Operators work alone more than almost anyone. We work from home, our best gifts are the ones that keep a business running quietly behind the scenes, and most of the people closest to us have no real idea what we do all day. That isolation is what this episode answers. I brought together four women who met in one of our Director of Ops cohorts and built something none of us planned: a small group inside the bigger group that has now outlasted the program itself. Their story is the clearest example I have of what business friendships actually do for a business.
Meet Beth
Beth Johnson is a Certified Director of Operations, operations consultant/growth advisor, and founder of Firefly Consulting Group. She helps contractors and trade owners of all kinds and has a soft spot for women carving out their place in the industry, supporting their growth without burning out. Her background spans the trades, project management, operations, and education, which gives her a unique view of what happens when a business grows faster than it can support its structure. That perspective has shaped how she works with clients today, using The Blueprint Method, a framework she built that starts at the foundation, walks through the entire business structure to find cracks, and rebuilds it into something that runs without the owner having to hold every piece.
Beth comes in as a consultant and usually becomes their strategist. She believes more owners can escape the daily grind of their business than they think, with the right systems and plan in place. Her mission is simple: help owners drowning in their operations get their operations under control and sleep better at night.
She and her husband, Chris, live in Charleston, South Carolina, and they have two kids who are in college.
Meet Cameron
Cameron Fugate is a licensed real estate agent and Certified Director of Operations. She is also the founder of Cameron Fugate Consulting, a strategic advisory practice for real estate investors and broker/agency owners. Her background weaves together property management, education, operations, marketing, and bookkeeping for real estate investors, a mix that gave her a front-row view of how investment strategy, financial systems, and the right advisory team all have to work together for a portfolio to actually succeed. That perspective is what led her to real estate herself, and it shapes how she works with clients today: using the Strategic Map process, adapted for real estate, to help investors build a clear, intentional strategy and align their entire team around it. Cameron believes more people are capable of building wealth through real estate than they’ve been led to believe, and her work is about helping them see that it’s possible, with the right plan and the right people around them. She lives in Kentucky with her husband, three daughters, and two dogs.
Meet Jenessa
Jenessa El Jarra is a Certified Director of Operations and strategic business consultant who partners with purpose-driven women founders to build sustainable businesses that reflect their vision, values, and impact. She looks at the whole picture, considering the person behind the business alongside its strategy, operations, and goals. Her work centers on creating the clarity and alignment founders need to make intentional decisions about where their business is going and what it needs to get there.
Jenessa believes a sustainable business should support more than the bottom line. It should give the founder the capacity to do meaningful work, serve the people they care about, and create a life that feels as intentional as the business they are building.
Outside of work, Jenessa is a mom of two boys, a beginner regenerative farmer, and an avid mushroom coffee drinker. She is also multi-passionate by nature and an artist who finds joy in drawing and painting. She brings that same curiosity and creativity into the way she sees business, always looking for connections, possibilities, and better ways forward.
Meet Tera
Tera Pupa is a business strategist, Certified Director of Operations, and longtime entrepreneur who has spent more than a decade building, scaling, and supporting service-based businesses. After founding and growing a successful transaction coordination company, she sold the business in 2022 and later completed The Ops Authority’s DOO Certification to better understand all the moving parts her clients were navigating and put some formal education behind what she’d learned from years of doing it herself.
Today, through her consulting business, TERApy, Tera helps women recognize the CEOs they already are, trust themselves to make confident decisions, and give themselves permission to own that role. She’s a big believer in intentionally connecting people, nurturing relationships, and creating the kind of community where people genuinely want to support one another.
Tera lives on California’s Central Coast, walking distance to her two adult daughters and two “son-in-loves,” with her first grandbaby girl arriving in October! When she’s not talking business, you’ll likely find her on the pickleball court, working on her ukulele skills, or dancing (and singing along) at the many small live music venues in SLO County.
It Took One Person Putting Their Hand Up
Tera did not wait for anybody to organize this. In the first few training sessions, she noticed four people contributing hard, taking the program seriously and still wanting to have fun, so she asked whether they fancied a smaller cohort inside the bigger one. They started meeting thirty minutes before every training to trade questions and catch up. That is the whole origin story. It always takes one person to put the olive branch out there, and everything you hear in this episode grew out of that single invitation.
The Structure That Worked Was Almost No Structure
Tera’s first instinct was to give everybody a fifteen-minute slot, and it did not survive contact with real life. What replaced it is a free-flowing Friday call where whoever needs the time takes it, with Voxer running underneath all week: top priorities in the morning, how the day went in the afternoon. I have watched an over-structured peer mastermind die for precisely the opposite reason. Real friendship does not run from an agenda, and when somebody is having the week of their life, you want a group that can hand them the whole hour.
Accountability That Survives a Terrible Week
Cameron left her W-2 in July 2025 and started her own business, and she is clear she would not have done it alone. Beth niched down into the construction industry after putting it to the group. Jenessa leaned on all of them through a first speaking engagement that did not go the way she hoped, and then a second one that did. The anchor is not a tracker; it is Friday. However chaotic your week was, somebody pulls you back to the question of what you are doing next.
Nobody in This Group Is a Taker
When I asked what the glue is, Tera answered generosity, and I think that is exactly right. They send each other scripts. They share the parts of the Strategic Mapping Model™ they have gotten stuck on. They give real feedback instead of leaving a question sitting in silence. Business friendships only work when people arrive as givers, which is why Cameron’s advice to anybody weighing up the certification is that the content is a no-brainer, but you will not get everything out of it unless you commit to the people too.
“We’re really not that different than the next operator sitting next to us.” — Natalie Gingrich
Weekly Ops Activity
What’s one relationship in your business that’s made a bigger impact than you ever expected?
Connect with Beth
Website: http://fireflyconsultinggroup.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fireflyconsultinggroup
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/firefly_consulting_group
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Fireflyconsultinggroup
Connect with Cameron
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameron-fugate
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cameronfugate2022
Connect with Jenessa
Website: https://sustainablesystemsstudios.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenessaeljarra
Connect with Tera
Website: http://teramarie.com
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/teramarie
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/teramarie.inc
Current promo:
Stay Connected:
Subscribe on your favorite podcast app
Join the Ops Insiders FREE Facebook community!
Share with your biz bestie