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Decision Confidence Under Pressure- Helping Leaders Assess Proportionately and Calmly.

At Maple Leaf Business Consulting, we specialise in helping individuals and organisations make robust, confident decisions both in times of calm and in moments of crisis.

Whether you’re a business leader deciding if now is the time to expand, invest, hire or you’re facing a major disruption like a reputational crisis, a cyber attack, or a workplace fatality MLBC is your trusted partner. We know that decision fatigue, doubt, and paralysis can strike anyone, even the most experienced leaders.

That’s why we don’t just offer advice we teach a clear, proven decision-making model that brings clarity, speed, and confidence. This approach empowers you and your team to make the right call, move forward without regret, and return to a place of control and calm.

Rebecca understands what it feels like to have everyone looking at you for a decision- as a Police commander in crisis the worst incidents arrive with the police to resolve. Trained extensively on a model which brings calm and order to chaos Rebecca has found that this works well when translated to running a business.

As an award winning CEO Rebecca has used this model in business to help others make decisions, manage crisis or drive business forwards with confidence, empowering teams to act confidently under pressure and be unafraid of what may await.

There is nothing worse than the flight, fight or freeze feeling- Rebecca helps unlock the freeze, stop the flight and enable the fight to be calm and controlled.

Helpful at home and at work the benefits of the model enable the user to feel more confident that whatever happens they can deal with it.

ABOUT

At Maple Leaf Business Consulting (MLBC), we provide strategic guidance and practical tools to support informed, timely, and confident decision-making for individuals and organisations during both stable periods and times of significant disruption.

Founded by a former senior police commander with over 30 years of operational leadership and critical decision-making experience, MLBC brings a unique perspective to the business world. Having led complex, high-pressure operations and later served as a CEO and multi-venture entrepreneur, our founder understands the full spectrum of decision-making challenges whether in moments of calm, growth or urgent crisis.

In today’s complex environment, business leaders regularly face pivotal decisions:

Should we expand our workforce?
Is this the right time to invest or diversify our offerings?
How do we respond to a sudden reputational threat, workplace incident, or cyber attack?

Many organisations lack the internal frameworks to respond decisively, especially under pressure. At MLBC we address this gap by delivering a structured, battle-tested decision-making model that equips individuals and teams to navigate uncertainty with clarity and resolve.

Our mission is to restore confidence and control enabling clients to make decisions with precision, move forward without hesitation, and return to a place of strategic calm.

Whether you’re planning ahead or managing the unexpected, MLBC is your trusted partner in turning complexity into clarity.

TESTIMONIALS

Rebecca Chapman has proven highly professional and agile at transferring policing leadership skills to business to help SMEs in the Northeast, throughout, and now in post-pandemic economic conditions. With cybercrime escalating and targeting SMEs, Rebecca has shown exceptional leadership in engaging with strategic stakeholders to secure investment and support for SME cybercrime prevention. She has done this rapidly and successfully.

Having now expanded her immediate team, of police and civilians that’s 50% female 50% male, and engaging local businesses for her support services, she is simultaneously proving impactful in business and police arenas for sensitive, urgent, and strategic communications as well as informed and risk-based decision making; applying national data analysis to continue to develop the provision from NEBRC to local business. Demonstrating her commitment to making this a success in reducing cybercrime risk for SMEs in the North East, Rebecca also committed her own time to develop her skills as a company Director to protect the governance of this new organisation, by attending the IODs Directors course. Continuing with such commitment whilst running a not-for-profit that’s continued to grow whilst additionally maintaining front-line senior police leadership duties, including firearms incident response as a serving officer, demonstrates outstanding leadership. She has encouraged this approach to skills develop by supporting her team to develop their own skills including areas such as CRM design and implementation, data analysis for engagement, communications strategy for engagement and marketing for sustainability.

Whilst supporting a team member studying a PHD, she not only supported the studies, she identified a method to apply the research in the NRBRC, to the benefit of both local businesses and the team member. This strategic, yet people-focused approach in Rebecca’s leadership style is what is resulting in help to now over 1,200 SME contacts in the North East.

My business has also been a client of the NEBRC, when I asked for my website to have a security assessment. What followed was a slick, professional service, and the team really took their time to understand my needs and demystify what cyber security is. I now understand what my website risk is, and this is a testament to the team Becky has built.

(Colleague and client)

Rebecca Chapman (Becky) epitomises the phrase “Inspirational Leader”. A police Superintendent, seconded to the NE Region, she hit the ground running when she took on the role as Collaboration Lead for Cyber and the CEO/Director of the North-East Business Resilience Centre (NEBRC).

Becky has been the driving force from the start as the police lead of the not-for-profit organisation that provides support to help protect small and medium businesses in the North-East region, from risk by helping them build their resilience particularly against Cyber Threat Actors. The passion she displays for helping business to beat threat actors and develop their resilience is to the North-East region’s benefit across all sectors.

Without Becky’s leadership, persuasive skills, ability to assimilate information outside of her usual work sphere, and constant enthusiasm, businesses in the North-East would not have access to protective and proactive services, Cybersecurity Students would not have opportunities to grow their skill-sets which give them a leg-up in terms of experience on graduation, and far more organisations would have been victims of Cyber Threat actors and fraudsters.

(Board member and Cyber comms specialist)

Rebecca is an outstanding individual who has made a tremendous impact and will undoubtedly leave a remarkable legacy.

Supt Chapman has a very strong regional and national profile leading the NEBRC which has acted as a beacon of good practice for the other national centres, utilising the blueprint/setup developed by Rebecca and her team which has seen services to small and medium-size enterprises both flourish and evolve.

Key to the above is the engagement of business leads in the development and evolution of the centre, which has been achieved directly as a consequence of Rebecca’s leadership and engagement as she presents a clear vision of the centre and delivers tangible benefits.

The NEBRC is a clear team effort, which is achieved through highly engaging and permissive leadership, allowing the members to utilise their skills to the full and develop.

(Line Manager - Chief Constable)

I have had the very great pleasure of knowing Rebecca for over three years now and in that time her leadership has only continued to escalate, to inspire, and to transform a unique business model, supporting policing, academia, and the private sector. Rebecca carries many years of experience, not only within policing, but also from a retail background. This quite unique combination of private and public sector skills means that not only is she well placed in understanding the continually evolving needs and requests of the business community, but it means she has a solid commercial understanding of the challenges facing particularly the smaller and micro business community. This particular micro and smaller business community is one which is sadly so often overlooked and therefore Rebecca brings a quite unique perspective.

Rebecca was one of two of the very first policing Directors to be set in place, within the UK, within a business environment in order to support the wider supply chain. In this time, Rebecca has worked exhaustively with her Board and with her team, in providing the framework for delivering an ever-increasing range of services, business models and partner opportunities.

From a standing start, Rebecca has worked creatively with her team to attract and to secure opportunities in order to enable the delivery of free services to the smallest businesses within the North East. She has also actively supported the engagement and mentoring of many young cyber skills students and has continually supported women in policing and women in the wider business community. Rebecca is a strong advocate for skills development and for women in these areas and she has quickly established herself as a role model, as well as a leader.

Within the wider National programme of cyber and fraud crime prevention which is managed within the policing estate, Rebecca is recognised for her leadership also. She is routinely referred to as a mentor and a peer support to a number of other incoming Resilience Centres which have grown in the time that Becky has been the Director of her own Centre. She manages to continue to support other programmes including mobile cyber units and a wider police cyber portfolio and always seems able to find time to support and guide others facing some of the challenges she had early on.

Finally, I would also like to say a few words about Rebecca as a leader and as a person together. She has built an unique team around her, ensuring that there is adequate and broad skills available within that team. She is a great champion of further development, including one of her team going on to receive support for Ph.D. studies. She has taken on junior members of the team who have subsequently been developed and now are full-time employees. In short, her natural good humour, her diligence, and her team ethos make her uniquely positioned for this prestigious award.

(management consultant, colleague and Cyber Woman of the Year)

Becky has the tenacity, courage, and vision to apply for home office funding to create the North East Business Resilience Centre (NEBRC), having recognised gaps in UK policing, particularly around business protection from cybercrime. Becky was successful in obtaining the funding and replicated the model of the Scottish Business Resilience Centre for the North East, however, the funding came with caveats:

1) The funding was for a pilot, and within 2 years if the pilot was not deemed to be successful then funding would be withdrawn.

2) If the project was deemed successful it meant that other similar centres would be created across England and Wales, this increased the pressure to demonstrate the proof of concept.

3) The centre was to generate its own revenue streams and employ its own staff. This was new territory for any police officer. Effectively, Becky was being asked to create a new start-up business and had all the associated challenges therein whilst simultaneously balancing policing operational callouts, meaning she was often called out at 3 am in the morning, dealing with firearms incidents and then at 10 am she was holding NEBRC business meetings! Not to mention opening the books to learn and study about a whole new area of business – cyber security and cyber-crime, topics which are full of jargon, and can often sound ethereal to the layperson.

Armed with a vision, funding, and a ton of tenacity, she went about taking the NEBRC from a concept on a piece of paper to the success it is today. She did this by firstly recruiting and identifying two Police Inspectors to work for her full-time in the NEBRC, this was not as easy as it sounds as she was asking the officers to leave their secure in force posts and come to a pilot which was not guaranteed to be a success.

Becky then went on a ‘schmoozing roadshow’ identifying key stakeholders and selling the NEBRC concept to big businesses such as Lloyds Banking Group and CGI, persuading them to invest their time, money, and reputation and join the NEBRC board. Similarly, she engaged with local cyber companies and persuaded them of the merits of centre. This was quite challenging as the consultancies feared that the NEBRC was going to displace them, undercut them. And take their businesses. Using her communication skills, and building up rapport and trust she was able to dissuade them from this notion and today the NEBRC has ten such cyber companies, who are active partners. Finally, she then identified and engaged with Northumbria University, bringing them and their students into the pilot NEBRC.

After the “schmoozing roadshow” she then recruited admin and HR staff into the centre, effectively making the NEBRC a direct employer of local people. Becky focused on developing those staff, and so the team has been given opportunities to enhance their individual skills and abilities through training courses and qualifications, some have completed master’s degrees and one is studying for a Ph.D.

Becky also led, built, and implemented a PR campaign, to raise awareness of the NEBRC to its target market – local SMEs. The NEBRC was just about to have its first of six launch events across the region when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the first lockdown became a reality. Becky is big enough to admit that at this point when she wasn’t being called at 3 am, she was having sleepless nights worrying about launching the business, generating revenue, and demonstrating to the home office that the centre was a viable success during a global pandemic. If she didn’t it meant the police officers returning to force and the staff, she had just employed looking for new jobs.

Back to the present day, the NEBRC has recruited 3000 SME members and delivered 47 student services, generating nearly £150,000 in revenue that can be reinvested for the “public good”.

The home office evaluated the project to be a success, and a national roll-out of Cyber Resilience Centres followed at pace, covering all of England and Wales, with a Centre within each police region throughout the UK. There is no postcode lottery, no matter where an SME does business in England and Wales, there is a cyber resilience centre nearby to help. This would not be the case but for Becky’s drive, ambition, and leadership.