It's Baton Rouge: Out To Lunch

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 Missionaries of Our Lady University in Baton Rouge, better known as Fran U. Tina came to Fran U in 2014 from Notre Dame, Indiana, where she had served as Executive Vice President and Provost of Holy Cross College. In the years since, she has overseen an aggressive and successful expansion of Fran U. Fran U started out nearly a century ago as Our Lady of the Lake, a nursing school. Today it is a fully accredited university with new undergraduate and graduate degree programs that Tina has created. Tina is overseeing the de

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 excursions, has a bus ride called Baton Rouge Blitz. Baton Rouge Blitz is a direct luxury bus service that runs from New Orleans to Tiger Stadium on LSU Tigers game days. The company’s executive coaches depart from downtown New Orleans hotels and arrives at the game in plenty of time to allow for tailgating, then returns patrons later that night. Patrick founded Premium Tours in 2015 and besides the football fan bus also runs other unique outings including a tour of local breweries and "Gators and Guns," a tour that takes cu

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 hospitality sector – Visit Baton Rouge – and the DDD have both come under new leadership by a new generation of women, who are bringing new ideas and creative vision for growing and reimagining Baton Rouge’s downtown and its tourism industry. Whitney Hoffman Sayal is Executive director of the Downtown Development District, a special taxing district in baton rouge that includes Spanish Town, Beauregard Town, and the Central Business District. The DDD was created in 1987 and works to support the district, using community-driven mas

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 dismantle systems of oppression and come together in new ways to make things better. Take, for example, Casey Phillips of The Walls Project.  We've talked about The walls Project previously on Out to Lunch. In this conversation, Casey expounds on a specific initiative that has the potential to address Baton Rouge’s systemic problems in new ways. It’s called OneRouge, a partnership between The Walls Project, which works to break down the societal walls in our community, and MetroMorphosis, Reverend Raymond Jetson’s nonp

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 days, well, actually, the commercial phone business has never been simple. Back in 1980, here in Baton Rouge, Mark Toney started up a phone business, for other businesses. He called it Preferred Telephone Systems. He was supplying phones that, in those days, you couldn’t even buy. Believe it or not, you had to lease a telephone – even for your home – from the – count them - one phone company, Southwestern Bell. We’ve moved on from those monopoly days to a very different world of business phones. Today we require a phon

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, a locally owned sweets boutique in baton rouge that specializes in homemade pastries and desserts, including cakes—and wedding cakes—cookies, pies and brownies.  Condoleeza Semien is founder of Beluga Bliss a company that sells handcrafted blends of aromatherapy oils and products suffused with aromatherapy oils. The blends are all natural and are designed to help with insomnia, sinus issues and pain cause by a variety of conditions ranging from arthritis to autoimmune diseases. Beluga Bliss is getting a lot of publici

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 Out to Lunch are further examples - they're rock climbers and acrobats. Rock climbers Lee Guilbeau is owner of Uptown Climbing, a rock-climbing studio in Baton Rouge that offers climbing in many forms for climbers with various levels of experience. Lee and Rob Antrobus, his business partner, opened the studio in 2017, two years after meeting by chance at a climbing wall industry conference in Colorado. At the time, they were both trying to open gyms. They decided to team up and combine their skillset. Six years later,

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 primary care doctor based here in Baton Rouge, whose practice, Sasser Direct Primary Care, represents a new and intriguing business model for health care delivery. Instead of a traditional fee-for-service model - where a doctor’s visit or hospital stay is paid for primarily by a third party like an insurance company - with Direct Primary Care, you join the group, pay a monthly fee that, depending on your age might be $50 or $75, and then when you need to see the doctor, you schedule and that’s it. No co pay, no bills!

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 ubiquitous and seemingly plebeian as signage, with Steve Perrett.  Steve is President of Letterman’s, a longtime locally owned company that started out in the 1940s as a print shop specializing in blueprints for architects and contractors - back when you actually had to walk into the store to pick up your prints. Today, Letterman's has become the state’s largest, privately owned full-service reprographics company, offering signage and graphics printing, technical document printing, and professional document management.

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 a fast food restaurant where people unexpectedly don't show up for shifts, machinery breaks, and, by the very nature of the business, customers demand immediate service and almost always know exactly what the product is supposed to taste like - owning 57 of these establishments sounds like an impossible task. Well, how about owning 150? That's the total number of Sonic restaurants Ted developed in his more than 40 year career. Ted Kergan is originally from Detroit. When he made his way down South, Ted was in Alexandria

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 racquets. Hunting and fishing trips are most often arranged informally by friends, and require rifles, rods and reels. Stephanie's guests on Out to Lunch today are involved with updating the organization of hunting and fishing trips, and the sale of equipment required for hunting. Namely, firearms. Laurie Lipsey Aaronson is President and CEO of Lipsey’s, the Baton Rouge-based company that has grown to become the largest firearms distributor to licensed firearms retailers in the country. Lipsey’s was founded in the early 19

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 others to step in and help address unmet needs.    Joshua Anderson is founder of Accelerant Education, a Baton Rouge-based company that develops software specifically designed to help high school students learn computer science and computer programming. Joshua started Accelerant when he realized that only about half of the high schools in Baton Rouge have computer science programs. Joshua understands the value of a computer science education: he is a self-taught software engineer and a graduate of LSU’s Flores MBA pro

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 providing them with easy, accessible data that measures a company’s impact on people, politics, and the planet. The platform is free, and lets users create customized platforms that include the values they prioritize and the brands they currently use. Cluey then lets a user know if their brands are misaligned with their own values, which, in theory could cause them to change their buying patterns, which, in turn, could force companies to change their behavior. Maryclaire launched Cluey in the summer of 2020, in the middle o

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 Astronomy at LSU. Like a lot of folks on the LSU campus, Professor Chatzopoulos got fed up trying to find a parking space. Where you and I might curse in frustration or even pray for a parking spot before we're late for our appointment, we're not astrophysicists who specialize in supercomputer simulations of supernovae and massive stellar evolution. Manos is. So what did he do? He came up with a parking app. Park Zen uses smart crowdsourcing to track and connect users with available parking in their vicinity— right d

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 to generate ideas, develop systematic approaches, and come up with scalable solutions to help an organization succeed. Specifically, the firm uses technology and data to come up with new processes, procedures, and ways to measure productivity and performance in areas like accounting, workforce, IT, digital marketing and cybersecurity. Jody co-founded the firm in 2014 and in the years since has seen it grow to help  clients in a range of industry sectors. When you get your business humming along and you're making money,

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-distributed services like adequate public transportation, sanitation, green spaces and foliage. And conversely, there are not unequally created vast acres of concrete and food deserts. As you know if you've ever lived in a city, these basic tenets are not as easy to implement and provide as they might seem. And, despite its relatively compact size and adequate financial resources, Baton Rouge is no exception. We're the seat of State government and so our legislators see first hand every day, as they navigate the city, exa

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 and actually cover a wide variety of energy types. There is even some disagreement about whether certain types of clean energy are really as clean as they claim to be. What’s going on in Louisiana and where do the opportunities lie? Renewable Diesel is a Big Deal One person who certainly knows what's going in the renewable energy sector locally and worldwide is Bryan Christjansen, General Manager of  Renewable Energy Group’s facility in Geismar. REG produces about 75 million gallons of renewable diesel each year, and ren

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 that can do precisely that. And it was developed right down the road at the Stennis Space center by a south Louisiana engineer. That engineer is Elizabeth Valenti, president and CEO of QRisq Analytics, the tech company that came up with this predictive technology. Qrisq uses  geospatial analytics engines on big data to provide precise storm surge and wind risk analysis before and after a major storm. This is really important before a storm for all sorts of obvious reasons – like it can help you decide whether you should

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 slam-dunks than anyone in the state is Gaye Sandoz. Gaye is Director of Foodii,  the LSU Ag Center’s Food Innovation Institute. It's a business incubator that specifically helps food entrepreneurs develop, test, produce, package and brand that delicious salsa or healthy protein bars or to die for cookies they’ve made for years to the rave reviews of their family and friends.   In the 10 years she has been at the helm of the incubator, Gaye has helped launch literally dozens of food business. She also has developed seve

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 Jason's earlier appearance on Out to Lunch when Jason told us about products Inventherm had made for space exploration. Products that found their way into NASA's equipment. At that time Inventherm was the owner of 50 patents. Now they have 60. And their new business, Cremmjoy, is a million miles way from their previous aerospace, automotive and medical devices. Cremmjoy revolutionizes soft serve ice cream and frozen drinks like daiquiris. The revolution is in the technology that drives the way products are made and dispen