How 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.

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