who believed in her at full volume. At her next company, Danielle stepped into a team led by people who would change the trajectory of her career. Her manager, Jason Bailey, became a pivotal influence. He gave her “the craziest projects” simply because they needed to get done, and he trusted that she could figure them out. He provided air cover when others attempted to exploit her capabilities. He helped her set boundaries and then protected them so she had room to stretch.
The playground was real. Big tech company. Big budgets. Freedom to test, build, and learn at scale.
It was not all glamorous.
There was a time when her team printed a conference hashtag on hundreds of bags, only to have it hijacked by protesters in real-time. One minute, they were ready to live-tweet the opening session. Next, the feed turned dark and confrontational. She cried in her hotel room, then came back and helped the team pivot. There were years of standing at trade show booths, representing a column-oriented database with no real interface to show.
She could not always answer the deepest technical questions, but she learned she could:
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Be a warm, approachable face
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Hit the key talking points
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Connect people to the right technical expert
That was her first big reframing: you can feel out of your depth and still be valuable. Over time, she trained herself to meet setbacks with a simple filter: What is the lesson here, and how do I keep moving?
Choosing A Different Path As A Working Parent
Fast forward to life with kids in Massachusetts. This chapter shifts the stakes.
Danielle did the math on full-time childcare for two children and realized it would cost her family more than $5,000 a month. That number is not a minor inconvenience. It is a life-shaping force. She also worked for a small company with limited benefits. When her second child was born, they paid for two weeks of maternity leave. After that, there was no pay and no legal requirement to hold her role.
She wanted time with her baby.
She wanted to keep her older daughter in daycare so they did not lose the spot they had waited for. She wanted to protect her family’s finances. So she engineered something different.
During her six-month maternity leave, she began moonlighting in freelance marketing operations. She took on projects at night and during nap windows, using her HubSpot and ops skills to build a bridge out of the old model. When the work proved steady, she made the leap and left her full-time job.
Over time, she:
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Built a client base as a solopreneur
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Structured her week to work four days, roughly nine to five-thirty
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Partnered in a nanny share so she could keep her nursing baby at home, close by, while still doing meaningful work
Eventually, she combined forces with a friend and fellow operations professional, Brian Osa, and co-founded Cartographer Consulting. Now she gets to define the container of her work in a way that prioritizes her kids, her health, and her clients. The decision was not easy. It came after months of conversations, spreadsheets, and what-ifs. But it came from a clear definition of success.
At the end of the episode, Danielle sums it up in one line:
“Success to me is being able to choose your own path.”
~ Danielle Urban
That is the north star behind every move.
Leading Humans And Systems With HubSpot
If you hang out in the HubSpot ecosystem long enough, you hear Danielle’s type of story. Early marketing hire. Fell into HubSpot. Never got out. The difference is how she uses it. Her background is deeply rooted in marketing and sales pipelines. She lives in a world where leads become customers and where systems either support humans or quietly sabotage them.
She has:
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Implemented HubSpot multiple times inside B2B SaaS companies
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Built architectures that let small teams act like much bigger ones
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Helped leaders see that ops is not just “tools” but how the business actually runs
Recently, she has become particularly interested in CMS Hub and the potential of customer portals. When a client needed a logged-in experience for their customers, she pulled on that curiosity and started testing the limits of what HubSpot’s CMS can do.
That curiosity is part of a bigger pattern she sees inside HubSpot’s evolution. The platform keeps adding flexibility. You can model a more comprehensive representation of the real business in a single, connected system. That is exciting if you care about humans having cleaner, calmer days at work.
At the same time, she is honest. She loves HubSpot. She also knows it can feel like a monster to manage if you are not intentional about your architecture. So she sits in the middle. Human on one side. System on the other.
Her job is to make sure they help each other.
Redefining Empowerment, Success, And Community
Danielle has opinions on empowerment. Especially the way “female empowerment” and “girl boss” messaging can feel hollow. For her, empowerment is not a slogan. It is ownership. It is taking up space in a room and feeling like you are allowed to be there.
It is having the freedom to structure your day so your kids can sit at the top of the priority list without apology.
It is having enough control over your career to say yes or no based on what is right for you.
Empowerment shows up in how she works with subcontractors. She asks, “How do we help them get better, whether they stay with us or not?” She thinks about their growth, their experience, and their next chapter, not just the task at hand. It shows up in how she raises her two daughters. She wants them to know from day one that they are people with thoughts, feelings, and agency.
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They can make choices.
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They can set boundaries.
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They can be loud when something matters.
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They also still have to wear sunscreen.
And it shows up in how she networks. Her whole career sits on one core belief her dad shared early on:
“College only gets you your first job and the rest is who you know.”
~ Danielle Urban
She took that seriously. She adds people on LinkedIn and stays loosely connected. She replies when old colleagues reach out with a quick “got a HubSpot question, can we talk?” She never charges for a ten-minute call. She knows that generosity compounds into referrals, friendships, and future opportunities.
One of her favorite examples is a fellow HubSpot pro she first knew from LinkedIn posts. Danielle messaged her for help on a tricky attribution project. They spent the first fifteen minutes on contract scope, then forty-five minutes talking about inbound, life, and how they might meet up at a conference. By the end, Danielle was offering her a guest room.
That is how a community gets built, not through polished “networking strategies,” but through honest conversations and mutual support.
Why It Matters
Danielle’s story matters because it gives permission. Permission to:
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Reframe layoffs and hard moments as data, not destiny
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Look at real numbers like childcare costs and design work that makes sense for your family
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Take your ops skills seriously enough to become a trusted advisor, not just hands on keyboard
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Be generous with what you know, because someone out there really does not know it yet
Most of all, it invites you to define success in your own words, then align your systems, your calendar, and your community around that.
Reflect & Act
Take a minute with these.
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Where are you letting shame or “I should be past this by now” keep you from learning the lesson and moving on?
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If you defined success the way Danielle does, what would you change about your work or schedule in the next 90 days?
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Who is one person you can reach out to this week, not to sell, but to reconnect and rebuild your network with intention?
