Jeffrey Gardner and Michael Vickers have come a long way from their days working behind the deli counter at a Charlestown sandwich shop. The brother-in-law team that founded Carousel Industries as a small telephone-wire cabling business operating out of the same sandwich shop has grown quietly into one of Rhode Island’s leading technology companies and a major national presence in its industry... 

...Gardner and Vickers founded Carousel in 1992 when both were in their late 20s. Vickers, a University of Rhode Island alumnus, had been laid off from his job as an electrical engineer with a cabling company in Worcester. He convinced Gardner, a Bryant University graduate, to leave his job as an accountant with a Connecticut firm to help Vickers complete a cabling project that he took with him when his employer was sold and he lost his job...

...“For the first four or five years we made more money selling Italian grinders than we did cabling,” Gardner said. The phone would ring and it would be, ‘I need two turkeys, three ham and two Italian grinders,’ and the next phone call would be, ‘I need a quote for 2,500 feet of fiber optic cable.’”

Carousel Industries has since logged an impressive history of growth in a notoriously fickle, fast-paced industry. The company claims an average of 40-percent, year-over-year growth for the last 10 years in both revenue and number of employees, and is anticipating 30-percent sales growth in 2007.