- November 23, 2024
-
-
Loading
Loading
How a former Marine and undercover narcotics agent became a pastor and direct sales team leader.
All Shaun Carter ever wanted was to help people.
Two weeks after high school, when she was 17, she joined the Marine Corps to get herself through college and aid her mom financially. She hoped to become a nurse or police dispatcher. But, following an impromptu parking lot interview with then-Sheriff Robert McCarthy, she eventually became Flagler County’s first black female deputy, starting in jail corrections, in 1992.
“You have the build to be a corrections officer,” Carter remembers McCarthy telling her. And standing at about 6 feet tall, it makes sense.
But Carter has more than height. Direct but welcoming, she exudes authority — it’s a trait which has helped her throughout the years, on the streets, in the office and behind church pulpits.
“When I came out of the Marine Corps, I had to kind of start life all over again,” she said, sitting in her R-section home-office. “(Working the jail) was nerve-racking, but it was adventurous. It was fun at the same time.”
Over the course of the next 13 years, Carter would work almost every facet of law enforcement — road work, sex crimes, undercover narcotics. And she estimates having arrested hundreds of criminals.
But she always craved to be a business owner, so she left the force and opened a restaurant in her native Bunnell. Then she became a property manager. But after reading numerous posts from a friend on Facebook about a direct sales telecommunications firm called 5Linx Enterprises Inc., she was on track to change direction once again.
“I didn’t just join right away; I needed some evidence,” she said. She read that 5Linx, founded in 2001, was named by Inc. Magazine as one of the 500 fastest growing private companies in the county.
Almost two years after signing up, Carter is now a national director, with about 150 partners in 14 states. “You get to be your own boss, and that’s what I love about it,” she added. But she also loves interacting with people all day. She knows people, she says. She’s good with them — whether she’s dealing with potential clients or known drug dealers.
“I have a good feel for people, always have,” Carter said, which over the years has turned her into an “encourager.” As a cop, she would help certain suspects she “saw potential” in, either by helping buy clothes for their kids or encouraging them to go straight.
One of her favorite lines when she was a corrections officer was telling inmates, “You’re in jail, but you’re not dead. You still have another chance to get it right.”
For Carter, every one of her jobs — drugs to direct sales — has been about relationship building. And now that she’s a pastor, at Kingdom Tabernacle of Praise, in Daytona, she says that people lean on her more than ever. Most members of her sales team, she says, either calls her Pastor, Doctor or, her favorite, Coach.
“(When I was a cop), I would try to help (people) because I saw something underlying that was causing their problem,” she said. “I believe that if you get to the root, you’ll kill (what’s) ruining them. … That’s the pastoral part of me.”
It’s a trait she got from her mom, she says, who is also a pastor, at House of Joy Ministries, in Bunnell. “I’m just being what she taught us to be.”
It’s easy to see that family is big for Carter, who admits that she chose the fields she did partly to make her grandmother proud.
“You’re going to make something out of yourself before I leave this earth,” she remembers her grandma telling her when she was young. And, describing the way she lives, Carter sounds confident that she’s accomplished that goal.
“I ran from (pastoring) because I saw the heartache it caused my mom,” she said. “But I was playing the role for years before even realizing I was.”
5Linx in Palm Coast
5Linx Enterprises Inc. now holds weekly meetings in Palm Coast, 7 p.m. Thursdays at the Holiday Inn Express, at 200 Flagler Plaza. Call 275-3865.
