Ivey Becker

About

Hi, I'm Ivey.

I'm from Austin, and I just moved home after six years in San Francisco, where I was essentially a chief of staff for a managing partner at a large law firm. I loved being the conduit between the technical experts and the rest of the business. I didn't have to be an attorney to know what they needed to work efficiently and produce great work for their clients, but I did need to know how to communicate to them, and from the technical experts to the rest of the organization. There are a lot of parallels between the legal industry and tech: just replace attorneys with engineers or a product team.

I worked for the same boss through four different roles at two firms. Along the way I opened a new office and renovated our San Francisco office in the same nine months (while renovating my own house, which is how I learned to read a change order), put together the pitch deck for our practice group's move to a larger firm, and then ran the transition.

I love the logistics and operations of professional services, and I'm curious what those skills can do outside of them, in tech and supply chain. I tend to be risk averse, so business school is my exercise in pushing out of that comfort zone, because you never know what you're good at until you've had the opportunity to try. I'm trying to find it exhilarating instead of terrifying.

What I'm looking for: a culture of longevity, but not stagnation.

xo, Ivey

your photo here

nice to meet you!

Experience

My career so far

Six years running operations for law firm practices, now building on it at McCombs. Here's the path, most recent first.

2026 – May 2028

MBA Candidate

The University of Texas at Austin, McCombs School of Business · Austin, TX

Full-time MBA, Concentration in Supply Chain & Operations Management. Forté Fellow.
- McCombs+ Consulting Project (Fall 2026): Designing scalable commission tracking, invoicing, and revenue forecasting processes for a fast-growing national company's real estate team (client confidential)
- Activities: Graduate Marketing Network, Technology Club, Graduate Real Estate Society, Graduate Women in Business, Jewish MBA Organization
2025 – 2026

Practice Group Business Support Specialist

Nixon Peabody LLP · San Francisco, CA

Am Law 100 national law firm; ran business operations for a 13-person real estate litigation team.
- Directed capacity planning and workflow prioritization for a $4.8M, 13-person practice, allocating staff across 150+ active cases and resolving resource constraints and partner-level bottlenecks to sustain throughput and client service
- Optimized workforce allocation by translating workload, billing, and utilization data into staffing decisions that balanced delivery capacity and talent development, serving as partners' primary advisor on resource planning and operational needs
- Managed a portfolio of 20+ vendors, evaluating cost and availability to guide supplier selection and renegotiating rates following service failures to strengthen vendor accountability and cost control, saving the team approx. $10,000/year in vendor costs
2023 – 2025

Practice Assistant

Nixon Peabody LLP · San Francisco, CA
- Led integration of 20 transferring attorneys and staff, 300 clients, and two practice groups onto Nixon Peabody infrastructure, clearing the onboarding backlog within weeks and using the migration to rebuild case-tracking and client-intake systems from scratch instead of porting legacy workflows
- Grew practice-group revenue 35% ($3.1M to $4.2M) within six months of the firm transition by partnering with finance to accelerate collections and redeploying non-billable work to raise attorney utilization
- Spearheaded go-to-market for the 2023 Los Angeles expansion via a seminar series drawing 150+ real estate agents, segmenting brokerages with intake data to target high-potential accounts and establish the first LA foothold
- Assumed full leadership of an 11-person team and 200+ active cases during the managing partner's three-month absence, triaging deliverables by revenue impact, holding every trial deadline, and retaining 100% of clients
- Grew LA clients 5x (about 15 to 75) after the January 2025 Palisades fire by anticipating a wave of price gouging claims against landlords and launching seminars within a week that turned local real estate agents into referral sources
2021 – 2023

Office Manager

Kaufman Dolowich LLP · San Francisco, CA

Midsize national law firm; supported the real estate litigation practice and office operations for San Francisco, Oakland, and Sonoma.
- Increased revenue by 25% by designing the practice's first case-tracking, client-intake, and file-management systems, converting time previously lost to manual coordination into billable work and creating greater capacity
- Launched the firm's Oakland office for a 12-attorney team, leading site selection, lease negotiation, buildout, and hiring, while managing a full renovation of the San Francisco office in the same nine-month period
- Recovered $1M+ in delinquent receivables by building a collections function that prioritized accounts by value rather than invoice age, driving a $540K year-over-year increase and making San Francisco the firm's most profitable office
- Built the financial business case for the 13-person practice group's lateral move, analyzing three years of revenue, billing, and headcount data to prove profitability to prospective firms and de-risk the decision
- Designed succession and restructuring plans for the 50+ person office remaining after the lateral departure, identifying successors for departing operational leads and mapping capacity gaps, ensuring no operational downtime through the transition
2020 – 2021

Executive Assistant to Managing Partner

Kaufman Dolowich LLP · San Francisco, CA
- Transformed client acquisition via a digital content strategy when COVID-19 halted in-person events, mining client-intake data for topics tied to customer pain points and cross-promoting into new networks to grow event attendance from 90 to 400+
- Generated $500K in year-over-year growth through customer-insight analysis of referral data, identifying the firm's most profitable relationship segments and concentrating outreach, retention, and client selection on them
May 2018

Bachelor of Arts in English

Texas State University, College of Liberal Arts · San Marcos, TX

Magna Cum Laude.

What My Boss Says

Candidly, Ivey's dedication and laser sharp instincts have done more for my career than I can say.

Most people in her role are reactive, waiting for instructions to solve today's problems. Ivey is proactive, using data to build new systems that solve tomorrow's problems.

I chose to hold off on certain tasks until she was back because I trust her judgment, responsiveness, and ability to manage key responsibilities effectively.

Ivey ranks in the top 1% of the 40+ managers I have worked with.

She is a builder at heart—a builder who leads with kindness.

She coaches staff through their weaker areas while somehow making them feel like she actually paid them a compliment.

A. Klein Partner, Nixon Peabody · my manager for six years

Skills I'm learning at

McCombs

Full-time MBA, Class of 2028, concentrating in Supply Chain & Operations Management.

The coursework

Completed

Financial Accounting

Reading the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement as a user, not a preparer: accrual measurement, revenue recognition, assets and liabilities, and financial statement analysis (ROE and DuPont, leverage, cash conversion cycle, sources and uses of cash).

Final project: a multi-year ratio analysis of a public company, where I had an AI argue against my conclusion and reconciled its math against my own.
Completed

Finance

Time value of money, NPV and investment decision rules, bond and stock valuation, portfolio risk and diversification, CAPM, cost of capital (WACC), capital structure, and free cash flow, all built out in Excel models.
Completed

Statistics

Managing uncertainty with quantitative models: simple and multiple regression, variable selection, interaction terms and nonlinear relationships, and time series forecasting, applied to real business cases and validated before drawing conclusions.
Completed

Managerial Microeconomics

Game theory, incentives, and decision-making under risk and uncertainty: building simple models to separate signal from noise, and understanding how scarce information shapes contracts and competition.
In progress

Analysis of Markets

Turning data into information into insight: market dynamics, regression and market response models, pricing analytics, segmentation, promotion and digital attribution, and forecasting, in Excel and R.
In progress

Operations Management

Analyzing any manufacturing or service process to find bottlenecks and improve efficiency, quality, and speed: process cost structure, waiting lines, inventory and risk pooling, statistical process control, the Toyota Production System, supply chain management, and project management.
In progress

Marketing Management

A structured approach to marketing decisions: consumer behavior, conjoint analysis of customer preferences, segmentation and targeting (RFM), customer lifetime value, and making and defending recommendations in cases and a marketing simulation.

McCombs+ consulting project

Fall 2026 · Five-person consulting team · Client confidential under NDA

Our team is advising a lean real estate team at a fast-growing national company on how to scale its fee invoicing, collections, and revenue forecasting without adding headcount. What I'm taking away so far:

Map it before you fix it. We're starting with a judgment-free, as-is map of how money actually moves today, treating the client kickoff as a listening session, before designing the to-be process.
Every milestone should trigger an invoice. Defining clear, event-based invoice triggers, required documents, and an escalation path for late payers turns a reactive process into a predictable one.
Forecast the timing, not just the total. When deals take years to close and pay out in installments, a useful forecast models when cash arrives and how uncertain that is.
Right-size the tools. A one-to-two person team needs a single source of truth and light integrations, not an enterprise platform it can't maintain.
Scope like a consultant. A finite scope inside an hours budget, steady weekly updates instead of a big reveal, and under-promise, over-deliver.

Clubs & community

Forté FellowA fellowship and national network supporting women's leadership in business
Technology ClubCareer prep and industry access for students headed into tech, including the annual Tech-Ops Challenge
Graduate Marketing NetworkMarketing recruiting, industry speakers, and practice with real brand problems
Graduate Real Estate SocietyPeer mentorship, site visits, case competitions, and programming with the McCombs Real Estate Center
Graduate Women in BusinessPersonal and professional development for women, from workplace advocacy to allyship
Jewish MBA OrganizationCommunity, holidays, and a professional network rooted in Jewish values

What I bring

Expertise & Interests

What I'm best at

01

Operations & process design

When I started, client intake wasn't really a process. I built one from scratch for about five new potential clients a day, so every attorney walked into a consultation already briefed.
02

Financial & P&L acumen

I'd rather chase one $5,000 invoice than ten $500 ones. I sorted our receivables by how collectible they actually were, put the right person on each pile, and turned it into a whiteboard game the team liked. We recovered more than $1M.
03

Capacity planning with data

I couldn't make the legal calls, but I could read the numbers. I'd tell the partners who was about to burn out, who had room for more, and which clients could wait a week.
04

Program management & change leadership

I opened one office and renovated another in the same nine months, while renovating my own house, which is how I learned to read a change order. When the new team felt cut off from headquarters, I started rotating in-person days so nobody stayed siloed.
05

Stakeholder management

I triaged about a thousand emails a day for my partner and boiled every associate's blockers down to a decision-ready list for one 30-minute meeting. I wasn't just allowed in the room; I was the reason the meeting worked.
06

Go-to-market & growth

Local realtors were our best referral source, so I ran the seminars that kept us top of mind. After one class on price gouging, I pulled our intake data a month later and new clients were up 10%. When COVID hit, I learned green screens and moved it all to Zoom.

Off the clock

Personal Interests

When I'm trying to destress from business school, I am…

going on long meandering walks
listening to audiobooks
skiing tahoe forever!
camping
hosting shabbat dinner
hand embroidery

Hand embroidery of red canyon cliffs above a blue river, in a wooden hoop

Hand embroidery of a cowboy silhouette filled with a sunset gradient, in a pink hoop

Close-up of a golden yellow rose embroidered over printed navy fabric

Framed embroidered El Cosmico Trans-Pecos Festival 2018 bandana with a woman in a kimono

A thread through it all

Real estate, from every side

The legal side

Six years in a real estate litigation practice on the landlord side, the go-between for attorneys, property managers, and landlords.
Leasing & site work

Led site selection, lease negotiation, buildout, and hiring for a new office, while renovating another in the same nine months.
Brokers & relationships

Built the seminar program that turned local realtors into the practice's biggest referral source.
Ownership

I own an investment property, and spent nearly five years managing three Austin rentals for Bab's Next Step LLC: tenant relations, vendors, repairs, and showings. Plus a full house renovation, change orders included.
Now at McCombs

Graduate Real Estate Society, ICSC mentee in commercial retail, a real estate consulting project, and Valuation and financial modeling next.