Carol Craig I Aerospace Entrepreneur: From Woman Veteran Founder to CEO of a NASDAQ Public Company

Carol Craig began her career as a Naval Flight Officer flying P3 Orion Aircraft, serving as a trailblazer for women in the military.  Today she is the CEO of Sidus Space, a public company listed on the NASDAQ Exchange.  Hear her story of her first aerospace startup, Craig Technologies, that benefited from SBA programs for women, veterans and minorities that led to her great success as an aerospace entrepreneur. 

Transcript

Carol Craig

Jeanne Gray: I'm Jeanne Gray, founder and publisher of American Entrepreneurship Today, a website that brings news and valuable information to entrepreneurs, innovators, and investors all across America. Our podcast series, Experienced Voices, explores the journeys of very successful people in the entrepreneurial arena who are open to sharing the key elements that led to their great success.

Our guest today on Experienced Voices is aerospace entrepreneur Carol Craig, who began her career. as a naval flight officer flying P-3 Orion aircraft. Her first company, Craig Technologies, was a woman-owned, service-disabled veteran, minority-owned, disadvantaged small business that today has approximately 200 employees.

Her second company, Sidus Space, is publicly listed on the NASDAQ and provides mission-critical manufacturing for the space industry. Carol's story is inspirational to all entrepreneurs. And also for young women considering their future careers. She's a role model for attaining leadership positions in male-dominated domains.

Welcome to Experienced Voices, Carol. 

Carol Craig: Jeanne, thank you so much for having me. 

Jeanne Gray: Well, I'm really curious about your background. Having been a naval flight officer and flown on a lot of P3 Orions, share a little bit about your mindset about going into a career path that was male-dominated and so challenging.

Carol Craig: Sure. Well, I think I didn't realize that it was male-dominated and challenging. I know that sounds strange, but I kind of had, I grew up as a tomboy. So I had all guy friends. I was athletic. I wasn't a girly girl. And I don't think I was aware of the reality that it was really male-dominated.

I was always interested in the military. My uncle fought in the Vietnam War and was killed in the Vietnam War. He was a jet pilot. And so I think I had a little bit of interest in the military from that point. And then even as I was going through college, I was in computer science, engineering, all of those typically male-dominated fields, but I never thought anything about it.

And then it was when I had gone to work for the Naval Air Warfare Center in Indianapolis after college, that I decided I was interested in it. Getting more involved in what I was doing on the ground and then, and then with the military. 

Jeanne Gray: Were there any challenges that you experienced where it then became evident that at least some parties viewed your gender as a factor in your career?

Carol Craig: Absolutely. There were, I would say it started at Aviation Officer Candidate School. And to back up, when I decided to join the military as a Naval Flight Officer, at the time, women were not allowed to fly combat aircraft. So they weren't even going to go through things like SEER school.

SEER school is Survival, Evasion, Reconnaissance, and Escape, I think. I've forgotten what that stands for, but it's POW training.  So women, because they weren't going to be flying in combat aircraft, didn't go, things like that. And then I went through Aviation Officer Candidates School and there were not that many women going into the military in that direction as well.

And that AOCS as i think back, Officer and a Gentleman was AOCS. What was unique there was the challenge I ran into, like you said, a male-dominated field. My drill instructor was not happy that he had a woman in his class. I mean, he made that very, very clear.

He did not want women. He didn't want to train women. He's a Marine Corps drill instructor and a great guy. It turned out to be just fine, but that was kind of the beginning of recognizing like, wow, some people don't really want us here. And then as I went into flight school, I don't know that I felt it that much.

I felt sometimes I felt like the instructors might be being almost too nice. Like, there was one time when I was flying, as a naval flight officer, you had to fly, you had to learn to fly front seat first, and then you move to the back seat in your aircraft. So I went through the training to fly front seat, and at one point I was flying, and we were in the pattern, coming into land, and I kind of did a couple of things prematurely, put down my landing gear too early.

He said, oh, no, no, no, you don't want to do that. So I just slam that landing gear right back up, which is not what you're supposed to do. It's called cycling the gear. It's a big no no. So we had to go around the tower, have a look, make sure the landing gear was all good to go. And then when I landed and he gave me the brief, he actually just gave me an average score for that flight, which in reality should have given me what's called a down, there should have been a negative to that and he didn't.

And I don't know. I thought back, was it because I recognized it? I owned it. I said, absolutely. I made that mistake. Or was it because it was new having women in the military at that time, or in aviation at that time, potential flying combat aircraft. And maybe he was being a little bit nicer than he probably should have.

I know it sounds strange to think of it as the opposite, but then, and even as I was in the military, I wouldn't say I had run ins, but I had strong conversations with other male aviators about whether or not women should be flying in the Navy, and even some of the Navy wives.

issues, even though I was like, I'm not interested in your husband, I'm flying. It was very odd because they didn't know where to include you.

So it was a little confusing to people. I think, 

Jeanne Gray: I don't know if this question applies to you. Sometimes women get a, maybe a bad rap about being assertive. And whether or not they should speak up more quickly in certain situations. Do you have any thoughts about the whole aspect of women learning when to be assertive?

Carol Craig: Yeah, I guess I've heard that, There are colorful descriptions about what women are called if they're assertive. A male is called assertive, a woman is called something else. Right. The only thing I would say is if a woman is overcompensating for it, then it can maybe be perceived as an issue, and I'm not saying we have chips on our shoulders, but sometimes we may come into a conversation with that kind of already perceived notion of how we're going to be treated or what to expect and that can cause us to come off a little too aggressive.

I don't know that I ever really saw too much of that. I'm confident. I have a strong personality, but I also like to kind of sit back a lot of times. And even now I'm in a room full of men with my leadership team and I will sit back, listen, and I'll speak up when I think it makes sense.

Maybe that's an advantage to what women do better than men sometimes. I don't know. 

Jeanne Gray: Okay. So then you jump from, a military career to being an entrepreneur and, and I know from your background that you are a woman-owned service, disabled, veteran-owned, minority-owned small business.

So, segue from a military career to starting that company and what gave you the first few steps of the runway to do that and some of the challenges that you had. 

Carol Craig: What happened is I went into the Navy. I went through SEARs School, got my wings, went to my squadron, and I had a problem with my knee.

So I went to Navy Medicine and Hospital there in Hawaii, and they took a look at it and said they could do some surgery on it and fix it.  They fixed it to the point that I couldn't run anymore. They basically kind of screwed up my knee. So I couldn't fly anymore. And at that point, I wasn't going to join the military to fly, not to sit behind a desk.

So I ended up getting out as a service-disabled veteran. And at that point, I had met my husband, who's a, was a former F 18, and F 14 pilot and was following him around. And with engineering degrees and wanting to have a career, it was getting difficult to find a job because every time I got a job, or it wasn't exactly the job I wanted, my husband would get transferred. That's one of the difficulties of being a military spouse. 

There was a point where I was working at, in Jacksonville, Florida and I was working at a company and one of the guys I was working with said, you know, you should incorporate, just in case.

And it's like, okay, just in case what? And so I incorporated Craig Technical Consulting, and then within like a month or so, the company decided they were making changes. They were, I think it was through an acquisition or something along those lines.

And so I ended up getting laid off and my husband was moving again, his squadron was moving up to Virginia Beach. Well now I've got this company.  I got some severance from the job I had before. I'm following John up to Virginia beach. Why not see what I could do? And that was what kind of transitioned me into the entrepreneur side.

It truly was just being a consultant. It just happened because of those occurrences and my husband being transferred. I thought, let me see if I can. make a go at this. And once we got up to Virginia Beach, within a couple weeks, there were some connections and people that I knew, I ended up getting a consulting gig up at a healthcare company.

And I was writing code. I was actually reverse engineering COBOL code. That dates me, right? When I say COBOL, that's the old stuff. That's really how I started the entrepreneurial journey is just as a consultant. 

Jeanne Gray: How long did you do that company? 

Carol Craig: So, that company pretty much grew. It grew from this one-person show, me, out of my kitchen, into over 500 employees at one point.

Companies craved technologies. Government contracting. And the way I moved into government contracting was that I was doing the consulting. I really still had that desire and interest in the military and then also what I had done before at the Naval Air Warfare Center in Indianapolis.

And I was designing cockpit systems and things for, for the military there. I really wanted to get back into something with the government. So, started looking at ways that I could move from just being a consultant to supporting government contracts. That's when I discovered the set asides, service disabled, veteran-owned, woman-owned, minority-owned.

I'm actually adopted. My biological name is Elizabeth Sanchez, so I'm of Cuban heritage, so I had the minority ownership. And then there was another set aside called HUBZone, which is a historically underutilized business zone. My main office happened to be in a HUBZone because I was employing my mother to assist me as I was growing my consulting company.

I asked her to come in and help and she helped with accounting. She lived in that HUBZone. So all of this kind of came together and I recognized there is definitely an opportunity here to try to see if I can grow this consulting into a real business. So it started with the set-asides.

Jeanne Gray: 500 employees are a lot of people. It took a while. And you're in the backseat of a jet. What were the skills that not got you through the first one or ten employees, but really how do you build it then to that scale? 

Carol Craig: Surround yourself with good people. I was blessed. I have a lot of people that have worked for me still at 20 some years as I brought on early on and just over those years, it wasn't about me.

It was about my team. I do have some qualities where I refuse to give up. No matter what. I think that helps when you go through the ups and downs and you know, I'm gonna persevere. I think that is very helpful. But, when you grow, it's the people you surround yourself with.

And that's not only the employees, I think, but it's also people in your community. Other business owners. I was not afraid to reach out and ask questions and ask for help because I don't have a business degree. I was making this up as I went along, right, just figuring this out. It meant that I had to start asking questions and open yourself up and being a little humble to say, I don't know everything and I need to try to learn. That's what I did. I mean a critical point for the growth in this government contracting was the set-asides because I was a part of the 8a program, which is for minorities and because of my Cuban heritage.

In the government, if you're part of an 8a program, you actually can get sole sourced contracts. It's still not easy. You can have all those set-asides and still not get work because there are a lot of small businesses and set-aside businesses out there. You still have to distinguish yourself from the others. 

That was probably the catalyst around 2005 when I won a small 8a contract and the agency, they call it the accidental contract. I guess I must have had a low enough bid  that they had to give it to me. It wasn't really who they wanted to give it to, but they're like, well, you know, you won anyway, so let's see how it goes.

And from there, we really started growing and winning more contracts. And then getting known, because that's part of it too, with these set asides. Well, the government has set aside requirements, so they'll look at larger companies and larger contracts and say, hey, a certain portion of your work needs to be given to these set aside type of categories or companies.

It's really about networking andgoing in there and saying, hey, I know that you've got set asides to meet, but here's my qualifications, here's what I've done, here's what I'm willing to do. And really get in the door and then keep those loyal customers. And that's what we did in the early days.

You know, we did everything we could to, to show our value. 

Jeanne Gray: Does that require a lot of patience when you sign into these programs and then it's six months, then it's a year, or then it's three years. Is patience part of the success? 

Carol Craig: Patience is definitely part of the success. I, and I'm not very patient to be quite honest.

It is definitely a. a learned type of attribute to realize it will take time. The way I looked at it was that if I have to have patience for one program, then I need several programs at one time. So one thing I think I'm really good at, maybe not as much as I get older, but multitasking.

You know, really not staying just singularly focused on a particular contract or a particular business model or a particular customer, customer capabilities, whatever. You should be looking at it from all different directions and have a whole bunch of lines in the water because they're not all going to hit at the same time and you need to create what I would call a diverse company, a diverse offering because diversity to me means stability. Because not everything's going to go along the same direction.

Jeanne Gray: You have these contracts coming in. Can you share a point where you had to do a gut check and say, what, what was I thinking?  Where it called upon you to tap into your reserves and your experience?

Carol Craig:

Well, there's, there've been some, just when you think about these contracts, there, there was one contract that I had that I actually. gave back to the prime contractor because the margins were really low. They, it didn't make sense with my overall business plan. And it was a little bit of a distraction in that way.

Right. And so sometimes you have to do that. Say it'd be great to have all this work. It'd be great to have more employees, but does that really make sense? You know, from the bottom line or even from a strategic perspective. And so, that was one example. Certainly in government contracting, you can decide if you want to have representative employees, union employees.

That was something that I had to really think about. And it's not that they're difficult to work with. They're not at all. It's just, it's a different structure. There's a lot more to understand. And so, in the early days, We kind of stayed away from union contracts, but now we have them and you know, it's, we understand how it works, and wonderful employees really.

So it, there's decisions like that where you have to say, am I ready for this? Do I understand it? Where, where can I go with this? And so, yeah, we've had a lot of those. How about 

Jeanne Gray: tapping into funding? Cause now you're growing and you're bringing on a heck of a lot of employees. Did you tap into any type of, uh, Were you using banks or were you using personal funds or did you have a strategic investor?

Carol Craig: Yeah, I did not have a strategic investor. As I grew my first company, I said it was Craig technical consulting. It's actually DBA doing business as Craig technology. So when I grew Craig technologies to that nearly 500 employees, that was all done organically, banks, SBA loans. My own, you know, money mortgage, my, my husband's nest egg that he had created because he invested in Microsoft way before I met him back in the eighties, we leveraged that, you know, I mean, so it was a lot of personal funding.

I put a lot of my own money that could have gone into the bank for my kids and my son and stuff into the company. And so that's how I did it. And I think I did it that way because I could with services type of contracts, you've got some stable revenue, you can kind of manage your cash a little bit better.

Um, so cashflow doesn't become as much of an issue, so I didn't necessarily really need that investment. But I also think I didn't understand how that world worked. So VCs and PE and angel investors, you know, very, very new to me. I didn't, I didn't get, so I kind of avoided it and I could. Up until I started Cytus Space, or Craig Technologies Aerospace Solutions, and that changed everything.

Jeanne Gray: And why did you take the step to set up Cytus? 

Carol Craig: So, I really hadn't planned on creating a large manufacturing company, or now a commercial space company. I was just approached by somebody with a technology that he was looking to prototype, who thought it would be a really good idea if we teamed together.

And I had a small manufacturing, just a machine shop. And so I actually bought a machine shop, the assets. And then I hired a couple of their employees for like 60 grand. It was really small, inexpensive, and. My plan was to use that as, again, a prototype shop to supplement what I was doing for the government and the other contracts.

And, um, within about a year it sort of took on a life of its own because there was an opportunity with NASA to respond to a request for information to potentially take over what was the old NASA shuttle logistics depot. which had 2000 pieces of equipment that were used to refurbish the shuttle every time it came back.

And so when the shuttle program went away, NASA was thinking about how, you know, how do we, how do we commercialize the use of this? We don't want to get rid of all this equipment. We think there's a capability here. When we move on to the next programs, we want it to be preserved. What do we do? How do we think commercially?

And so that's when they thought, okay, let's see if we can find companies who might be interested in taking on this equipment. And then maintaining it for a period of time and then kind of give it back to us. And so that was what the request for information was. It was to see if there were companies that were interested in that kind of a model to take over that equipment.

And there were only three of us that applied. They selected me. It's one of those, be careful what you wish for, because no money came along with it. I mean, it was, there was not a contract for any work. It was, hey, here you go. Here's 2, 000 pieces of equipment. Now figure it, you figure out the rest. And, uh, we did that.

And it was, the equipment was in a building that have, I happen to know the owners of the building, the landlords. So that worked out good that I could talk to them and see about leasing the building. And then we didn't have to move the equipment and, and we just started to try to grow. This concept of, uh, we called it the Aerospace and Defense Manufacturing Center, ADMC.

And, and it was a good idea. It's just that, you know, timeline things didn't quite go as fast, you know, with the, with the government or even the commercial space as we'd hoped. So we had this 160, 000 square foot facility. Five years, we had this equipment with NASA. And at the end of the five years. NASA wanted, asked if we wanted to, you know, re up or sign up again for the Space Act Agreement, but this time they wanted us to pay for the use of the equipment.

And at that point, you know, we'd realized like this, there's not a business case for all of this equipment or all of these types of specialty machines and such. So we had figured out what was really good, what made a good business case. We didn't sign up again with NASA for that Space Act Agreement, but we moved into a little bit smaller facility and, and actually recapitalized.

So I purchased. The machines knew that I knew we could utilize and that we could make a business out of. And so that's kind of how we transitioned. into this manufacturing side, which a year and a half ago we renamed Sidus Space. So Craig Technologies is the engineering and technical services type of company and Sidus Space is the commercial space manufacturing company.

While 

Jeanne Gray: you're doing all of this, are you tapping into advisors and experts? You know, how did they plug into your, your team? Um, you know, you go to your bank, but You really ended up meeting a good CFO, right? 

Carol Craig: Right, which I did not have a CFO. I had a great controller. A very, very good controller. And the way we were, we were handling it at the time, this is before we went public, is that Craig Technologies and, and I'll call it Cytospace, even though it was under a different name, Craig Technologies Aerospace Solutions, but Craig Technologies and Cytospace were very closely aligned, and they could work together Craig could look at government contracts with engineering, technical services, and if there was a manufacturing component that could be subbed out to CITUS.

The other thing that Craig Tech could do was provide back office support. So rather than staff up CITUS with, you know, all of HR and accounting and everything that goes along with the business, CITUS could buy those services. from Craig Technologies. So in a sense, what happened was that Craig Technologies was the seed funder for Cytospace to the tune of about 16 million, but over 10 years.

So very small amount of capital that's being put in. So it's kind of a borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. And, uh, and so as far as advisors went, you know, a lot of it was my team on the Craig side. It was bankers, it was SBA, it was local community. But it's hard to find an advisor for something that nobody's ever really done before.

And I think that was what was so unique about what we were doing and how we were structured. And so, uh, so yeah, so we continued on. Uh, at some point when we talked about not having, you know, investors, I've somewhat I realized I, I'm not going to be able to accelerate the growth of Cytospace, especially looking at where commercial space is right now, unless I have some sort of capital investment, some sort of money to help us accelerate what we want to do.

Jeanne Gray: So what type of investor did you bring in? 

Carol Craig: I went public. So I really did mostly banking loans, um, some revenue based lending. I had a bankers, but when it came to I had talked to a number of VCs, PEs, angel investors and talk about, you know, what I wanted to do with Citus. And they, what happened was they were lumping the two companies together.

It was, my story was so complex that I think it was almost pushed them off because it didn't make sense to a lot of these, uh, these guys. Um, and, and I think another, I probably didn't tell my story as well as I could. And I see that happening, you know, I'm very transparent. I try to be honest, which is good as a public CEO.

I think that's a good trait to have, but a lot of times you'll, you'll hear people tell stories and when they're really pumping up their companies, you're like, that's not true. That's not accurate. So they embellish a little. I couldn't do that. So, um, so anyway, the, the PEVC angel investing community didn't seem to be the right fit.

And that's when somebody approached me about going public. Craig Technology staying private, doing its services, you know, supporting agencies on their sites and stuff. And then CytusBase going public and that's, that's when we did it. 

Jeanne Gray: So we can circle back now since you've accomplished so much and you're, you're leading a public company, sort of back to the role of women.

So now that you're in the position of influencing so many people's careers, how do you take a look at your own employee base? In terms of mentoring or things that you instill or, or installed into the company that made. It'll level playing field. 

Carol Craig: Well, I think just naturally by being female CEO with engineering background and technical and being in the STEM environment, I think that alone shows, uh, it gives that, that mentoring or shows our female employees or even a male employees that, you know, women can do this and that, that's one piece.

But we try to do a lot of other things like get involved in organizations in the community. When it comes to STEM or women in STEM, I have an open door policy, any of my employees, women engineers, whoever want to come in and talk about career, what I think, you know, my recommendations or suggestions that's again, open door policy, and we even have an intern program, which right now we have 18 interns that people think that's crazy, but I would say trying to think of the numbers, but.

At least 50 percent of those are women and in technical fields, mission operations and engineering. And so it's that lead by example and, you know, lead by your actions to show that this is how we support women in these different fields. 

Jeanne Gray: Well, I mean, it was surprising to learn that Less and less women in college were entering, um, computer science and, and those, uh, in engineering.

And so this great effort has been put on the last few years to change that number, to reverse it. Do you have any thoughts on, on that big, you know, I, I would never have thought that women would actually end up not progressing in, in the field. I 

Carol Craig: am surprised. And whether it's the military or it's engineering, I mean, I really thought.

That there would be more women in engineering, women, CEOs, women, public CEOs. Uh, you know, women aviators and, and there are, so I just, you know, the, the blue angels have a, a, a female pilot. She's amazing. I got to meet her. Just incredible. So there are these awesome things that are happening. And but at the same time, it's, it's not as fast as you would think.

And I don't know if that is because there, there still is, I don't know if it's a stigma, but you know, there is that question. Can I run a company, run two companies? raise a family, you know, marriage, all those things that go along with, uh, you know, maybe being a woman or being a family, uh, family person. I think sometimes that might be intimidating or might, you know, deter, uh, you know, sometimes women will leave the workforce to take care of family and then come back in and maybe not be as received as well as they would have expected.

That's not the case with us. We've had that happen many times. It doesn't matter. I, I don't look at, I look at a person's ability, you know, when you have interviews, it doesn't matter what their college degree is. It doesn't matter how long they've been in the workforce or if they've been out of the workforce.

It's really a, you know, what, what we believe they can contribute. And it's more than just what's on the paper. And so I think having an open mind like that is important. And I don't know that it is. you know, that's necessarily the case with others. So it is interesting that it hasn't changed much. 

Jeanne Gray: Is mentoring making a difference for women?

Cause when I began my career, I don't even think we knew how to spell the word mentoring is, uh, uh, you know, it was quite an experience when you're trying to progress your career, but you find you. You don't have family or friends who have had similar careers to, to guide you. So, how do you feel that mentoring may be changing the picture for, not just women, but for, you know, underrepresented groups?

Carol Craig: I think, I think it does work. I think it's important. If we could do more mentoring, and there's a number of organizations here in Brevard County. that support women owned businesses or service disabled veteran owned businesses or even, even men in, you know, startups. And so I think that is really important.

I also think that, like I mentioned before, just Just being out there and showing what you're doing, you know, sometimes it feels awkward when you're talking about yourself or, you know, you're supporting a community or I've given, you know, talks or I'm on a podcast like this and I think, you know, I shouldn't be, you should be humble, you know, you shouldn't be saying, hey, look at me.

But in some ways. You do want to get out there so that others can see it can be done. And I know, I will say in Brevard County, which is in Florida and it's the, it's called Space Coast, so right where Kennedy Space Center is, I have seen more women owned companies start up over the last decade, you know, it's just, there's more and more.

So I do see that happening. It's, it's not, you know, a significant number, but at least it's more. And I hope that, you know, someone like myself, when I'm out there, that they can look and say, okay, yeah, if she can do this, I can do this as well. It's never going to be easy. And even now I've had some stories, things I could tell about, you know, even when my company was 500 people, like some of the comments that people made to me were just like, really, you know, you're still doubting whether or not, you know, I'm suited for this, you know?

So. But that's always going to be the case. You know, you're never going to get around that 

Jeanne Gray: when you're building your team. Did you find women are better collaborators or better team players? That's one of the other buzzwords that's out there that women bring something different to a company and that's why they should be in the 

Carol Craig: C suite.

I, I think so. Um, they do. But at the same time, I would say though, I have, I'm going to look at my own leadership team and I've, I selected, it was very selective about, uh, and a lot of my leadership team I knew personally. Before I even brought him on board, which if you look at the MBA kind of thoughts or whatever, they think that's a really bad move.

Don't hire your family or friends. But I did it because I understood what was behind it. The particular individual. And so in my case, I would say even the men in my company are very good collaborators, respectful to each other and, and have all those qualities that we look for in leadership. But certainly women do come with.

Something added, you know, goes back to multitasking or thinking differently, maybe empathy because I really believe our companies are all about our employees. A lot of people focus on the bottom line, focus on that product, whatever it really, you don't have anything if you don't have your employees. And so what's really important is how you treat those employees, that you're compassionate.

You know, we all have families, we all have situations, you know, that we're going to have our ups and downs. I think sometimes I will see women actually be able to handle that a little bit better and lead better in that respect than men. But again, I've been blessed to have men that have those good qualities as well.

I wouldn't hire them if they didn't. I guess that's what it comes down to, right? 

Jeanne Gray: I think exactly. Women are just like looking for that opportunity up at the top to make themselves a contributor. And that we're just seeing more and more entryways open, but I think there still is in the dialogue of our women, you know, why are there so few women who are CEOs of public companies, you know, they're, they're, that discussion is still going on as to the rate of progress and why or why not.

Um, so that's why I thought I would pose a couple of those questions to you. 

Carol Craig: Yeah, I still think some of it is maybe family related. I have a son with a rare genetic disorder. So as you can imagine, there's a lot of work when it comes to family. I've got a great husband, so I am, I'm not on my own on this, but you know, there's a lot of other things pulling at me and, and so it is a balance.

It really is when you're trying to balance that personal and the professional. And as a mother, I am absolutely a control freak, especially when it comes to my family, right? So my son, I went to every doctor's appointment, you know, we got him in college, he's doing great. Uh, but I want to be there and I'm still involved.

Very much. And so that, that pulls you from a traditional maybe CEO who can just a hundred percent focus on a company and, and, you know, your, your, uh, significant other can handle the things at home. So that may still be some of the challenge. that women face or some of the other, uh, minorities face, you know, will that ever change?

I don't know, but maybe I'm an example of you can do it. It's not easy, but you can do it. Well, especially that 

Jeanne Gray: women, um, choose to leave the, uh, workforce when they are going to have and raise a family. So they may lose five or 10 years out of a career that they later come back to and slows that progress up to the very top.

So those are all the things still, still playing out for us, I would say. So I thought we would sort of wrap up by talking a little bit about your initiatives that you are undertaking into the community. I think you're speaking at Junior Achievement. So. So what do you tell those, those young people?

What's your theme when you get up in front of 

Carol Craig: them? It really is. If I can do this, you can kind of a thing, but I actually teach a B entrepreneurial class for junior achievement at a local high school every year. I've got a different high schools and I just finished up the last one. And, and really, it is that message of you can do this.

It's not hard. There isn't any. One way to do it. I feel like I probably did it the hardest way so I can tell my story and I can say, hope you don't take all the zigs and zags of paths that I did. But, um, but yeah, it's, it's really that you can do this no matter what the age is. And I think where we are right now with technology and the ability for young people to even be entrepreneurs in high school, where that is, I think that that's just a huge advantage.

I mean, these kids, Have a headstart on where we are now, but they can start doing this in high school. And so it's really important to me to, to support that and to be able to be in a classroom and kind of share my experiences and, and let them know that, you know, you could do this and you could do this now.

You don't have to wait until you're 30 or 40 or 50. You know, you can do this when you're 20 years old and you're in college, you can be an entrepreneur. Uh, and, and there is, there's also that discussion about STEM and. engineering and math. And does that mean I have to go a certain, you know, route? And that's another thing I talk about.

I'm working on a PhD in systems engineering and systems engineering applies. It applies to music, it applies to business, it applies to engineering. I mean, there's some, there's an advantage to some of these STEM disciplines that don't necessarily mean that you are stuck in that particular discipline, you know, you can, you can still do a number of different things, but having some sort of a technical or STEM background, I think really is an advantage even for business owners.

I agree. 

Jeanne Gray: I believe STEM will bring more and greater opportunities to people over the arc of their career. It was a pleasure speaking with you today, Carol, about your career, about entrepreneurship and women related issues. Thanks again for being a guest on Experienced Voices. 

Carol Craig: I appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Jeanne Gray: You've been listening to the podcast series Experienced Voices, hosted by Jeanne Gray, publisher of American Entrepreneurship Today. Sign up for the series at AmericanEntrepreneurship. com/podcast.