One of our favorite Out to Lunch shows, for many reasons, was a 2019 episode called High on Mushrooms that brought together two interesting, unlikely guests, whose worlds could not have been more different. Paul Charbonnet, a drone pilot and the owner of Atmosphere Drones , which shoots all sort of aerial scenes for movies, TV and a variety of users; and Cyrus Lester, co-owner of Mushroom Maggies Farm , a Saint Francisville based farmer of specialty and exotic mushrooms that Cyrus and his wife M...
Jun 14, 2023•28 min
If you’ve ever dreamed about writing or dabbled in writing then you’ve probably engaged in that fantasy where Terry Gross or Oprah is interviewing you about your brilliant new best seller or memoir or thriller or screen play. For most of us that's just a day dream. But a rare handful of local writers are actually authors of books with titles published by legitimate publishers. How does this happen? Is there a secret to getting someone to read your manuscript? If a publisher picks it up, does it ...
Jun 07, 2023•28 min
We’re inundated with bad news and dire predictions about the sate of our nation and our world and, here in south Louisiana, the condition of environment, which is ever more vulnerable to climate change and global warming. Our unhealthy lifestyles are also a problem: we spend too much time in front of screens - now under the control of artificial intelligence - and we eat the wrong foods full of processed ingredients and high fructose corn syrup. But, there are signs of hope everywhere that it’s ...
May 31, 2023•28 min
DIY. We all know what that means. Do It Yourself. It’s usually applied to home improvement projects. Like, “Why pay a professional to tile your bathroom when you can DIY.” Well, whether or not you can tile your bathroom as well as a tile layer is debatable, but there’s one thing that a number of people, at some point decide they just have to DIY - and that’s life. Especially work life. You can stay in your job, doing what you do, and be perfectly happy. But if you’re not happy with the way thing...
May 23, 2023•29 min
Most of us spend our days at work, whether that’s at the office or in this new post-covid world, in some sort of hybrid, virtual, workspace. But whatever it is you're doing, it’s probably pretty serious and grownup. But, imagine if you spent your work day doing something totally fun and goofy! The kind of thing most people do at parties or on vacation. Stephanie Morace is owner of Balloonatics of Baton Rouge , a local business that specializes in balloon arts and entertaining. That includes ever...
May 16, 2023•28 min
If you’re like a lot of people, you may never have completely gotten your head around crypto currency or believed that it is a viable and inevitable replacement for traditional bullion-based U.S. dollars. When the crypto market cratered in the summer of 2022, you might have felt a little bit vindicated and assumed that the whole thing was over. A flash in the pan, just like you’ve been saying all along. Right? Well, not so fast apparently. As crypto continues its fluctuations, here in Baton Roug...
May 09, 2023•28 min
There are so many things we take for granted we don’t even much think about them: they’re part of our daily life so we may not even really pay them much attention. For example, a billboard we pass on the side of the road, or the bar of soap we pick up to wash our hands. What separates creative entrepreneurs from the rest of us is the ability to take those everyday things and come up with a way to reimagine them and make them better so they can reach more people. They're generally the kind of inn...
Apr 17, 2023•28 min
Since the beginning of time, we have turned to nature to find plants and roots and fungi to calm us or pep us up, help us perform better, or take us out of our bodies and minds to some other dimension. It’s an age old tradition that continues to the present day and has given us foods, beverages, remedies, supplements and, drugs around which entire industries have been built. Randy Mire makes his living in one of those industries: medical marijuana. Randy is a pharmacist and owner of Capitol Well...
Apr 11, 2023•29 min
Baton Rouge may be no Silicon Valley, heck it may not not even be the "Silicon Bayou" that we were hyped in the early 2000s by the tech park and economic development folks. That said, there are nonetheless some amazingly impressive companies here that are creating tech products and performing IT services in ways that are not being done anywhere else. These are not attention-grabbing cool startups with a catchy marketing hook solving some or other issue like laundry and parking (though we have th...
Mar 29, 2023•29 min
The lemonade stand has become a sort of iconic institution in the American narrative: the kid on the side of the road peddling lemonade from a pitcher. A way to make a little extra change and stave of summer boredom while also picking up a thing or two about the fundamentals of entrepreneurship. But the lemonade stand can be so much more. Not only a teaching tool but a way to help young people with disabilities learn entrepreneurship. Case in point: Sherilyn Hayward's business, Leroy's Lip Smack...
Mar 15, 2023•29 min
Louisiana continues to rank behind almost every other state in the country in terms of its educational outcomes across the board – from Pre-K through post secondary. But buried under those bad stats, are some bright spots – success stories of programs and schools that are finding ways to prepare students and train them for the jobs of the future. On this episode of Out to Lunch, meet two of the leading lights of the Baton Rouge education system. Tina Holland is President and CEO of Franciscan Mi...
Mar 08, 2023•30 min
We often lump "tourism and hospitality" together because they seem to go together, but like other conjunctive categories like "sales and marketing" or "chicken and waffles," "tourism and hospitality" is a vast umbrella under which there are a plethora of specialties. within these sub-groups, entrepreneurs have created businesses providing services in a multitude of innovative ways. Take, for example, Patrick Healey. Patrick is owner of Premium Tours and Transportation , which, among other excurs...
Mar 01, 2023•29 min
Anyone who’s been around Baton Rouge for a while has noticed the amazing transformation of its downtown over the past 30 years. it's a transformation that has come in large part from the planning and leadership of the Downtown Development District . In that time, the capital city has also seen growth and transformation in its hospitality and tourism sector, which is largely, though not exclusively, concentrated downtown. In recent months, the organization that oversees the tourism and hospitalit...
Feb 15, 2023•29 min
Entrepreneurs frequently explain how they came up with a business idea to solve some sort of problem they personally experienced. This "necessity is the mother of invention" incentive is also true in the world of non-profits and purpose-driven businesses more concerned about making a difference than making a profit. Often it is during the worst of times - crises, hardships, or conflagrations and controversies - that people see opportunities to help those most in need. Or, on a grander scale, to ...
Feb 08, 2023•28 min
Have you heard this sentence lately? “Please listen carefully, our menu has changed.” I bet you have. It seems like every place you call, from a giant multinational company to a local small business, has a phone system that for some mysterious reason has to constantly be updated. Why exactly does the menu have to change? What was wrong with the last time I called when I had to press 1 for sales and 2 for tech support? If it seems like even making a simple phone call has gotten complicated these ...
Jan 25, 2023•30 min
Everybody likes to feel good. For some people that's simply the absence of pain. For other it's chocolate cake. As consumers we all like to splurge from time to time. Even if we’re pinching pennies, there’s always going to be a special something we’ll make an exception for because it makes us feel good, mentally, physically or emotionally. If you’re that entrepreneur, who can intuit what customers need, you just might have hit on the secret to success. Liz Anderson is owner of Honey Hive Treats ...
Jan 18, 2023•29 min
You often hear people giving business or career advice along the lines of, "Do something you love and you'll never have a bad day at work." Intuitively you just know that's not true: there's no such thing as having a great day every day, but as we've discovered over the years here on Out to Lunch, you can get pretty close. We've met people who have turned their passions for bee keeping, scuba diving, art, and may more occupations into profitable businesses. Stephanie's guests on this edition of ...
Jan 11, 2023•28 min
When it comes to quality of life measures, Louisiana ranks near last in every category – especially health-related categories like life expectancy, and rates of diabetes, cancer, hypertension and heart disease. And we have some of the worst outcomes of any state in the U.S. But entrepreneurially-minded medical and health experts are trying to help address this by using new models of health care delivery, and coming up with inventive ways to engage underserved communities. Dr. Charles Sasser is a...
Dec 06, 2022•30 min
The one constant in business (and in life), is change. Like most platitudes, this one also is true. You might not think things as already established and mundane as breakfast cereal or everyday signage need to change. But they do. Companies that are able to adapt to change, even if they’ve been around a long time - or start ups that can come up with a better way to deliver an old favorite - are the businesses that survive and thrive. Let's kick off the conversation by talking about something as ...
Nov 30, 2022•29 min
This is an encore presentation of Stephanie Riegel's conversation with fast food impresario Ted Kergan. We decided to unearth this episode and run it again because Mr. Kergan is one fascinating guy. In 2018 when we recorded this conversation, Ted was the largest franchisee of Sonic drive in restaurants in the state of Louisiana. He owned 58 Sonic locations in the central and southern part of the state. When you think about how much can go wrong day-to-day in any single workplace - especially in ...
Nov 23, 2022•28 min
Louisiana is known as a "sportsmen’s paradise" because of the abundant fish and game that make for good hunting and fishing. And that’s created something of a culture – one, admittedly shared by many states in the south and the west—that loves to hunt and fish. All sports require organization. And specialty equipment. Football, for example, is arranged by leagues - from high school through the NFL - and requires pads and helmets. Tennis is typically centered on clubs, and requires balls and racq...
Nov 16, 2022•30 min
Our educational systems, from pre school through the graduate level, are in a constant process of evolution and, in many ways improvement, as pedagogy becomes more sophisticated and curricula become more specialized in response to an ever more complex world. And yet, in some ways we’re not at all keeping up and our schools and universities are falling short of how they need to be preparing students to succeed in the 21st century. But those gaps can also create opportunities for entrepreneurs and...
Nov 02, 2022•30 min
As many of our systems and institutions change these days, they challenge our long-held assumptions and make us rethink the way we do just about everything - even simple things like buying dish soap or sneakers. If you think there's nothing you don't know about online shopping by now, let me you clue you in on the next level, courtesy of Maryclaire Manard. Maryclaire is founder of Cluey Consumer , an online platform that enables internet and IRL shoppers to practice conscious consumerism by prov...
Oct 25, 2022•28 min
The university is a place of learning, where scholars do research and impart their wisdom to students through lectures and courses. But with all those smart people walking around, sometimes great ideas emerge from the ivory towers of academia that are quite unrelated to one’s field of study or area of expertise. And, like all happy accidents, sometimes those are the best ideas. Take, for example, the current experience of Professor Manos Chatzopoulos. Manos is Assistant Professor of Physics and ...
Oct 11, 2022•30 min
In today’s hyper-competitive economy, even if you're a sharp business person you need a lot of tools to run a business - from everyday people-management HR skills to social media marketing, and that's not even touching the nuts and bolts of your business itself. To keep up and stay competitive, local business people are turning to specialized sources for help. Jody Mitchell is CEO of Directed Analytics , a Baton Rouge-based company focused on helping businesses with a range of services designed ...
Sep 27, 2022•28 min
In conversations about how cities ideally ought to run, you often hear the term "level playing field." That's meant to describe an urban environment that's equally accessible to everybody - physically, but also socio-economically. The concept behind this fundamental urban planning is, given that there are inevitably going to be wealth differences between different parts of town, as much of the structure of the city as can be controlled by ordinances and planning will ensure there are equally-dis...
Sep 21, 2022•28 min
One of the biggest business stories in Louisiana today is in the growth of the renewable energy sector. With a growing acceptance of climate change, and policies in Washington that incentivize the development of renewable energy sources, it’s an exciting time to be in the clean energy space. Louisiana, because it already is home to so many petrochemical facilities, is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the growth. But renewable energy and clean energy are terms that get thrown around freely an...
Sep 14, 2022•29 min
In a part of the world where hurricanes and severe weather events are an ever present threat that appear to be getting worse, it would seem anyone who could come up with a way to predict not only how your general area would be affected by a storm but how much wind and water were expected at your specific street address... Well, you’d expect that person to be a world-famous gazillionaire and probably a figment of the collective imagination of a storm-weary public. But actually, there is a tool th...
Aug 10, 2022•27 min
Food is something we know we do well in Louisiana. We’re renowned the world over for our Cajun and Creole cuisines, our seafood industry, and the many restaurants and famous chefs we have produced. But Louisiana also has a thriving culture for food entrepreneurs . People may bemoan that our tech or manufacturing sectors lag those of Texas or Silicon Valley, but they cannot quibble with the fact that food-based businesses in Louisiana are a slam dunk! Somebody who's seen more food entrepreneurial...
Aug 03, 2022•28 min
One of the first rules in business is to come up with something that solves a problem your target market didn’t know it had. It sounds so simple, right? But how do you know what those problems are? And, where do those ideas come from in the first place?. Well, in Baton Rouge, one place to look is LSU's Innovation Park and a company called Iventherm . Inventherm's latest innovation is a new startup company called Cremmjoy . Jason Hugenroth is President of Inventherm and Cremmjoy. You may recall J...
Jul 27, 2022•29 min
