It's Baton Rouge: Out To Lunch

When you draw up a business contract, lawyers try and predict the myriad things that could go wrong and plan strategies and remedies so if they do there are no surprises and you know what to do. Well, outside of business, real life is different. You can’t even imagine the number of things that can go – well, if not totally wrong, not as right as you’d like. When things go off the rails, or before they do, to try and head off the worst outcome, there are places and people to turn to. Like Stephanie's two guests on Out to Lunch. Rachael Hebert is Executive Director of The Red Shoes, a non-profit center for personal and spiritual growth with a mission of supporting women on their life’s journey. Located in Mid City here in Baton Rouge, The Red Shoes was founded in 1999 to celebrate, empower and nurture women and offers a space to explore and develop their inner life. Rachael is a licensed clinical social worker and who took over as Executive Director in 2024, but she has a long history of

"Hi, how are you? "  It's amazing how often the word "hi" and the question “How are you?” go together. The latter is such a standard greeting it barely registers as a serious question. The standard answer is, “Good. How are you?” Now, if we were to stop there and have a real conversation about how we are, most of us would say we’re good, but we could be better. We’d like a better job, better car, bigger house, more money, less stress… But much of the time these kinds of life-improvements are out of our control – or they’re a more distant goal. So, if we can’t do better immediately, what we can do is feel better. One of the ways we do that is with food. There’s comfort food. And there’s food as medicine. One particular medicinal food that’s having a moment these days is mushrooms. Here in Baton Rouge, Jordan Gros is a Biological Engineer and CEO of a mushroom-as-medicine company called Mycocentrics. The use of mushrooms as

In the past few decades, technology has taken over the way we live our lives. From the books that we read to news we receive, the way we consume media has been changed forever. But recently, there’s been a movement to return to the analogue. Whether it’s vinyl records, DVDs, or even newspapers - the demand for physical media is growing. Creators and storytellers across the nation are meeting that growing need by making new and interesting physical content of their own. Christopher Payne is doing just that with his publication Fine Print. Christopher grew up in a small town in California named Cherry Valley near the Mojave Desert. While living there, he honed his skills as an artist, producing art that focuses on what he describes as, “nature viewed through a distorted lens”. After finding artistic success in exhibits, on magazine covers, and having artworks placed in movies and TV shows - and after living in LA and Austin - a new job search led Christopher to Baton Rouge four years ago

Baton Rouge has long been a city of tradition. People here can be a little resistant to change. This is true from centers of political, economic and even medical focus. But recently, the stage has been set for the capital city to become a place of innovation.  We never know where life might take us. Something small that happens to us, or that we witness as children, may change the course of our lives. Andy Barth grew up in Baton Rouge and was in and out of the hospital. After his mom suffered a stroke, he watched her experience with rehabilitation and therapy.  Andy also spent time in the hospital due to several knee injuries that led to surgery and physical therapy. Seeing how the physical therapists conducted themselves and how they interacted with their clients, Andy saw a future for himself doing that same thing.  Now, he’s been a physical therapist for 21 years and has become an innovator in the field with his company, Gold Standard Therapy Solutions. Gold Standard Therapy Solut

The golden rule of real estate has always been, "Location Location Location." Today in Louisiana it's more like, "Location, Insurance, Mortgage." When we say "real estate" we're mostly talking about something more than just a transaction. "A man’s house is his castle," as the old saying goes, or maybe we should say a person’s house is their castle. But whatever, the adage speaks to something really meaningful about the value and significance we place on home ownership. It defines who we are. And for most people their home is their single most valuable asset.  As recently as 2005, nearly 70% of Americans owned their own home. Today that figure is closer to 60%. And with the rising costs of homeownership, it is hard for many people to buy a house – especially their first house. But there are plenty of people in the business of buying and selling houses and helping others do the same.   Trey Willard is a realtor and owner of the W Group, a residential real estate brokerage firm b

In some ways, there are two Louisianas. There's the one the tourism marketing folks sell to visitors, centered on New Orleans on one side of Baton Rouge and Cajun Country on the other. And then there's the Louisiana that we live in, which is Baton Rouge. Maybe to tourist salespeople it looks like there's nothing very exciting going on here, but that is far from the truth. Baton Rouge is anything but a civil-service seat of government town like other state capitals. Though we do have a decent number of people who work in government departments, we also have people who create a unique Louisiana culture that's a tapestry made up of all kinds of threads that are drawn together here. This tapestry is created by people like Stephanie's two lunch guests: Oscar Tickle and Kimberly Szuszka. Oscar is a multimedia producer and content editor at Melara Enterprises, which publishes the Baton Rouge Business Report and 225 magazine, among other publications. And in his job there, Oscar gets to help tell some of those intere

When you’re launching your own business, some of the first questions you have to ask yourself are, who is your target market? How are you going to differentiate yourself from the competition? Are you going to try to be all things to all people? Or go niche? Will you specialize in a certain area, or combine some of your talents and skills to appeal to a particular customer base? Getting these foundational questions wrong can be the difference between making it and being one of those 50 % of small businesses that fails in the first year. Fritz Embaugh, founder and CEO of Baton Rouge's Plus One Design and Construction, figured out nearly 20 years ago what he wanted his company to be. Plus One provides turn-key services on commercial and residential projects – from architecture and design to planning to construction and project management. Among the firm’s varied portfolio are well known restaurant buildings – like Curbside Burgers and French Truck Coffee—churches, apartment complexe

We live in fractured, divided times where sometimes even simple facts about basic reality are too much for folks to agree on. Partisan politics, social media and the internet serve to divide us and keep us apart. And experts tell us all the time that even though we’re more digitially connected than ever, we’re paradoxically more isolated and lonely. How do we address this complex challenge? On this edition of Out to Lunch, Stephanie is visiting with two community-engaged local entrepreneurs, one focused on bringing people together, the other on helping them heal. Sean Braswell is owner of Simple Joe Café, a mid-city diner that serves breakfast and lunch and has positioned itself since opening in 2015 as a community gathering spot. The kind of place where neighbors meet up for home-cooked meals or friends meet weekly for coffee, and just linger and visit in a warm friendly atmosphere. Sean began his professional career in the military, serving in the Marines and the Navy simultaneously, later went into sales a

"All the world's a stage," as Shakespeare famously wrote, and we are "merely players" performing roles, today as professionals or politicians or teachers in a classroom of students. or parents modeling behavior for their children.  In an era when traditional media, social media, and ever-present modes of telecommunications determine how these roles and personas are received and perceived, crafting images, honing messages, and telling stories around them has given rise to entire industries. Stuart Feigley is president of Feigley Communications, a Baton Rouge strategic marketing agency that specializes in creating ad campaigns across a wide spectrum of industries, including healthcare, education and government. Stewart co-founded the firm in 2006, and in the years since, Feigley Communications has handled such high profile local cleints as LSU, the La Dept of Health, and the Baton Rouge Area Chamber among others. Stuart is a native of Baton Rouge with 36 years experience in the field. After graduating from the

Making a business plan is an essential part of launching a new business. But it’s not a skill an aspiring business owner necessarily has. Which is where Camille Terk comes in. Writing business plans is literally what she does for a living. Her firm, Terk Consulting, is a boutique consulting firm that specializes in business planning. Camille founded her firm in 2005 and in the nearly two decades since has served over 700 clients, helping them draft business plans and pitch-decks to present to investors and lenders. All told, she estimates she has helped her clients raise more than $350 million. Camille has an MBA, is based in New Orleans, and is one of the few firms specifically focused on doing business plans for small business. She counts among her clients some of our previous guests on this show, including: Falaya, Marex Services, Resource Environmental Solutions and Speedy Eats.  If somebody went to Camille and told her they wanted to open a vegan restaurant in Zachary Louisiana, I don’t know what Camille

Around two million people in the United states will be diagnosed this year with cancer. Taken together, each one of these individual life-changing diagnoses forms a part of an overall cancer care industrial complex which adds to up to an annual $75 billion sector of the national economy. And, like every other business heading into the second quarter of the 21st Century, cancer treatment is changing and advancing with the implementation of technology that includes AI.  In Baton Rouge, very few people are more familiar with the current state of cancer care than Sotirios Stathakis, Chief of Physics at Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center, and a radiation oncology physicist with more than two decades of experience in this highly technical field. Sotirios came to Mary Bird in 2023, and in his role there oversees the cancer center’s physics and dosimetry teams. He also is involved in implementing new AI technology at Mary Bird to help improve internal processes, with the goal of improving both outcomes and the patient e

There are cose to 3 milllion apps available today – nearly 3 times as many as there were a decade ago – and they are designed to do everything imaginable, whether it’s helping us buy a house, track a hurricane, rent a car or remember to breathe. In other words, there is nothing that cannot be digitized and commodified with the right software and a creative entrepreneur. One of the popular fields of app by numbers downloaded are apps that marry the worlds of music and tech. You've no doubt heard of Spotify and Pandora, but you are less likely to have heard of music industry apps Tipzy and Bloom. Brandon Harris is founder and CEO of Bloom, a booking app that bills itself as an Airbnb for the music industry by centralizing the live event booking process.  Users – principally performers and venues - communicate, schedule and organize upcoming events, negotiate payment terms, and execute transactions through the app. And they can use app to discover each other. Brandon also has another tech company,  Hareseca, tha

When is the last time you heard someone say, “I love email?” I would bet, probably never. Every day it seems like we’re swamped with more spam. And when we do actually rely on email for something important, well, you know how that goes. You send someone an email and ask them three questions. They reply to one. You reply with a comment about their reply and re-ask your other two questions. They reply with a comment on a whole other subject and before you know it you’ve got a long list of back and forward messages you’re scrolling through looking for who said what, when. It's just so totally inefficient. Now, imagine that you’re an architect and you have to rely on this kind of communication with multiple contractors and sub-contractors to manage a construction project. This is what actually happens in the real world. It’s crazy. And that’s why Chuck Perret created a company called Centerline. Chuck says the goal of the company is, “to kill email.” Centerline is cloud-based data management for architects that p

The complexity of healthcare today and all the western advances that go with it – from AI generated diagnoses to online scheduling platforms to cold, impersonal clinical settings – has a lot of people – and their four-legged friends - looking for alternative, more holistic, wellness-centered approaches to healing and feeling better.  Stephanie's guests on this edition of Out to Lunch are are experts in this segment of healthcare. Dr. Keta Patel is owner of the Excel Wellness Center in Baton Rouge, which focuses on holistic wellness and functional healing, and is particularly focused on helping women combat hormonal imbalances from hyperthyroidism, perimenopause and menopause, insulin resistance and autominnune conditions. Keta is a chiropractor and also offers chiropractic care at her clinic, which she opened in 2015. She is also a nutritionist and has become well known on the speaker circuit, where she talks about the relationship between holistic wellness and hormones and her approach to helping patients -

Ask anyone in Louisiana, or any other state, and they’ll tell you that two of the greatest problems today facing the average American are access to affordable housing and access to quality affordable healthcare. Despite billions in federal funding and policies intended to help, the need continues to grow. On this episode of Out to Lunch, Stephanie talks with two local entrepreneurs who are taking matters into their own hands to fill the void and make things better. Wendy Green Daniels is President and CEO of Beechwood Residential, a Baton Rouge-based real estate development and consulting firm that specializes in multifamiy affordable housing. Wendy founded the firm in 2012, with a mission to enhance the lives of residents and revitalize communities through the creation of high-quality, socially impactful housing. Before venturing out on her own, Wendy, who grew up in Baton Rouge, spent more than a decade learning the ropes from other successful nonprofits, including Mercy Housing and Columbia Residential in

For most of the 35-thousand years or so that humans have roamed the Earth, we were able to represent what we see and hear through art and music. But we were not able to capture images and sounds and replicate them until - in the grand scheme of things - relatively recently when the inventions of the industrial revolution brought us rudimentary photography and phonographic recordings. Imagine how that changed the world. Not only the way we see and hear ourselves and others, but the way we think about reality. In the nearly two centuries since, technology has created unlimited creative opportunities for people in the audio and visual fields and given rise to some exciting new possibilities. On the forefront of changes in the audio world for the past couple of momentous decades, Bill Kelley has been a Recording Engineer at the LSU school of Music and Dramatic Arts, a century old school on the LSU campus with more than 400 students and two dozen majors. Bill produces 300 or so recitals a year for students and fac

For more than half a century, American educators and policymakers have been grappling with a problem that just keeps getting worse: A lot of American children don’t learn how to read, at least not very well, and despite new programs and curricula, the literacy gap keeps growing. In Louisiana, the problem is particularly acute – studies show that more than a quarter of our population has a low literacy rate. Baton Rouge author Susie Shepherd is working to change those statistics. She is a children’s book author, with eight titles to her name, who volunteers her time promoting reading and literacy among children. Susie is a retired teacher from Baker with more than two decades’ experience working in special education and also has a masters in autism spectrum disorders, so is particularly keyed into the needs so many young learners have. In addition to her children’s books, Susie also has published a collection of poems.  Literacy is just one of our many challenges in Louisiana, and while Susie is focused on hel

Despite what statistics show about fewer people getting married and more people getting divorced, Americans spent more than $50B on weddings last year, and the numbers continue to grow. Venues, food, liquor, music, gowns, flowers, cake, photographer – and that’s not counting bachelor and bachelorette parties or what’s involved if the big day is a destination wedding in another state or country. Call it the wedding industrial complex. Or call it good fun. Either way, local entrepreneurs know all about it and are capitalizing on the opportunities to meet ever-growing demands of couples who want more than a courthouse ceremony. Ramsey Roberts Sims is one of Baton Rouge's wedding authorities who knows as much about brides (and probably grooms) as anyone in Louisiana. Ramsey is owner of I Do Bridal Couture, a boutique that specializes in designer bridal gowns at its two locations in Baton Rouge and Covington. Ramsey started the business in 2012, a few years after shopping for her own bridal gown and becoming frust

For as long as humans and pre-human ancestors have been on the planet -- roughly 2.6 million years or so, we have been eating meat. In fact, recent studies have suggested that had it not been for our carnivorous consumption, humans would not have evolved the way that we did. Over the millennia our tastes have changed but not our love of meat. These days consumers - who spent more than $122B in 2023 on meat - are seeking out high quality, artisanal, organic and sustainable meats. Which is good news for local entrepreneurs cashing in on the craze.   Ross Brown's company, Bougie Bologna, specializes in making an all natural bologna using smoked pork shoulder – and if like a lot of Ross’s customers you grew up thinking of bologna as a luncheon meat from Oscar Mayer think again. Ross describes his meat product as Cajun smoked sausage in sandwich form. Ross founded the company in 2022, after nearly two decades in the oil business, because he believed in the product and wanted to be his own boss. Bougie Bologna has

If you subscribe to an online news service, you’re used to getting notifications about news stories the algorithm thinks might impact you. In Southeast Louisiana, you’ll pretty regularly see variations on the headline, “Sea Level Rise Threatens Coastline” or “Louisiana Loses a Football Field of Wetlands Per Hour.” If you’re like most people, you keep scrolling. Or, maybe you read the article, shake your head at the dire situation, but shrug it off because, well, what can you do?  The reason you can afford to take a laissez faire attitude toward our disappearing coastline and wetlands, is because there are people who don’t. There are people working every day, here in Baton Rouge, to preserve our piece of Planet Earth. Darius Bonton is the founder, owner and principal of Bonton Associates. Bonton Associates are an engineering company focused on designing and implementing infrastructure and transportation systems that allows us to build what needs to be built, and get where we need to go, without destroying the