BrightSpan Partners is a strategic consulting firm built for small businesses that are ready to grow — and need a partner who will do the work alongside them, not hand them a report and disappear.
We bring cross-sector experience from government, nonprofit, and private industry to help founders and small business owners scale their operations, build a powerful digital presence, and execute on the strategies that matter most.
We kept seeing the same thing: good businesses with real potential, held back by problems that already had solutions — but no one they could trust to actually deliver them.
Too often, small business owners were handed advice they didn’t have the bandwidth to act on, or handed off to junior staff at large firms that didn’t understand their world.
They needed experienced partners who would roll up their sleeves and get into the work.
So when colleagues, friends, and business owners in our network started asking for help, we made it official.
BrightSpan Partners exists to give growing small businesses access to the kind of strategic, hands-on support that used to be reserved for much larger organizations.
Today, we work with founders and small business teams on everything from launching a Shopify store and building their brand across social media, to streamlining operations and working through the details with distributors and fulfillment partners. Whatever your growth challenge looks like, we’re in it with you.
Carla has spent more than two decades doing work that most people don’t see but everyone depends on — helping governments plan for what happens when things go wrong.
Her career has taken her from serving as Wilmington’s first Sustainability Manager, where she led the development of the city’s inaugural Energy Assurance Plan, to guiding state and local governments through some of their most complex challenges: emergency planning, ARPA and ARRA fund management, cross-departmental strategy, and long-term resilience planning.
Since 2012, she’s worked as an independent consultant — which means she’s been solving real problems for real clients, on deadline, without the safety net of a large firm behind her.
What makes Carla effective isn’t just technical knowledge. It’s her ability to walk into a room full of competing priorities, build trust quickly, and turn complexity into something a team can actually act on.
If your organization is navigating a planning effort that feels too big or too tangled to move forward, that’s exactly where she does her best work.
Carla holds a Master of Public Administration and a Bachelor of Arts in English and Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
Most consultants learn their craft in a boardroom. Phil learned his in environments where getting the message wrong had real consequences.
As a Senior Psychological Operations Specialist in the U.S. Army, Phil spent 20 years analyzing audiences, crafting strategic communications campaigns, and advising commanders on the risks and opportunities embedded in every decision. The work taught him something that shapes everything he does today: everyone is capable of great ideas, but turning ideas into action takes purposeful planning, honest communication, and people willing to do the hard coordination work in between.
During three years in the Washington, D.C. area, Phil worked for the Army in a consulting capacity across multiple federal agencies — learning to listen before proposing, and to build strategies around what clients actually needed rather than what was easiest to deliver.
After retiring as a Master Sergeant from the Army in 2022, he brought that same discipline to Wells Fargo, where he managed third-party relationships and contributed to internal communications and branding for a growing risk program.
Phil is currently completing dual graduate studies in Risk and Analytics and Business AI at NC State’s Poole College of Management — because he believes the best partners never stop learning. Phil also holds a Master of Arts in Strategic Security Studies and a Bachelor of Science in Marketing.