It's Acadiana: Out to Lunch

When you travel around Acadiana it s amazing how many talented people live in this part of the world. You can stop in at almost any small town and find a handful of people living there who are doing something sensational. Take for example, Eunice. After being born and raised in Eunice, Michelle La Fleur McFayden went to college for electrical engineering, and got a job with NASA. From 1988 to 1998 Michelle was a Space Shuttle Flight coordinator at NASA s Mission Control. That s one job you can t bring home to Acadiana so when Michelle and her husband NASA co worker J.P. decided to move back to Cajun country they had to find something else to do. That s when Michelle and J.P discovered the Great Harvest Bread Company and opened a bakery on Kaliste Saloom in Lafayette. Neither Michelle or J.P. had baked bread before. But, hey, it s not rocket science, right Lori Walls comes from one of the most familiar families to folks in Eunice. The Johnsons. Lori s grandfather opened Johnson s Grocery in Eunice in 1939. Back then, Johnson s was the first place in Acadiana to commercially sell Boudin. In 2005, after 68 continuous years, the family business closed down in Eunice. Meanwhile, Lori was working for an optometrist in Lafayette. In her off hours she was smoking meats and making boudin at home. In 2008, Lori and her husband Greg opened the second generation of the family grocery, including an 80 seat restaurant, in Lafayette. They called it Johnson s Boucaniere. Today Johnson s in Lafayette is already approaching institution status in Lafayette like its predecessor Johnson s in Eunice. Photos at Cafe Vermilionville by Gwen Aucoin.

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When you own a business you generally believe that nobody knows more about your business than you. But there are times in the lives of many businesses that growth or success complicates things. At these points specialist consultants outside of your company can have greater insight than you about what you need to do to achieve your goals. When your business comes into contact in any way with local, State, or Federal government, working with specialist consultants becomes less of an option and more of a necessity. In Acadiana, one of the leading governmental affairs consultants is The Picard Group. The Picard Group has offices in Lafayette, Baton Rouge, and Washington DC. The company s Principal is Tyron Picard. In discussions of business strategy you often hear the advice that to grow you have to stop working in your company and start working on your company. Part of that task is to come up with a strategy for presenting your company to the world. Otherwise known as marketing. When you start thinking about marketing, you ve got a million questions to answer about how you want your company to look to clients or customers. You need to decide everything from the color of your logo to the attitude you want to present on social media. You can answer these questions yourself as they come up. Or you can turn to expert consultants to craft an overall strategy for you. That s the specialist mission of a company called Healthy Image. Healthy Image is in Lake Charles, but their work is spread far and wide. Healthy Image s Creative Director is Barbara VanGossen. Although this show is called Out to Lunch Acadiana, the insights in this conversation about business, and business s relationship to government, go beyond the bayou and well beyond the Louisiana border. Photos at Cafe Vermilionville by Gwen Aucoin.

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Here in Acadiana we take the term "Southern Hospitality" seriously. We re proud of how we welcome people into our homes, and into our businesses. And for some of us, hospitality is our business. On this edition of Out to Lunch, Peter Ricchiuto introduces two people at very different ends of the hospitality industry Herb Schilling and David Billeaud. David is the founder and owner of one of Lafayette s favorite institutions, T Coon s restaurant. David started T Coon s in 1993, and he s still there every day, in the kitchen, cooking. David, thanks for taking time out of T Coon s to come eat at Social. Welcome to Out to Lunch. Herb Schilling spreads around hospitality on a grand scale. Since 1950 his family company, Schilling Distributing, has been wholesaling Budweiser, Anheuser Busch products, and more recently a wide range of beverages all across Acadiana. Photos at Social Southern Table and Bar by Gwen Aucoin.

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We often talk about business and creativity as if they are polar opposites. In fact, business is a creative enterprise. Every great business, from Apple to Wal Mart, stems from a great idea. As with other creative endeavors, like movies and music, the execution of an idea takes a team of collaborators. But the undertaking only becomes a success when all of the team players are contributing their individual talents toward creating the same vision. As much as business leaders like to stress team work over individuality, with sayings like "There s no "i" in "team," the fact is that vision is not a collective activity. The inspiration and vision that is central to creating a single, unified, successful business comes from an individual. The kind of inspired people who can have a great idea and inspire and lead others to execute it are not very common. But Peter Ricchiuti has two of them as lunch guests on Out to Lunch. Jason El Koubi is the President and CEO of One Acadiana. One Acadiana is a 9 Parish wide organization that promotes Acadiana as a place where business can flourish and succeed, and where business people and their families can enjoy a lifestyle unparalleled in the United States. Along with a talented team, it s Jason s vision, and ability to implement it, that is bringing noticeable positive change to Acadiana s economy. Jason, welcome to Out to Lunch. Blaine LaFleur is the founder and CEO of Stonewall Consulting. On the face of it, Stonewall Consulting is an engineering firm that builds machinery products, primarily for the oil and gas industry. But that would be a bit like saying Bruce Springsteen is a singer songwriter. While it s technically true, it doesn t convey the impact that transforms Blaine s approach to his work and clients into something more than just tool making. Blaine describes his mission as offering others a platform to succeed and find their purpose. Photos at Cafe Vermilionville by Gwen Aucoin.

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There are a number of terms people use to try and make talking about business as exciting as talking about football. You re probably familiar with the football clich s, "We re going to go out there and play our own game." "Our plan is to play hard till the final buzzer." And all time favorite, "It s mental." In business we hear people describing their business as being so exciting it s "moving the needle." A "paradigm shift." And a "game changer." As in football where most teams don t play their own game or play hard to the final buzzer most businesses are not shifting paradigms or changing the game. But, once in a great while, a business comes along that does change the whole game for their clients, for their industry, or even for all of us as consumers. And that s the case with Peter s three guests on Out to Lunch today. Tom Hayes is the local General Manager of Uber. Against long odds and stiff opposition, Tom has successfully brought the ride sharing business to New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Lafayette. If you re a certain age you might remember the term "dial up." It referred to the act of getting online. In those days, most of the time your computer was a word processor. You had to use your landline to get onto the internet and to give you an idea of the speed of your connection, it would take around an hour to download a song. Today, if you re in Lafayette and you re hooked up online through LUS the Lafayette Utilities System you can download a song almost instantly, and download an entire movie in 4 minutes. That s because LUS has built one of the fastest internet connections in the world. And that is not some sort of wild claim or "moving the needle clich ," it s true. Terry Huval is the Director of LUS. If you re one of America s biggest and most successful companies like Apple, Fox, Buick, or GMC, you get marketing advice from only the best and the brightest. All of those companies and many more household names besides take advice from a consultant company on Jefferson Street in Lafayette called Potenza. Potenza s founder and CEO is Frankie Rousseau. On this edition of Out to Lunch from Cafe Vermililonville in Lafayette Peter talks with three local guys who are actually moving the needle, shifting paradigms and changing the game. Photos by Gwen Aucoin.

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If you live in Acadiana there s a pretty good chance you re connected in some way with the oil industry. Most of us know somebody who works offshore. These men and women are gone for days and weeks, ferried out to massive oil rigs in the Gulf. So massive that they often refer to them as "floating cities." They call them cities because there s a lot more going on on an oil rig than just drilling for oil. There s a whole community of people who, besides work, have to eat, sleep, get medical attention, go see a movie, workout at the gym, and more. Providing the real estate for these non work activities on a floating hunk of metal out in the ocean is the specialty of a company called HB Rentals. HB Rentals is the world s largest supplier of temporary on and offshore accommodation modules. The company operates from three major global hubs. In Aberdeen, Scotland, Singapore, and from its headquarters here in Broussard, Louisiana. The President of HB Rentals is Deirdre Toups. Whether your company is out in the Gulf on an oil rig, or up in space on a rocket, you need stuff. All kinds of stuff. From nuts and bolts, to chairs, beds, protective clothing, maybe even a pest control contract, and a million other things some of which you may never have anticipated or budgeted for. Businesses can take the unpredictability out of their supply chain by turning to industrial procurement professionals. One of the nation s most recognized procurement companies is Brewster Procurement Group. Their clients include NASA, and a who s who of major oil and gas companies. The founder, CEO and Managing Principal of Brewster Procurement is Janet Brewster. Peter, Janet and Deirdre take a business trip out to the Gulf and up in space on this edition of Out to Lunch from Cafe Vermilionville in Lafayette. Photos by Gwen Aucoin.

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William Shakespeare famously wrote in his play As You Like It "All the world s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts." Like much of Shakespeare s work, you can look at this on many levels. One interpretation is, although we each believe we are masters of our own destiny, in fact much of our life is spent performing for others, doing what others expect of us. These days, especially in our professional or work life. For some of us, life is even more complex than Shakespeare observed. If you actually are a professional performer, your serious work day world is a stage, and your work life consists of actually playing the part, of fictional characters. Amy Waguespack is an actor and theater director. Amy is the founder and Artistic Director of Acting Up Theater Company. Acting Up is the resident, professional, theatre company at the Acadiana Center for the Arts. Amy, welcome to Out to Lunch. Clare Cook is a dancer and choreographer. Clare is the Artistic Director of the Clare Cook Dance Theater, and the founder of Basin Arts, a new dance and arts space in downtown Lafayette. Photos at Cafe Vermilionville by Gwen Aucoin.

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Business today is increasingly about information, technology, and service. Before this era, business wasn t so much people making things happen, it was simply about making things. Today on Out to Lunch Peter Ricchiuti is talking about people who make things. With robots. And steam. At the beginning of the 21st Century Missy Rogers and her husband Scott founded Noble Plastics with a bunch of employees who had no experience whatsoever making plastic products. Noble Plastics has continued on this path of local groundbreaking, creating a state of the art manufacturing plant that today includes robotic plastic molding machines, automated monitoring, a design studio, and an Acadiana Small Business of the Year Award. Jim Phillips calls himself the Founding Evangelist and Information Officer of The Incubatrix. The Incubatrix is a free community building program based on STEAM Science, Technology, Education and Art Makers. THE INCUBATRIX was launched in 2014 at the Lafayette Science Museum during The STEAMpunk and MAKERS Fair which celebrates Art and Science through performance, presentation and hands on interactivity. Peter met Spanky Meche, today s Entrepreneur du Jour on this edition of Out to Lunch through One Acadia, the organization that s leading economic development in Acadia Parish. Spanky is the founder of Spanky s Small Engine and Mower Sales in Church Point, Louisiana. Since its founding in 2010 Spanky s has grown and become a focal point for other businesses. In 2015 Spanky s won the Rising Star Award for outstanding sales and service from international power equipment manufacturer and distributor SCAG. Photos taken over lunch at Social. For more information about Acadiana entrepreneurs Innov8 Acadiana and The Opportunity Machine.

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In 1964, Bob Dylan wrote, "The Times They Are A changin ." Perhaps nothing illustrates that the times are still changing better than the fact that Dylan now has the Nobel Prize in literature for that and other observations. There are countless Ph.D dissertations and pages of press punditry examining all the various social forces at work that are changing our country. Hopefully among them a social scientist is tackling one of the big questions of our time What happened to beer and coffee Back when Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan was writing about changing times, Americans even hipster poets were content to drink Folgers, Maxwell House, Budweiser, and Schlitz. Today, a mere generation or so later, hipsters, and many more of us, demand better tasting and fresher artisanal beers and coffees. Those tastes are a changing all across the country. Even here in Acadiana. In Lake Charles, Nancy Holmes started roasting her own coffee beans as a hobby. Today her artisanal coffee roasting company, Acadian Coffee Roasters, is a wholesaler, supplying 100 organic coffee to casinos, restaurants, farmers markets and stores. And business is booming. It doubled over the past 12 months. Nancy, welcome to Out to Lunch. Meanwhile, in Broussard, Andrew Godley is brewing beer. Also starting out as a hobbyist, Andrew has turned his passion into a successful and growing business. Andrew s Parish Brewing Company has 17 employees and makes around 10,000 gallons of beer a week, including the popular Canebreak and Envie beers. Parish is in the enviable poition of selling as much beer as it can brew. Photos at Social by Gwen Aucoin.

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When we talk about "manufacturing" in the United States it s usually in the context of how many big ticket items like cars are no longer made in Middle America. Louisiana is practically never mentioned in discussions about manufacturing. But there s a surprisingly active manufacturing community here in Acadiana. A lot of it is based on making products large and small for the oilfield. But, despite what you might think, over the last 20 years while the manufacturing base in the rest of the country has shrunk, in our part of the world it has continued to grow. We ve featured companies as diverse as Stuller Inc and Begnaud Manufacturing on this show. Today Peter introduces two members of the next generation of Louisiana manufacturers. Jacques Dugal is the founder of a company called Idea Zoo. Idea Zoo specializes in combining 3D Printing and Laser Cutting to produce a range of products primarily made of plastic or wood. If you re not sure exactly what "3D Printing" is, Jacques explains all, and dissects the current state of the 3D consumer revolution. Grayson Carroll is a jeweler at Artisan Jewelers in Lafayette. Grayson grew up in the jewelry business his father, Sam, is a co owner of Artisan and although Grayson spent years working in the ski fields in Colorado and the oilfield in Acadiana, since 2010 he s been designing and making jewelry back here in Lafayette. Photos at Cafe Vermilionville by Gwen Aucoin.

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