For Natalie Gilson and Dr. Melissa Weber, the ocean has never been just a backdrop. It has been a childhood memory, a research path, a career question, a calling, and now, the centre of a growing business with roots in Nova Scotia and reach well beyond it.
Pisces Oceans Inc., headquartered in Milford, Nova Scotia, with a Caribbean presence in Cabarete, Dominican Republic, is an ocean project consultancy built around a clear idea: the people doing vital ocean work should not be held back by weak systems, unclear strategy, limited capacity, or stories that never reach the people who need to hear them.
As Natalie succinctly puts it, “Pisces helps people help the ocean through science, systems, strategy, and story.”
The company was first incorporated in 2017 as Pisces Research Project Management Inc., founded by Kes Morton after she saw a gap in the ocean ecosystem.
“A lot of projects had the science, they had all the pieces, they just didn’t have the management side working for them,” Melissa explains. “Scientists like to be doing scientist work.”
Melissa joined Pisces in 2020, supporting Ocean Allies, a major initiative focused on equity, diversity, and inclusion. Over time, the company’s work expanded. It became clear that project management was only one part of the challenge. Ocean leaders also needed help communicating their work clearly and powerfully. Natalie, who had previously run her own creative studio, joined in 2023, bringing deep experience in branding, communications, and storytelling.
Then, in January 2025, Kes told Natalie and Melissa she was ready to step away. She brought forward a choice: either she could wind down Pisces and everyone could move on, or they could take over and carry the company forward.
For Melissa, it came as a surprise. For Natalie, it sparked something else.
“I was excited,” Natalie says. “I’m very entrepreneurial at heart, and I joined Pisces because it’s in the ocean industry, and that’s where my passion lies. When Kes decided to step away, I was like, yes, what a great opportunity.”
A New Course for Pisces
By March 2025, Natalie and Melissa had officially taken over as co-owners and Co-CEOs. They renamed the company Pisces Oceans Inc. and began the careful work of asking questions and defining what Pisces would become under their leadership.
The answer would soon become clear. Pisces would focus on helping ocean leaders and visionaries strengthen the infrastructure behind their work.
Natalie explains what that means through the example of a shark researcher.
“What he loves doing is being hands on in the water, tagging sharks, being out on his boat,” she says. “But for his project to keep going, to keep getting funded, and to keep visible, he needs project management. He needs grant management. He needs to tell creative stories about his own work to funders and stakeholders. He doesn’t want to do any of that stuff.”
That is where Pisces comes in, handling the background work so clients can stay focused on the work only they can do.
An Ocean Without Borders
Historically, many of Pisces’ clients have been in Nova Scotia’s ocean tech sector, along with academic, government, and non-profit clients. But the company’s scope is increasingly global. Melissa lives full-time in the Dominican Republic, and that connection helped make a recent trade mission to Barbados feel like a natural next step.
“One of the biggest motivations for us is that the ocean doesn’t have boundaries,” Melissa says.
The CBDC-led Barbados mission, held in May 2026, gave Natalie and Melissa the chance to explore opportunities in the Caribbean with an open mind. They were not expecting to arrive and immediately sell services. They wanted to understand the market, meet people, and see where Pisces might be useful.
The experience exceeded their expectations.
They took part in roughly 20 meetings, many of them with decision-makers and organizations already working on significant ocean initiatives. In their first meeting, with the University of the West Indies, they were invited back to deliver a guest lecture on storytelling techniques.
For Natalie, the trip also made the urgency of ocean work deeply visible. In Barbados, she saw coastal challenges up close, including disappearing beaches and sargassum blooms that had made the Atlantic coast difficult to use.
“You can see when you go to a place like Barbados that they’re experiencing them to a whole different level,” she says. “To talk to the people who are living through these things and trying to solve these things was really eye-opening.”
The mission also reinforced how much Pisces’ storytelling work resonates. Many ocean organizations are deeply immersed in the science and seriousness of their challenges, but they still need ways to connect people emotionally to why the work matters.
“People really resonated strongly with the storytelling side of what Pisces does,” Natalie says.
That blend of science, strategy, and story is also what makes the company difficult to compare to anything else. There are project managers in the ocean sector. There are communications companies that touch ocean work. But Natalie and Melissa have spent the last year proving to themselves that Pisces is not simply two services placed side by side. It is a model of its own.
“It does very much feel like we’re building our own ship,” Natalie says.
Leading Together, Building Differently
They are also building it in a way that challenges the traditional image of a single founder or lone CEO carrying the full weight of a company. For Natalie and Melissa, shared leadership is not a symbolic title. It is a practical structure rooted in equity, trust, and complementary strengths.
“We wanted to be equitable partners in the business,” Melissa says. “There’s a lot of pressure and a lot of weight on your shoulders when you’re a CEO or a sole decision maker. What’s really advantageous about what we’ve done here is that we can share the load.”
Natalie agrees. After watching solo entrepreneurs wear “100 hats a day,” she sees their co-CEO model as a healthier, more sustainable way to lead.
“We can wear 50 hats each instead of 100,” she laughs. “The things that are my weaknesses are Melissa’s strengths and vice versa.”
Their leadership has already earned national recognition. In fall 2025, Pisces received a BMO for Women grant and award. Natalie recalls realizing at the event that they had been selected from thousands of applicants across Canada.
“We were the only ocean sector company represented,” she says. “It was really validating that not only are we on the right track, but that people are seeing that what we’re doing is different and important.”
For Melissa, the award affirmed the internal work they had done to refine the company’s identity and avoid the common consultancy trap of saying yes to everything.
Behind the business strategy is a personal connection to the ocean that runs deep for both leaders.
Natalie’s earliest memory is from a canoe trip on the West Coast with her parents when she was two years old. A harbour seal surfaced nearby, and the encounter stayed with her.
“When you’re two and you don’t know what that is, it’s just so mind-blowing and formative,” she says.
For Melissa, who grew up landlocked in Ontario, the ocean first existed in imagination. She loved dolphins, watched Flipper, and later saw the ocean for the first time at 16 on a trip to Guatemala, where she remembers the black sand of a volcanic beach. Her academic path eventually led through geography, climate change, tourism, and PhD research with Inuit communities in Nunavut.
Now, living on an island in the Dominican Republic, she is surrounded by the ocean every day.
“It’s always sort of been in there,” Melissa says.
Navigating the Next Chapter
Looking ahead, Pisces is preparing for a larger role. The duo want the company to step out from behind the scenes and become a recognized ocean leader in its own right. They are developing new offerings, including a communications-for-oceans certification-style program, and formalizing an ocean impact program that would channel pro bono and volunteer support toward underfunded organizations and projects.
For Ocean Week (June 1-8, if you’re curious), they helped organize a cold-water connector event with a local diving shop, giving children a chance to see and learn about marine life from nearby waters.
“Inspiring the next generation, making a difference, having that big impact and helping our oceans, really, is what’s going to drive us,” Melissa says.
That is the heart of Pisces Oceans: not a conventional consultancy, not a marketing agency, not only a project management firm, but a business built for the complexity and urgency of ocean work. From Milford to the Dominican Republic, Natalie and Melissa are helping ocean leaders find the structure, confidence, and voice to move ambitious work forward.
And in the process, they are proving that the people who help others tell ocean stories have a powerful story of their own.