Melissa Acton-Buzard is the Founder & CEO of Chameleon Technologies.
Tell us about your company. What inspired you to start it?
I worked in the staffing industry ever since I graduated from the University of Washington in 1995. Hired as the vendor coordinator for a large contract the company landed with Microsoft, I quickly fell in love with the fast pace and personal relationships of the staffing world. I started Chameleon Technologies in 2000. With invaluable first-hand experience, I was clear about the services and practices I wanted to offer as well as what I would do differently with my own firm. With a focus on diversity and inclusion as a woman-owned business, Chameleon set out to emphasize the importance of diversity in the workplace with a focus on outstanding customer service. Chameleon exceeds its competition by providing a very personal, hands-on, high-quality service. I also recently opened data analytics and BI project division, which exclusively focuses on data management and data analytics.
Who are your cofounders and what makes you a great team?
Sole founder but my close-knit team is like family to me and we work together to further the Chameleon brand in both my businesses.
How is your company making a difference?
In our Staffing division, we help match the best candidates with the right companies. Our recruiters are focused and spend their time finding the right fit for both the candidate and client. We offer a proven approach to finding the most qualified candidate for our client’s open positions, and we only present those candidates that we know are an ideal fit and that have been thoroughly screened and referenced. In our Data division, we make our customer’s jobs more efficient and productive. We turn raw data into meaningful insights with visual data analytics to help our clients and customers make better and informed business decisions. I believe that every business decision should be empowered by data and my team’s goal is to ensure that we extract action-oriented value from our customer’s data and provide a single view of their business data. It enables them to monitor the health of their business through interactive reports and a live data dashboard.
What are some of the challenges you have faced?
With our Staffing division, there is a lot of competition in Washington as we’re not the only staffing firm in the area. But, it’s all about trusting our recruiting process, getting feedback from clients about how we can help find the right candidates, being transparent and honest, and keeping our clients and candidates happy. Additionally, because we are an IT Staffing firm, we’re looking for qualified and experienced technical candidates. It can be difficult to find the right person with all the requirements/qualifications our clients need. In our Data division, we find that the challenges are around educating our customers about our product and the need for it. We create automated reports that people do manually, and we have to explain how it will help bring all their data into one place and solve their reporting problems by eliminating errors, reducing costs, and ensuring the validity of their KPI’s. It’s hard to explain as we just launched and are still building our brand.
What is your biggest win?
Launching out our Business Intelligence Reporting Solution this year! It’s been so exciting and it has evolved so much in such a short time.
What do you wish you had known before starting your company?
The unknowns are what get you to where you’re at! So I’m not really sure what I wish I would have known except that maybe telling myself that things change and happen fast in our industry so to roll with it and keep my head held high. I’ve learned a lot through my journey and I wouldn’t change how I got to where I am because I made decisions that brought me here today.
