TAMPA, Fla. — Tampa businesswoman Carrie Charles said tough times don’t stop her from moving forward.
“I credit a lot of the confidence to my faith,” she said. “The Marine Corps taught me to be brave, but in the face of being scared. Right? It's okay to be scared. I love being scared. I love being uncomfortable. Every single day, if I’m not uncomfortable and feeling nervous about something, I feel like I’m not in the right place, I’m, not growing.”
Charles said she spent two and a half years in the military. Today, she runs Broadstaff, a tech company that combines telecom and energy. It has expanded from a handful of employees in the last few years to a room full, and it’s growing.
Charles said she actually joined the Marine Corps on a dare.
“A Marine Corps recruiter came up to us,” she said. “My friend looked at me, and she’s like, you could never do that. I’m like, really? Watch me.”
During her service, Charles made a promise to herself: Women would always be saluted.
“I have a strong passion for young women. To help young women have confidence and have power and strength and believe in themselves,” she said.
Charles said being CEO of Broadstaff has helped her grow leaders and helped her grow.
“I was not a technical person. I had no background in technology at all,” she explained.
Charles enlisted Mike Day’s help to build out the rest of her team.
“Right now, we can think up things to do faster than we can deploy the bandwidth to enable those things,” Day said.
Charles believes sharing shine is why public acknowledgment keeps coming.
“Myself, I was actually named CEO of the year, in Tampa a couple of years ago,” Charles said. “Although we are striving for equality. We are trying to get more women into leadership roles, and it’s still not there yet, we’re just not there."
"Men need to help women along the way by being mentors and sponsors. The men that I’ve seen that support women and really lift them up, they’re the men that also are getting lifted up and promoted," she continued.