Jennifer Lansden is the Founder and CEO of Rainbow Chameleon Corp., a technology and operations advisory firm, based in New York. Rainbow Chameleon helps early-stage startups and small businesses make the right decisions to grow and scale their businesses. She also sits on the advisory board for several startups and is currently the fractional CTO for a new Fintech.
Before launching Rainbow Chameleon, Jennifer served as a Senior Technology Executive with over 19 years’ experience leading the technology vision, strategy, talent, and complex initiatives for large global financial institutions. She has a successful track record of implementing critical plans by driving multifunctional teams across application development, IT risk management, infrastructure, and enterprise-architecture teams. Her expertise spans risk and compliance technologies, data transformation, cloud, and other emerging technologies.
Her business acumen coupled with strong analytics, technical expertise, resourcefulness, foresight, interpersonal communication skills, and ability to develop partnerships provides her with the skills necessary to enable continuous improvement, risk mitigation, and operational efficiencies.
Jennifer also holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Hofstra University. She lives in New York City with her family.
What is Rainbow Chameleon all about?
I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur and work for myself. I saw owning a company as a way to create my own destiny. Over the years, I have provided business and technology advice to new companies, and I loved seeing how they evolved from my help.
When I left my corporate job, I took some time off to figure out what I wanted to do. Combining my years of technology delivery experience with new cutting-edge startups seemed like a natural fit. And since I prefer diversity, challenges, and flexibility, I decided to figure out how to package my expertise into a regular service for startups.
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
I had been prototyping my business model for some time and was officially going to launch mid-March 2020, but then COVID shut down NYC. While there still seemed to be a demand from potential customers, I had numerous challenges with my son having anxiety about COVID and extreme difficulty handling remote learning. He became the primary focus for our entire family. I was able to continue to work with existing clients, but I was not able to expand or take on any additional tasks.
What are your plans for the future, how do you plan to grow this company?
Given the continued challenges with COVID and my son, I knew now more than ever I needed the ability to make my own hours and create my own destiny, instead of going back to a corporate work environment. I learned how to become an advocate for my family while working on building a business. I knew I couldn’t do it all, so I’ve delegated more and found individuals who have expertise to help the brand grow.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
We focus on really getting to know our client’s business needs and making practical recommendations. Most technologists focus on cool technology but is that technology really needed at that point of the company’s growth?
Additionally, with our diverse and deep experiences we are able to prevent our clients from experiencing problems before they happen.
One of our clients that launched their app a little over a year ago has had very successful application releases month-over-month with little to no bugs or issues. In a young startup that is usually difficult to achieve, many have not figured out how to create or improve their processes and testing procedures to become that well-oiled machine yet.
What valuable advice would you give new entrepreneurs starting out?
- Outsource things you hate — I should have started outsourcing things like marketing much earlier. I thought I could do it on my own but working with clients and procrastination took over.
- Ship the work — I recently finished reading Seth Godin’s The Practice. He talks about how building the habit of shipping work frequently will ultimately make your product better. An example he gave was if you think you can’t write you should start writing every day.
- Niche — I always felt that “Niche” restricted the population of potential clients I could work with, but actually finding a niche client base helps you refine your process and get proficient in that area. Then those types of clients will refer you to their network.
- Talk to everyone in your network — You never know what they might need or who in their network may need your services.
- Just ask — What is the worst that can happen? Sometimes we are afraid to ask for something we think we deserve or afraid to start a conversation with a stranger.
Can you recommend one book for entrepreneurs?
In Arlan Hamilton’s book It’s About Damn Time, she talks about everyone being “Community Made”. That resonated with me because I believe I am a product of all my experiences and interactions starting with my personal life with my parents and siblings and then friends, my husband, and my son.
All of this has provided valuable support and encouragement. Then in my professional life mentors, managers, colleagues and staff have all taught me how to lead, collaborate, think differently, and make good decisions.
What are the top 3 online tools and resources you’re currently using to grow your company?
- HubSpot for a customer relationship manager (CRM) – I like HubSpot because it is a great central place to keep all of your customers’ information and communication. Also, you can easily integrate it with your website and email marketing for prospective customers.
- Google Suite – For a relatively low price per employee per month, Google Suite provides a wealth of services for a team. Google Suite includes email, calendar, documents (drive, doc, sheets, slides), meetings, tasks, and much more.
- QuickBooks – I love QuickBooks because I can sync all of my accounts (bank accounts, credit card, PayPal, etc.) and I can also easily automate clients’ invoices and customers can pay the invoices online very easily.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new business, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
I think with only $1000 the best is to start a business where you leverage your existing skills and either sell a service or product. If selling a product try to assign at least $700 to inventory of your product and the rest to either set up a website, email marketing, online/social ads to test your market and see if people want to buy your product or service.
What are you learning now? Why is that important?
In order to stay up to date on business & technology you always have to learn something new. Currently, I am expanding my knowledge of the different cloud providers solutions and working on getting some cloud certifications. I am also learning several data analytics solutions to be able to better recommend data options to my clients.
What’s a productivity tip you swear by?
Most importantly I rely on my calendar. I will block out time in my calendar for tasks that are important, and I use Calendly for clients to book meetings with me. I also rely on Amazon Alexa to remind me about important tasks, meetings and add meetings to my calendar.
What is your definition of success?
Initial success is seeing traction in acquiring new clients and those clients are referring you to their friends. Real success is being able to make those acquisitions become profitable enough to provide you the income you need to support yourself and your needs.
You can reach us on RainbowChameleon.com and follow us on Instagram
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