Career Growth Advice from Delphine Carter, Career Development Leader | Career Tips for Women in Career Development

2B Bolder Podcast – Episode 38
Featuring Delphine Carter, Founder of Boulo

Episode Title: #38 Career Podcast featuring Delphine Carter, a champion for women looking for flexible fulfilling work - Women In Business

Host: Mary Killelea
Guest: Delphine Carter

Mary Killelea (Host): Hi there. My name is Mary Killelea. Welcome to the To Be Bolder podcast, providing career insights for the next generation of women in business and tech. To Be Bolder was created out of my love for technology and marketing, my desire to bring together like-minded women, and my hope to be a great role model and source of inspiration for my two girls and other young women like you. Encouraging you guys to show up and to be bolder and to know that anything you guys dream of, it's totally possible. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the conversation.

Hi there. Thanks for tuning in. Today Delphine Carter joins the show, and I am so excited about what she's doing to help women and their careers. She is the founder and CEO of Bulo, a careers matching service that helps women stay in and return to the workforce. Now what's better than that? She has helped over a thousand women and generated over a million dollars in revenue so far. Delphine, thank you so much for being on the show.

Delphine Carter (Guest): I'm so glad you're having me. I'm looking forward to it.

Mary Killelea: Okay, so I'm totally intrigued about your business and want to hear all about it, but first I'd like to kind of set the tone on who you are, kind of your background, kind of career highlights, and how you kind of evolved into wanting to start this career and seeing this need.

Delphine Carter: I was the stereotypical female careerist, I guess. I've always said the only thing I've ever been good at is working. I don't, I can't say whatever. I'm good at work. And so my entire career has been in as a generalist. So, I've been in sales, I've been in marketing, I've been project management, customer success, all of it. And it turned out that three out of four women have non-linear careers just like mine. And so, I would go on a job board and there was no place for me because I bounced around everywhere. And I'd been a project manager and then a product manager that creates new software and I would launch it. And so, then I had this idea with another partner at the time and we're like, we can do this. Let's solve the problem for the generalist, for the women who are going everywhere on two wheels and trying to get back into a workforce in a flexible way, and for the businesses that need these people. I just used my skill from sales, customer success, all the other things that nobody really thought was made sense and created Boulo.

Mary Killelea: Yeah, that's awesome. So tell me what Boulo, the name, how did you come up with that name? It was really intriguing to me.

Delphine Carter: Yeah. So I'm half French. I grew up overseas and Boulo is slang for work in French, like gig.

Mary Killelea: Got it. Perfect. Total sense. Okay. So let's dive into Boulo. Educate me if I'm a woman and I want to learn more about your business and how you can help me.

Delphine Carter: Yeah. So we've served two women and we're literally split in the middle of who we serve when we look at our demographics, women who are currently working full-time and looking to find a job that gives them flexibility. And then women who are trying to get back into the workforce after taking a caregiving break. And so those paths are a little bit different for each one. If you are someone who's been out of work, you may feel like you're struggling to explain how your caretaking role is valuable. And it is in so many ways and levels. And so, when you are that person, you come through our profile and we ask you a series of questions telling us what are, give us examples of leadership and innovation and stick-to-itiveness. Just give us these things in your words and a business can understand how your world today translates into success in their role in their company. And so we help those women come up with the words and then we are their advocates in the marketplace and say, Hey, you're going to miss out if you don't interview this person. Just interview. We're not asking you to hire them. Just interview them.

Now, if you're a female who's been working for a long time and you're looking for that transition job into flexibility, so you don't feel like you're going everywhere like a maniac, then with you, it's just a little more streamlined process. You can apply to any of the jobs on the career page. But our goal, our vision as a company is in 10 years to have a 1% material impact on the number of women in the labor force. So, our goal is to meet with companies, usually innovative companies that value diversity and then match them with these incredible brains that are sitting in carpool that are sitting in offices, draining themselves and just make everybody successful on all sides.

Mary Killelea: That is so fabulous. And I know this sounds weird, but I'm getting goosebumps because I so wish I would have had something like you to lean on when I was younger and doing my own job just to create money to come in the door because we needed the money, but I wanted to be there for my daughters. And so it was this craziness that I just so wish I would have had a service like you guys and what you provide. So, what's been the response from the corporate or corporate clients or are they all corporate clients? Who are your clients?

Delphine Carter: Well, that's what's interesting. And so we work mostly with small to medium-sized businesses, typically under 200 employees, because they have the ability to be nimble and agile. They'll take somebody because they are a generalist and they think, wow, all of these skills I can really use and plug and play to get my business going and for it to be successful. They also tend to offer flexibility, a little bit more open to flexibility. So that's been our bread and butter, especially tech companies that need a jump team and we can bring them a full-time accountant. We can give them a part-time marketing person and help them with their sales team. So we're able to offer everything they need to get started. Corporations are a difficult journey for us. And so it's much longer sales cycle and there's a lot more for the women to slog through to get to a flexible option. And not many are offering flexibility, even with COVID.

Mary Killelea: I think that's going to change because I think people are starting to understand the value of diversity and women and what we bring to corporations and the bottom line from a business perspective. And I absolutely love what you said in how you help women with articulating or translating their very, very useful skills from parenting, mothering, whatever the generalist break they've been doing. If you had to describe maybe three qualities that you tend to emphasize or translate for companies, what would that be?

Delphine Carter: Yeah, they're better listeners. They're calmer in a crisis. They're better team players. They're more diplomatic. And so there's people way smarter than us who have done these studies, longitudinal, legitimate studies that showed that 89% of American workers agree that working moms in leadership roles bring out the best in employees. And so, what you saw during COVID, there was, yes, a lot of women leaving the workforce, but we actually saw more women promoted into leadership roles because what companies needed at that time was empathetic listeners. And so, you saw those strengths really being elevated and valued.

Mary Killelea: Yeah, that's awesome. So, I mean, one of my questions was going to be how do you see yourself different than different job boards for females? But through our conversation, it seems obvious to me, but I'll let you articulate how you're different and why someone should go to you versus an Indeed to look for jobs.

Delphine Carter: Yeah. Well, for one, we only work with companies that offer flexibility. So it's flexibility in hours, flexibility in location, or flexibility in culture. Flexibility in culture means that if I have to run to the dentist, I don't feel like I have to account to that to five different people and then feel ashamed and like explain how I'm going to make up my work. And so, flexibility and culture are businesses who have KPIs that they give you and say, Mary, go execute, hit your goal. I don't care how you get there. Just get there. So that's really one of our biggest differentiators.

The second one is that we are the advocate for the women because we understand their voices so intimately that we can translate the value that they bring to the businesses. And the beautiful thing that we learned from the very beginning is the number of businesses owners that came to us and said, you're talking about my mom, you're talking about my sister, or you're talking about my wife. And they saw these genius women in their lives who either were incredible career moms or had always wished that they could be and never could find their way back in.

Mary Killelea: Yeah. No, that's what I hear a lot from my friends is they wouldn't change it for a minute that they spent the time with the kids, but they feel like there was such a gap. They don't know where to start to get back. And so that's why I was like, well, I'm glad I always kind of kept…I did my own web design company. So I felt like I always had a pulse on it. And then I was able to leverage that going into corporate America. But there's so many women that don't have that. And so I'm glad there's assistance out there like this. Let's talk about when you were starting this business, what kind of challenges did you face and what are some wisdom nuggets that you can share with us in how you address challenges?

Delphine Carter: One of our biggest challenges was it didn't matter whether you were working full time, or you were trying to get back in is helping women believe in themselves. We got a lot of women who would come to us and they would say in their profile, I'd say, I've just been a mom for 10 years and or five years or three years or whatever the number is. And there is no “just”. We have all been pulled into our communities to contribute in some way. And I'm highly doubt you're sitting on the couch watching Netflix all day while raising kids like, so get rid of the “just”. And then even the people that had been working full time, they struggled to believe that they could ask their company to let them be flexible, have that self-confidence to say I'm valuable enough that they will give me this request. And to handle those challenges, that's when we came up with a 360 degree profile.

So, I was racking my brain trying to figure out how can we help these women get rid of the “just” and understand their contribution with in a scalable manner. And so we worked with an industrial psychologist who helped us come up with the questions that would kind of draw it out of people without hand holding it too much. So that was a big challenge. And then also, just trying to scale a business. And the takeaway for this is take one step forward, whatever it is, just take one step, solve that one problem. And then you just keep moving. It was the times where I just felt stuck. And really all I need to do is make one choice. And then the ideas would come and you'd move past that barrier.

Mary Killelea: So, your business certainly serves a valuable purpose by bridging top female talent with companies. What are some of the responses from the women who might have lacked confidence prior, and then you see them six months after you've helped them get back into the workforce and they're nailing it and they're doing really well?

Delphine Carter: My favorite is when we get pictures of them working and there's a baby on their lap or they've got a child in the background and it's showing this can be done. They're reaching their goals. They're successful. About a month ago, we received an email from the company who told us that they had promoted to director level one of the Boulo members that they had brought in. She had been out of the workforce for a little bit. They had a customer success role and she went from helping them with their customers all the way through to becoming a director for setting up customer success. And she was thriving. They were thriving. And it was that you talk about goosebumps. That's one of those where you shout it out to the team. You put it on all the Slack channels and say, this is why we get up every single day.

Mary Killelea: Absolutely. That's exciting. What excites you the most about having your own business?

Delphine Carter: The ability to establish my own culture as a company. I've worked for great companies that had amazing cultures and super intentional about it. I've worked for other companies that culture was something you put on there because you were supposed to. And the ability to say, this is how we're going to do it and this is how we're going to behave. Our hopes and dream is to become a B Corp so that we can have as a company and as a team, a positive effect in our community, in the world. I mean, we want to go national. We are definitely more than regional at this point, so we just keep growing.

Mary Killelea: How long have you guys been in business?

Delphine Carter: Officially since 2019.

Mary Killelea: How did you pivot during the pandemic? Because I'm sure you had to like everyone else.

Delphine Carter: So when the pandemic first hit, if you'll remember, everybody froze. Don't spend economies going to like no idea what's about to happen. And so, I was lucky enough to be in the right room at the right time. And there was a movement in our city where they were taking unemployed workers and matching them with nonprofits. And there was a grant that was basically paying them. So, the zoo got people to help them clean up some of their stuff. And so, we handled all the labor, the onboarding and all of that for them. It felt good and it kept us going. And I'm eternally grateful for the city of Birmingham for having that idea and for using us. During COVID, we also realized that women were in full-time roles and needed flexibility desperately. And so that's when we started doing full-time. Originally, we were only helping women get back into the workforce. And then we realized there's an entire audience that is crying and exhausted at night that needs this help as well.

Mary Killelea: Here, here. When you think about your career in business, what keeps you up at night and how do you manage the stress?

Delphine Carter: We made promises. So, in January, 2021, we got investors. We also did some crowd funding. And I talked people into a promise, into a performance and an expectations. I also talked people into joining the team. Same thing, right? Like there are these people that believe in you and want this company to be what you promised. And it's making sure that I deliver on what I have said and handling the stress. I've got a wonderful person who most people call a therapist, but I call a lifeline. And she always talks about name it to tame it. So, like just name whatever that dark thought that's going around, name it. You'll be able to tame it and figure out how to explore it and put it away. And, you know, I have to name it a few times a month, but it does absolutely help.

Mary Killelea MK: That's great. What are you most proud of when you look back at your career?

Delphine Carter: The people where I have championed them in a room, some conference room, some meetings somewhere. And so, there's lots of people who mentioned my work in a meeting suggested that somebody come to me for an opinion or named me for a project. And that's how my career kept going. And the people that I have done that to super simple, just throw out somebody's name who you believe in, and you want them to have an opportunity and think they can really shine.

Mary Killelea: When I was researching you for this podcast, you had a lot of references who spoke very highly about your work ethic and your determination. As an entrepreneur, do you think are qualities that a person should have in order to succeed? Because, you know, at the start you get a lot of notes or even along the journey, you get a lot of notes and it does all fall on your back.

Delphine Carter: Yeah. Is it just blind stubbornness or is it perseverance? I don't know. It's just believing enough in your idea to know, I know I've got the right thing. I know this problem needs to be solved and this is just a quick fire. I have to walk through and on the other side, it's clear. The smoke clears and you're in a better place and you've you're one step closer to your goal. So maybe perseverance, just believing enough in what you want to do that you will run through a brick wall.

Mary Killelea: Okay, so now we're moving into our rapid fire section. There you go. If you could tell your 20 year old self anything, what would it be?

Delphine Carter: Stop shoulding all over yourself. I should give my kids green beans tonight. I should be working right now instead of sitting on the back porch. Quit shoulding all over yourself. That's my Lifeline Therapists advice.

Mary Killelea: I love it. For a second there, I was like, what was that? What does to be bolder mean to you?

Delphine Carter: It's that perseverance. It's to walk through fire.

Mary Killelea: Who inspires you and why?

Delphine Carter: I think it changes for a very long time and at its core, it's my father and that's because he told me there's absolutely nothing I couldn't do. Absolutely nothing that I couldn't do and I remember being like, really? I mean, for sure and he just never let that thought get in my head. But lately it's been the athletes that we've watched who have said, I'm not doing this because my brain and my health is at risk and that gives me goosebumps because the pressure they are under has got to be insane and they have found the strength to fight for themselves.

Mary Killelea: Totally agree. What are a couple of good books that you're reading or maybe what were the two last books that you've read? I always like sharing books.

Delphine Carter: I read these are odd. So one of them, it was a great little book. It's called Why Fish Don't Exist and it's kind of a memoir, but it's a really good story along the way and then the other one is more because of the line of work. It's called Double X Economy and it's about why women have found themselves with lower pay and with the childcare penalty and the parenting penalty as well. There's another one that I read a long time ago, but it is essential in any woman's bookshelf and it's called Burnout.

Mary Killelea: Who's that by? Do you happen to know? I'm putting you on the spot.

Delphine Carter: I can’t remember it. There's a pink cover, but it's called Burnout and it is absolutely incredible. Very well written, humorous, direct, easy to consume, but just so many good pointers. I'll look for it and I'll add it in the show notes.

Mary Killelea: That's awesome. Okay, so we're wrapped up. Anything, I mean, I could honestly continue to talk to you and I want to pick your brain because I love what you're doing. I want to know like, who's your, like, who's your staff? What are you talking about? Like, I want so many details about your business and what you're doing. What do you want to tell the listeners that maybe we haven't touched on?

Delphine Carter: My entire company is being built from women who have stepped out of the workforce to take care of their children and we're looking to get back in. And you can build a company that has over a million in revenue and that is spread across its little Birmingham, Alabama borders. So, anybody who owns a company, I want them to hear that and any mom that questions their value to a business, I want them to hear that as well. My team is incredible and it's all the moms that are in our database.

Mary Killelea: That's fantastic. How, what's your website address so people can learn more about your company?

Delphine Carter: Absolutely. It's BouloSolutions.com, B-O-U-L-O, solutions. And you can go to the talent page, learn more about what we do. It's always free to become a member. We become your champion. You start filling out the profile and you get your 360 degree printout that you can use. It's a PDF. You can use anywhere that you want, but it helps us make sure that your words are heard.

Mary Killelea: Thank you so much for being on the show. It's very valuable and I commend you on all your work.

Delphine Carter: I appreciate it. This has been fun.