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It’s a moment Paige Carter remembers well.
In her role as a project manager with Louisiana Economic Development more than a decade ago, she was conducting a site visit at IBM’s temporary Essen Lane location while its downtown Client Innovation Center was under construction, and a young employee walked in “just glowing.”
Asked why his spirits were so high, he explained that thanks to this job, he had been able to purchase his first car the previous evening.
“He said, ‘Most of you don’t know but my mom has been dropping me off at work since I started,’” Carter recalls. “He said that before he started there, he thought he was going to have to move out of Louisiana and away from his family to get a job. He was just glowing with pride for what he was able to accomplish.”
Read “Voices of Influence: Paige Carter”
for more of her personal and professional insights.
This is a memory Carter, who now serves as LED’s chief business development officer, frequently shares with her team when members need a little motivation. “That was when I really recognized the tangible impact that we were having on individuals and on multiple generations of families who get to stay close to each other,” she says.
The IBM investment in Louisiana, which brought hundreds of jobs to the Capital City and then more to Monroe, is only one of many successful projects that Carter has had a hand in throughout her career. The Arizona native moved to the Pelican State shortly after graduating from Arizona State University, and she rose through the ranks at LED to become director of business development.
Her next career stop was the LSU Foundation, where she created and oversaw a new office of industry engagement. During her tenure there, the university saw its largest industry investment: a $245 million health care partnership with Our Lady of the Lake Health and LCMC Health. “We were looking at how we could cultivate the workforce of the future,” she says.
“I was essentially creating an economic development team at the institution—fostering alignment between higher ed and industry with the vehicles for that being philanthropy and research funding.”
LED came calling again in 2024. The department was being restructured thanks to the passage of Senate Bill 494, aka the “Positioning Louisiana to Win” bill, and the door was open for Carter to once again help the state attract new businesses—and keep its best and brightest.
“What I really love to do is build things, and build strategy that’s targeted toward a potential outcome,” she says. “Getting to come back to LED and essentially rebuild business development in a way that I felt would help evolve industry was something I couldn’t say no to.”
It’s been less than a year since Carter returned to LED, but the department has already seen more than a 250% increase in potential capital expenditures in the state, as well as over 200% job growth in the pipeline, she reports.
“It’s really unfathomable, the type of growth we have seen through implementing new strategies, and that’s everything from how our team operates to assessing new incentives and tax reform,” she says.
Those strategies have paid off in recent announcements like the planned $5.8 billion Hyundai steel plant and Meta’s selection of Richland Parish for a $10 billion artificial intelligence data center.
And there’s more where that came from: Carter says there is more than $130 billion of potential investment in the pipeline now, all classified as “highly viable opportunities.” But she says what she loves most about her job goes back to that encounter with the young IBM employee years ago.
“Multigenerational impact and social mobility are very important to me,” she says, “being able to ensure that the next generation has more opportunities to fill their potential than I had. There are very, very few careers that can actually make that type of decision and have an influence on that reality. And it’s an unbelievable benefit and privilege to be able to do that.”
