Podcast
It's Baton Rouge: Out to Lunch
Hosted by ItsBatonRouge.la · EN
OUT TO LUNCH finds Baton Rouge Business Report Editor Stephanie Riegel combining her hard news journalist skills and food background: conducting business over lunch. Baton Rouge has long had a storied history of politics being conducted over meals, now the Capital Region has an equivalent culinary home for business: Mansur's. Each week Stephanie holds court over lunch at Mansur's and invites members of the Baton Rouge business community to join her. You can also hear the show on WRKF 89.3FM.
11episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Speed Food and Love
2w ago00:31:44Tap to summarizeMiranda Albarez hosts this edition of Out to Lunch. If there’s one thing that has consistently evolved as society has progressed over the millennia, it’s the speed we do things. Every year, people’s patience grows thinner and attention spans, smaller. And with the invention of these tiny computers that we keep in our pockets 24/7, we no longer take in life without first viewing it through the screen. Most of us have probably heard the phrases “phone eats first” or “Hold on, I need a video of this before you mess it up”. As a byproduct of “progress” for increased production, we have lost much of what many consider makes for a “full” life. We’re always sharing, always needing the scoop, always moving. But are we truly living? At the end of the day, no matter what speed humanity moves, we still have basic needs to meet whether or not we feel like we have the time. And that’s where my two lunch guests today come in. While many entrepreneurs and businesses would find a way to encourage people to slow down, my guests are finding ways to catch up with people in their daily lives and run alongside them. Speed Bancroft has been chasing startup ideas for years, but Speedy Eats may just be the one that stuck. Originally from Monroe, Speed came to Baton Rouge after years in Jackson, Mississippi, drawn by what he saw as a stronger ecosystem for entrepreneurs. He launched Speedy Eats in 2017, but the concept began a year earlier in his living room, where he started building an automated hamburger vending prototype. That idea eventually evolved into an automated pizza concept, and in 2019 the company raised capital to develop its first-generation system. The original model was built around automated pizza stores, but after an unsuccessful crowdfunding campaign in 2022 and ongoing capital challenges, Speed made a major pivot. Instead of building full restaurant-style automated stores, he focused on what he thought was a more scalable model: automated outdoor walk-up and drive-thru food vending units. That pivot—he says—may have saved the company. Now, these aren’t your everyday vending machines. There are two major concepts: A 10-foot by 3-foot walk-up store and a larger 30-foot by 8-foot automated drive-thru. The vision focuses on serving hot, homestyle meals in areas where other traditional restaurants can’t go. Unlike traditional restaurants, the units don’t require water or sewer infrastructure, allowing them to operate in places most food businesses can’t— think industrial corridors, rural highways and underserved roadside locations. Speed sees that as a major opportunity. There is still traffic where there’s no food, and Speedy Eats can go where others can’t. The company has locations planned at Ole Miss, in Iowa, and near the Meta data center construction site in Holly Ridge, Louisiana. Hannah Wilson is founder of Red Stick Speed Dating. Originally from the Chicago area, Hannah came south for LSU, fell in love with Baton Rouge and began working remotely while living in New Orleans. As a content creator and she was documenting her dating life online through her Mimosas and Lipstick social channels and talking openly about frustrations with dating apps. One experience, in particular—a “Hey girl” message alerting her that a man she was seeing was also dating someone else—became a turning point. She started asking a simple question: If the apps aren’t working, where do people actually meet? That led her to launch Speed Dating NOLA in April 2024, and later expand into Baton Rouge in October of 2025. Hannah has now produced over 20 speed dating events in the Baton Rouge area and hosts two to four per month. Typical events include: 15 to 20 participants with men’s and women’s groups balanced as evenly as possible. She organizes events for different age brackets, anywhere from 20s to 60s, as well as heterosexual and LGBTQ-focused events. Hannah is a one-woman show—from venue coordination and check-in to event facilitation and match follow-up. Every event is adjusted based on the venue, age group and crowd dynamic. Red Stick Speed Dating also isn’t just about selling romance as much as creating structured social opportunity. Even when participants don’t meet a romantic match, many leave having made a friend or simply feeling more confident after trying something new. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →
Bikes and Buses
3w ago00:27:00Tap to summarizeThere’s a particular kind of business story that you can really only tell about Louisiana. It usually starts with somebody who barely had two nickels to rub together, an idea that almost nobody else took seriously, and a lot of stubbornness. It almost never starts in a glass tower in a major metropolis. It starts in places like a front yard near LSU. Or in a small office somewhere on the way to the oil patch. Both of my lunch guests today are Louisiana people who built something out of, more or less, nothing. One of them runs a national company that has 400 vehicles, 25 offices around the country, and was a Super Bowl LIX vendor. He started it the year after he graduated from LSU. The other one runs a nonprofit in Mid City Baton Rouge that began with one neighborhood kid showing up at his front door asking him to fix a bike. Today it has worked on more than 10,000 bikes, and is the centerpiece of a $2 million renovation of a former church and rug shop on Government Street. Both of these guys are in their thirties. Both went to LSU. And both of them have grown their organizations far faster, and far further, than anybody would have predicted when they started. Corey Rosales is a New Orleans native who came to Baton Rouge for college and then stayed long enough to start a company. He graduated from LSU with a degree in petroleum engineering in 2018. A year later, in 2019, he founded American Safety. American Safety started out as an environmental response and industrial services company. Then COVID happened, and a record-breaking hurricane season happened, and Corey kept saying yes to opportunities. Today American Safety is a multi-division operation – industrial services, environmental response, disaster relief, and transportation. They have 25 offices, more than 400 vehicles, and somewhere between 300 and 500 employees, depending on the time of year. They were a vendor at Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans, where they moved more than 10,000 people during the event. They’re now the official transportation partner of the New Orleans Saints and the Pelicans. And, as part of their expansion, they recently acquired Baton Rouge–based Dixieland Tours. The President and CEO of American Safety is Corey Rosales. In 2010, Dustin LaFont was a recent LSU graduate, an AmeriCorps alum, and a middle school history teacher in East Baton Rouge Parish. He had grown up biking to school in Houma, and he commuted by bike at LSU to save money on gas and parking. In his spare time he’d sit in his front yard fixing up old bikes. One day a kid from the neighborhood came up to him and asked if he could fix his bike. Then more kids showed up. Then more. The neighbors started calling it “the front yard bike shop.” Dustin made it a nonprofit. After two years of running it on top of teaching, he quit his teaching job to do it full time. That nonprofit is called Front Yard Bikes. It’s now the largest community bike shop in Louisiana. Kids ages 6 to 18 earn credits by learning bike mechanics, welding, gardening, cooking, and cycling safety, and they apply those credits toward a bike of their own. Older kids can move into paid internships and earn job certifications in mechanics. In 2022, CNN named Dustin a CNN Hero. In 2023, City Year gave him their national Alumni Leadership Award. And right now, on Government Street in Mid City, Dustin and three other Baton Rouge nonprofits are in the middle of a $2 million build-out of a place called Youth City Lab – a former church and rug shop they’re turning into a bike shop, a performance stage, a barber shop and library, and a community gathering place for young people. The Founder and Executive Director of Front Yard Bikes is Dustin LaFont. There’s a tendency, when we talk about Baton Rouge business, to look toward the big oil and gas companies, the chemical plants, the institutions on the river. And those are real, and they matter. But the story of Baton Rouge is also Corey Rosales – a kid from New Orleans who came here for college and ended up running a transportation and disaster response company that helped move 10,000 people through Super Bowl LIX. And it’s also Dustin LaFont – a kid from Houma who came here for college and ended up creating a youth workforce development program in his front yard that now occupies an entire renovated block on Government Street. Both of these entrepreneuras are doing what Louisiana, at its best, has always done – they saw a need, they said yes, and then figured out the rest as they went. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →
Home Sweet Homes
Apr 1900:28:30Tap to summarizeHow many companies do you think are involved in building a single house? Take a guess. Five? Ten? Maybe twenty? Fifty-three. On average, fifty-three different companies touch a single home before anyone moves in — foundation crews, electricians, plumbers, pest control, lighting specialists, insurers. Karen Profita represents all of them. She runs the Home Builders Association of Greater Baton Rouge, the largest homebuilders association in Louisiana and the 25th largest in the country. Karen came to the homebuilding industry through a side door. After COVID disrupted her work at Audubon Nature Institute, she briefly pursued an idea for a seafood industry incubator — extracting collagen from crab shells, that kind of thing — that never quite got off the ground. A conversation at the Parade of Homes led her to an open position at HBA GBR. She says it was the rare job that combined everything she actually cares about: real estate, business advocacy and supporting local entrepreneurs. HBA GBR has more than 800 members across every corner of the residential construction industry. Sara Landry West, owner of South Coast Organizers, helps people figure out where things go in the homes they build, buy, or rent. Sara spent nearly eight years teaching first grade — mostly in charter schools. She was good at it but the hours were long and the breaks were short. So, during the 2018–2019 school year she made a decision: she left over Christmas break and didn’t go back. Sara spent the first months of 2019 doing what every new business owner has to do — filing the LLC, building a website, practicing on friends’ homes for free so she’d have photos to show people. Within a few months she had paying clients she’d never met before. South Coast Organizers has now worked with nearly 200 clients — people moving, people grieving, people who just had a baby and can’t find anything any more. The projects look beautiful on Instagram — the before-and-after photos, the labeled bins, the pantries that somehow fit everything — but Sara says what you don’t see is the heavy lifting, both literal and otherwise. Organizing is the easy part. Walking into someone’s home under stressful circumstances requires a different skill set than most people expect from a professional organizer. Karen and Sara, are both in the business of "home." Karen spends your days advocating for the people who build homes, trying to keep the cost of those homes from getting further out of reach. Sara helps people through the moves and the losses and the general accumulation of life — inside their closet, with their things, helping them figure out where everything goes. You can build a house, but you ultimately have to make it a home. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →
The Don & Susan Show
Apr 1200:28:00Tap to summarizeIn Hollywood, power couples from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, icons like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, and Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, exemplified glamour both on and off the screen. At the pinnacle of their careers, these romantic couples were closely followed and adored by movie-goers, capturing the public’s imagination during a Golden Age of film. Today, power couples are more often found on smaller screens, not in a seductive embrace but wielding power tools while knocking down interior walls or building decks. I’m thinking of course of the husband and wife teams on popular home decor and renovation shows, couples like Dave and Jenny Marrs of “Fixer to Fabulous,” and Egypt Sherrod and Mike Jackson of “Married to Real Estate.” You might not have ever heard of Don and Susan Charlet, co-owners of the home decor and furniture gallery The Corbel, but you can be sure that in social circles from Zachary to St. Francisville, Don and Susan are a local power couple. Don Charlet is no stranger to entrepreneurship—he worked in the family funeral home business for the first decade of his career. Then in 2000, with his brother, Don launched Charlet Brothers Construction, a custom residential homebuilder and remodeler responsible for some of the first homes built in the Copper Mill neighborhood. In 2003, Don and Susan opened The Corbel on Highway 61 between Zachary and St. Francisville. Then, after 20 years of business, they relocated The Corbel to downtown St. Francisville where the curated home goods and antique furniture shop became the anchor store for a multi-business redevelopment project called North Commerce. Today, North Commerce includes The Corbel, boutiques Barlow and Deyo, the eight-room Hotel Toussaint, event venue Mallory, a pizza restaurant and a microbrewery. Starting a business is stressful and challenging under most circumstances. What often determines whether a business succeeds or fails is the commitment and perseverance of the business partners. With 5 successful businesses and a lifetime of memories in marriage, it’s safe to say Don & Susan have struck the right balance for success. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Ian Ledo & Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →
My Original Plan Was...
Apr 500:29:10Tap to summarizeThere’s a line I keep hearing from people who run small businesses in Baton Rouge. It goes something like: I didn’t plan this. I was doing something else, I saw a gap, and I walked through it. Norisha Kirts Glover has a degree in mass communication and an MPA. She spent years in nonprofit fundraising in Washington, D.C. and California. In 2015 she walked through a door marked “commercial construction” — an industry where women and people of color were barely present — and decided that was exactly where she needed to be. Norisha is originally from the Alexandria area. She came to LSU for college and stayed. In 2015, an opportunity came along to enter commercial construction. She researched it, noticed that women and people of color were dramatically underrepresented, and decided to launch NRK Construction anyway — or maybe because of that. The firm picked up early traction after the 2016 floods, working through extensive residential renovation before moving deeper into commercial work. NRK is intentionally small — three to four employees, about $3 million in annual revenue, with two major projects at a time. Norisha says that’s not a limitation; it’s a choice. Her superintendent is on every job site and every client meeting comes with an agenda. Norisha’s aiming next at healthcare, education and federal contracting. Ralph Whalen grew up in New Orleans, studied English at Dartmouth, and has tried to leave Louisiana several times. Chicago, New Hampshire. He keeps coming back. Ralph started his career implementing Epic — the electronic health records platform that runs inside most major hospitals — and worked his way up to Senior Vice President at a healthcare IT firm called Divurgent. In September 2020, he launched Benzait, a consulting firm that helps hospitals and health systems figure out how to adopt artificial intelligence responsibly. Benzait works with medium to large health systems, building the governance frameworks and technical infrastructure that AI actually requires before it goes anywhere near a patient. Ralph says the biggest problem in healthcare AI right now isn’t a lack of technology — it’s organizations rushing to adopt it before they’ve figured out what problem they’re trying to solve. His job, a lot of the time, is to slow people down just enough to get it right. Ralph and Norisha both entered rooms where the conventional wisdom said they didn’t quite belong — a woman in commercial construction, an English major in healthcare tech — and found that being the unexpected person in the room turned out to be an advantage. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →
Tech Never Sleeps
Mar 2200:29:55Tap to summarizeThink about the last time you showed your ID. Maybe at the airport, maybe at a bar, maybe somewhere you had to prove you were who you said you were. You pulled out a card. A piece of plastic. Maybe it was a little beat up. Maybe the photo was from ten years ago. There’s a decent chance that if you live in Louisiana, you’ve also used a phone to do that. That digital driver’s license on your phone — that was built right here, in Baton Rouge, by a company called Envoc. Calvin Fabre built it. Calvin is a long-time friend of Out to Lunch: he's made multiple appearances on this show over the years as he's developed his company, and some of Louisiana's most advanced tech. He's been writing code since he was 12 years old — 1978, give or take — when he got an Atari 800 and discovered that he could make a computer do exactly what he told it to do. He has essentially been doing that ever since. Calvin studied computer science at Southeastern Louisiana University and built Envoc into a software firm that now works on some of the most consequential identity technology in the country. You may know Envoc best as the company behind LA Wallet — Louisiana’s digital driver’s license. Calvin divested the IP on that about a year ago, but the work continues: he’s now sitting at international standards meetings with Apple, Samsung, Google, and representatives from Hong Kong, New Zealand and Canada, working out what digital identity should look like everywhere. He’s also thinking carefully about who gets left behind when identity goes digital — seniors, low-income users, people who don’t trust the technology or can’t easily access it. For Calvin, that’s not an afterthought. It’s the whole point. Samantha Morgan started her career as a journalist — arts writing, then Hurricane Katrina turned it into hard news overnight, then broadcast, then the BP oil spill, then digital. Eventually she stopped working for other people’s newsrooms and started her own production company - Quick Flip Media. She says she named it after a phrase she repeated every day for twenty years in television: flip it quick. Samantha is a Baton Rouge native — Old Goodwood, specifically — who has tried to leave more than once. She jokes that the natural disasters keep pulling her back. Calvin and Samantha have both ended up running their own business after years of building something for someone else. And in both cases, the reason seems to be the same: the problem was too interesting to leave to other people. Calvin has been at this long enough that he was building software before most of the people who use it were born. Samantha has covered enough Louisiana history that she has a personal archive most newsrooms would envy. Not surprisingly, neither one of them are done. Because, after all, tech never sleeps. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →
Apps Born In Baton Rouge
Mar 1400:28:10Tap to summarizeI’m Amy Irvin, host of Out to Lunch in Baton Rouge. I was a college student once. A long time ago. And like a lot of college students, I picked some of my classes based on the professor. Word of mouth, mostly. What my friends said. Whether the 8 a.m. course section was worth getting out of bed for or not. These days, there’s a website that tries to do that systematically. You’ve probably heard of it. Rate My Professor. And if you’ve ever spent time on it, you might have noticed it’s also a place where students settle scores, write reviews about a professor’s appearance, and occasionally make things up entirely. My lunch guest, Nash Mahmoud, noticed the same thing. He happens to be a professor. He also happens to be a software engineer. So he built something better. Nash came to the United States from Jordan in 2008 to pursue a graduate degree at Mississippi State. He got his master’s, then his PhD, then a tenure-track faculty offer at LSU — and somewhere along the way between learning his way around campus, walking to football games, and dining at local spots around town, Baton Rouge became home. He’s been teaching software engineering at LSU for the better part of a decade. A few years ago, while advising nearly 40 students at once, he started paying close attention to how they were using Rate My Professor to make decisions about their education. What he saw bothered him: anonymous reviews, no way to verify whether the reviewer was even a real student, bias against female faculty, and a single bad comment that could follow a professor for years. Nash spent a couple of years researching the problem. Then he started coding. On March 14th, 2024 — Pi Day — Nash launched Professor Index, a verified, AI-powered professor review platform designed to reduce misinformation and bias. It’s now live at 20 universities and has more than 3,500 downloads. Professor Index has become so popular that students are sending in requests to add more campuses faster than he can keep up. My other lunch guest, Courtney Sparkman, taught himself to code because a problem at his job was driving him crazy and he couldn’t find anyone else to fix it. He was running security companies, then. Now he runs a software company that serves 700 of them. Courtney is from Chicago and moved to Baton Rouge when his wife — his fiancée at the time — got a job here after pharmacy school. He says the thing that surprised him most about Baton Rouge was how welcoming the city is to newcomers. Courtney is a self-described serial entrepreneur. Before coming to Baton Rouge, he helped his father build a security guard company from the ground up — zero employees to about 300, and several million dollars in revenue — before they sold it. Then he went to work for a larger security firm and immediately recognized every problem he thought he’d left behind: guards showing up late, incident reports written hours after the fact, supervisors with no real-time visibility into what was happening in the field. Courtney taught himself to code and built the solution himself. It’s called OfficerApps. OfficerApps launched in 2013. Today, OfficerApps serves about 700 security companies, from five-person operations to firms with thousands of officers in the field. Nash and Courtney have both figured out — the hard way, mostly — that building the thing is only the beginning. Getting people to use it, trust it, and tell someone else about it: that’s the actual work. Nash launched his Professor Index app on Pi Day and is now traveling to college campuses to make the case in person. And in Courtney's case, besides being the software developer he also answers OfficerApps support calls himself so customers know somebody’s there. Neither of these fathers of apps born in Baton Rouge planned it quite the way it happened. That turns out to be a pretty common feature of good ideas. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →
The Art of Camping
Mar 800:29:40Tap to summarizeThink about the last time you visited a city you’d never been to before. Not for business — just to go. What made you decide to stay somewhere? What made you feel like the place wanted you there? Most of the time, we don’t give a lot of credit to the people who set that stage. The campground owner who keeps a shuttle running at midnight so you can get back safely from the French Quarter. The art curator who figured out that if he put a show up in a doctor’s office, more people would see it than in any gallery. These are the people who decide, quietly and without much fanfare, what kind of place a city is going to be. Camping Mike Dunn did not grow up dreaming of owning a campground. He grew up on a dairy farm in Maryland, spent his career running cranes and heavy equipment, and took a wrong turn somewhere around 2011 that led him to a night attendant job at the New Orleans KOA — which, as wrong turns go, turned out pretty well. Within six months, KOA had promoted him to run the park. A few years after that, he and his wife Deborah bought it. They are now in their third year as owners of the New Orleans KOA Holiday in River Ridge — 100 RV sites, three deluxe lodges, 12 full-time employees, shuttle service to the French Quarter and the Superdome, a souvenir shop, a dog park, and a recreation hall. For most of its history the park’s guests were 60% international. Canadians, Europeans, Australians. In the last year or so that has flipped to 90% domestic. Mike and Deborah are figuring out what that means for a business built around introducing the world to New Orleans. If you're wondering what a person with a business in New Orleans is doing on a show about Baton Rouge business - well, people who stay in an RV park are generally not people who live in the same city as the RV park. So I thought it might be useful for those of us here in Baton Rouge who visit New Orleans to know about it. Art Keidrick Alford grew up in Zachary, Louisiana. His parents let him draw on the walls. That tells you most of what you need to know. He went to college, spent time in real estate, then nearly a decade in hospitality — long hours, demanding work, not a lot left over at the end of the day. The whole time, he was watching something on the side: Baton Rouge was turning out artists from LSU who had no idea what to do with themselves once they left. The business side of being an artist — contracts, galleries, marketing, pricing — nobody was helping them with any of that. In 2018, Keidrick started Ellemnop to fill that gap. Since then, he’s curated nearly 90 exhibitions — in galleries, in medical offices, in whatever space made sense. Today he’s a managing partner in The Pearl, a 5,000-square-foot warehouse in Old South Baton Rouge that will house gallery space, artist residencies, and apprenticeship programs in bodyshop work, barbering, and welding. Yes, all in the same building. There’s a word that comes up a lot when you talk to Mike and Keidrick, and that word is “guests.” Mike uses it for the people who pull into his campground, and Keidrick uses it for the people who walk into his exhibitions. They both mean the same thing by it: these are people who trusted you with their time, and you don’t waste it. Mike went to New Orleans planning to stay a little while. Keidrick has been in Baton Rouge his whole life, looking for ways to make it worth staying. Different journeys, same destination. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →
Fake Video & The Real Thing
Mar 100:30:10Tap to summarizeToday’s edition of Out to Lunch sits at the intersection of two big ideas: immersion and reach. One guest is building virtual worlds for the world’s largest energy companies and the U.S. Air Force — right here in Baton Rouge. The other is shaping how millions of people around the globe experience the NFL — from a home office in Baton Rouge. Both guests grew up in Louisiana, both left, both came back or stayed — and both are doing work that most people wouldn’t expect to find anchored in the Capital Region. The through-line is this: the future doesn’t always happen in Silicon Valley or New York. Sometimes it’s being built from a studio off Perkins Road and a home office in Baton Rouge. Today we’re talking about what it looks like when Louisiana shows up on the cutting edge. Cody Louviere grew up in Lake Charles dreaming about video games and ended up building simulations for the U.S. Air Force and ExxonMobil. He’s the founder of King Crow Studios, a Baton Rouge company that uses virtual reality, augmented reality and AI to train people on equipment worth tens of millions of dollars — without anyone ever touching the real thing. Cody came to Baton Rouge when his ex-wife enrolled at LSU, and the city kept him. More than 50 simulations later, King Crow is quietly doing some of the most sophisticated technical work happening anywhere in the South. Danielle Brown is a Baton Rouge High graduate who interned at Google as a college student and never really left — except that she did come back, during the pandemic, and helped rewrite Google’s remote work policies so she could stay. Today Danielle leads global marketing for NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV, overseeing a 15-person team, co-marketing partnerships with the NFL itself, and subscriber strategy for one of the most-watched sports products in the world. Eighteen million people watched a recent international NFL game on the platform she helps run. She is doing that work from Baton Rouge, Louisiana — and she seems to think that’s exactly right. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →
Beauty Guru
Feb 1500:27:20Tap to summarizeA little wartime history: In 1940, at the start of World War II, approximately 12 million women were working outside the household in the United States, comprising about 25% of the female population. That number rose significantly during the war to over 18 million by 1945, as the U.S. government encouraged women in posters and commercial advertising to volunteer for wartime service in factories. Inspired by a song by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb, Rosie the Riveter, the brawny brunette with a red, polka dotted headscarf, became an icon of the war and women’s movement. Today, women make up nearly half of the total U.S. labor force. And if, like me, you grew up with a mother who owned a small business, then you won’t be surprised at all that women make up nearly 45% of all businesses in the U.S., employing over 10.5 million workers and generating over $3.3 trillion in revenue. As an ad from the Sixties used to say, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” Sidney Coffee became a small business owner after decades of public service. Originally from Texas, Sidney came to Baton Rouge to attend college at LSU. She began her career in journalism at The Advocate, working on special sections, then moved to WBRZ Channel 2 as a news producer, creating morning and evening broadcasts. Sidney then pivoted to positions in public communications—first as Gov. Buddy Roemer’s press secretary, which then led to a position with the Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission, chaired at the time by then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton. Recognizing her work in coastal policy, Govs. Mike Foster and Kathleen Blanco each tapped Sidney for positions during their administrations. For the last decade, Sidney has been the owner and operator of The Guru, an art gallery, spiritual retreat, and event venue, set inside a restored 1920s mechanic’s garage on Government Street. When we think about the factors that drive consumer purchases, convenience often tops the list, with 77% to 83% of consumers citing it as a key factor that influences, or sometimes dictates, their buying decisions. From fast food to five-minute oil changes, our modern lifestyles demand ease and immediacy. Anna Beth Guillory, has developed an app for busy professional women to book appointments directly with beauty professionals. It's called BeautyFindr. After nearly a decade of co-owning a blowout bar in Lake Charles, Anna Beth identified a persistent problem: connecting clients to available beauty professionals in real time. Working with a developer, Anna Beth spent 11 months building the BeautyFindr app, which launched in 2024. Today, BeautyFindr operates in 19 states and is quickly evolving into a business-development hub for beauty professionals, and, as well as scheduling, offers peer networking, social sharing and business-growth tools. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →