As Principal Consultant, Lisa Smith combines firsthand business leadership with expertise in branding, positioning, storytelling, and visual communication. She has founded and operated businesses across creative services and technology, served as a fractional CEO, and guided entrepreneurs through consulting and accelerator leadership. Her experience raising capital, developing products, and managing teams grounds her advice in the realities of running a business.
Being a business owner herself, Lisa has experienced technological disruption firsthand, from the impact of ASR on her transcription business in 2018 to the disruption of EdTech by LLMs in 2023. Across each shift, she has adapted, pivoted, and found ways to use emerging technologies to her advantage without losing sight of the human element at the core of the business. She brings that same practical perspective to her clients, helping them assess new technologies, automate workflows, improve efficiency, and identify opportunities to evolve while preserving the relationships, judgment, and human experience that technology should support rather than replace.
Schain Consulting helps founders and business leaders clarify their strategy, strengthen their branding and positioning, prepare for fundraising, and improve operations as they launch, grow, or navigate change.
Our perspective comes from more than 15 years of making the decisions business owners face: where to focus limited resources, when to change direction, how to build a team, and how to communicate an idea clearly enough for others to get behind it.
Building and operating businesses has given us firsthand experience with the consequences of those decisions. Advising dozens of founders has broadened that perspective across different industries and stages. We bring both to Schain Consulting, along with an understanding that a sound strategy has to work for the people responsible for carrying it out.