Karen Caldwell entered the wireless business at a time when cell phones were large and contracts were small. She remembers “big bag phones” and managing projects that involved developing 15-20 cell sites during a year. “Now,” she says “you have to have hundreds of sites on every year just to simply keep up with demand.”
Caldwell is founder and CEO of Caldwell Compliance, a company that helps carriers and tower companies manage environmental vendors and make sure that “all the i’s are dotted and all the t’s are crossed” in order to meet FAA and FCC regulations. RCR Wireless News chose Caldwell as October’s outstanding Woman in Wireless, based on a nomination made by Ellen Magnie of AT&T, who says Caldwell does “an exceptional job clearing the FAA/FCC/SHPO/NEPA compliance requirements that are required on cell sites.”
As an English major at Santa Clara University, Caldwell never planned to go into the wireless industry. She paid her way through college by working at an auto parts store, entered the electronics industry after college, and then a good friend got her into wireless in the early 1990’s. “I looked at what my skill set was and I was a perfect fit, I thought, for site acquisition, and that’s how I got into the business,” says Caldwell. She started her career with SBA Communications in St. Louis. Then, as now, wireless was growing quickly, but Caldwell says there was much less structure than today.
“There was no training,” she remembers. “They were pretty much just bringing as many people as they could find into the industry.” But Caldwell differed from most new recruits because of her gender.
“Frankly, there were not a lot of women in the business back then at all,” she says. But because of her time spent working behind the counter in an auto parts store, Caldwell says she was “really used to being in a male dominated industry. … It was just really getting in there and learning how to walk that line between being one of the boys and not really losing who I was.”
Caldwell moved from site acquisition and zoning into project management, working for both tower companies and carriers along the way. In 2000 one of the carriers asked her to take over their modification department by starting her own consultancy. “Honestly, I don’t think that ever would have crossed my mind, and when that opportunity was presented to me I thought ‘Sure, why not? What a great opportunity,’ and that’s when I decided to make the jump,” remembers Caldwell. “Again at that point I was really one of the only women business owners out there working as a consulting firm, and I did at that time reach out to a couple of other women firms and asked for some advice and guidance from them and I really haven’t looked back since.”
In 2005, Caldwell shifted her company’s focus to regulatory compliance, realizing that companies often did not have a dedicated resource in-house to handle compliance. One of her favorite parts of her work is offering training to people who are starting out in wireless, and she particularly enjoys sharing her experiences with women who are entering the industry.
“We mentor women, we mentor everybody,” says Caldwell. “When I first started to focus on compliance, I was able to tap women who had been out in the field doing regulatory work on the environmental vendor side of it who now had children and wanted to be able to have a different schedule, and this allowed them to work for us, and we got some incredible talent while allowing them the flexibility that they needed.”
Caldwell sees a need for more training in the wireless industry, and tries hard to provide a solid foundation to her employees. Her clients say they appreciate teams that show up ready to hit the ground running. “I’m actually very proud of what we’ve created,” says Caldwell. “I think it helps open up a lot of opportunities for people to get into the business and provides an opportunity for them to grow.”
If you would like to nominate someone for recognition in the Women in Wireless Leadership series, please email Martha DeGrasse at RCR Wireless (mdegrasse@ardenopco.com) or Blair Bode at Kineticom (blair.bode@kineticom.com). Bode is executive director of industry relations for the Women’s Wireless Leadership Forum. When sending a nomination, please use the words ‘Nomination: Women in Wireless’ as the subject line of your email. Follow @mdegrassseRCR for updates on the Women in Wireless Leadership honorees.
