It's Acadiana: Out to Lunch

A fast car and pressed shirt are two things that probably won't ever go out of style. Considering we live in an age of rapid economic disruption, those two facts present a potentially endless business opportunity. Everything breaks. It’s a natural law. Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong is how Murphy put it. Scientists call it entropy. In business terms, you’d call it a blue o...

People are looking for healing in places they didn't used to look. Acupuncture, sound baths, energy work — once dismissed as fringe, are now very much moving into the mainstream. That shift shows up in the numbers. Wellness is a trillion dollar industry in the U.S. Americans spend more than $6,000 per person each year on it. That's the broader current carrying a lot of what used to be consid...

Most of us spend a good portion of our lives looking for the right words. The ones that explain who we are. What we believe. What we're here for. Some people find them early. Others take a longer route — through careers that almost fit, through places that challenge everything they thought they knew, through questions that don't resolve so much as deepen. My guests today have both built busi...

So, your family has a business. You grow up around it. You love it. It’s the center of gravity for your family life. But…you swear you'll never do it. You leave. You build something of your own. And then one day you look up and… Just when you thought you were out, they pull you back in.  That’s one version of the story anyway.  There's another where you just nev...

Megan Constantin sits in for Christiaan Mader on this edition of Out to Lunch Acadiana. When I say the name "Jourdan Thibodeaux…" You’re thinking of a musician. He’s hard to miss on stage at a festival as a fiddler and frontman for Jourdan Thibodeaux et les Rôdailleurs .  But Jourdan is also a business owner. In Henderson Swamp outside Breaux Bridge, Jourdan and his p...

There's a version of life in Acadiana that most of us only see from a car window. We live in something of a paradise, it’s just sort of removed from your day-to-day reality. That’s in part because Louisiana’s natural beauty isn’t always so easy to see. Louisiana is flat. Famously so. We don’t have mountain vistas to behold.  So, if you want to really drink in Aca...

The advent of AI is either exhilarating or terrifying, depending on the day and maybe your last interaction with Siri. That’s because the stakes of the technology, at least as it’s promoted by its developers, is really really high. If what they say about it is true, it could upend human work as we know it. No wonder, then, that a crisis of trust has accompanied its rapid rise.  Wh...

Here's something most of us won't admit: we have too much stuff.  It’s human nature in the consumer age. You can’t throw a rock in Lafayette without hitting a storage unit. And that’s the stuff that doesn’t fit in our homes. Clutter is the order of the day. In the business world, that translates into noise. We pile on messaging, saying too much when getting straight to...

Maybe when you're in trouble, you have someone to call. A family member. A friend. Someone who knows the system, or knows someone who does. But a lot of people don't have that. They're navigating institutions — legal, civic, governmental — that weren't really built with them in mind. And when no one's paying attention, things get lost. They need an advocate. Someone to speak for them.&...

There's a kind of person you've probably met before. Someone who, no matter what their job title says, is really just taking care of people.  That's what they do. That's what they've always done. That’s who they are. The title just took a while to catch up. Susan Titus is a Lafayette-area entertainer, nonprofit founder, and — by her own description — a woman whose life has h...

Here's a question every small business owner loses sleep over: how do people find out you exist? Word of mouth still works. Always will. But today you need more than that. The challenge is that most small business owners are already doing three jobs at once. Marketing is the thing that slides. The thing you mean to get to.  You need a presence — online, in print, somewhere people are ac...

Hi, it's Christiaan Mader, host of Out to Lunch Acadiana. I love a dive bar.  And I know I’m not alone. They attract a certain cult-like following among people looking for an unpretentious place to share a reasonably priced drink with an old friend or a new one. The appeal is fundamentally American.  The drinks are cold, the music is loud, the bathrooms might be suspect — but...

Some businesses don’t just sell a product — they sell a feeling. They create an experience you can’t fully describe on a website, because the magic is sensory. It’s atmosphere. It’s memory. It’s the thing that makes you walk into a space and instantly feel like you belong there — or like you’ve been there before. From a business standpoint, that&rsqu...

There’s an old saying you’ve probably heard before: Those who can’t do, teach. Well, that’s total BS. If you’ve ever tried to teach someone anything — how to play a guitar chord, how to dance a two-step, how to do just about anything — you know that saying has it exactly backwards. Teaching is hard. Being good at something and being able to teach it are tw...

Hi, Christiaan here, host of Out to Lunch Acadiana. Everyone’s got a story. It’s why I got into journalism. People are just interesting. But having a story doesn’t mean you’re any good at telling it. That part takes skill. And a lot of discipline — Even if you’re using a large language model to help.  Everyone needs an editor. It’s our motto at The Cu...

When we talk about running a business, we usually talk about revenue models, staffing, square footage, and growth plans. We talk about work. What we don’t always talk about is emotional work. The phone calls you don’t charge for. The time spent listening instead of billing. The moments when you’re not really running a business so much as helping someone through a rough chapter. R...

Some things you don’t think about until they stop working. Then you get a trickle from your shower head. Suddenly, all you can think about is what’s happening with the pipes underground.  There’s money to be made in invisible industries. That’s true if you’re pumping water from a well — a technology as old as civilization itself — or driving engineere...

When we talk about “growth,” we usually mean population, jobs, or maybe cranes on the skyline. But growth isn’t abstract — it’s physical. It’s steel. It’s dirt. It’s concrete. It’s towers you don’t notice and neighborhoods you drive past every day. Christiaan's guests on Out to Lunch are both in the business of building up — literal...

People in Acadiana love restaurants. They love talking about them, reviewing them, arguing about them. They always seem to think they could run one. Hey, if you can cook, why not?  Here’s the thing: Restaurants are famously unforgiving businesses. Margins are thin. Labor is hard to find and harder to keep. One bad weekend, one broken piece of equipment, one stretch of slow traffic &mdas...

Some people make a living building things. Others make a living making those things look good. There’s more to decoration than meets the eye. Space has a tremendous impact on how we think and feel. Sometimes it really is all about appearances, and that’s true whether you’re picking out curtains for your living room or designing an arch of balloons for a wedding.  Our own spa...

Farming isn’t what it used to be. Louisiana has lost thousands of small farms over the last few decades. The average farmer is over 58. Land prices keep going up, commodity prices keep wobbling, and modern farming techniques are about scale, not stewardship of the land. The small independent farmer — the icon of the American landscape — is by and large disappearing. But not every...

We often think of “doing good” as the business of nonprofits. You start a foundation, apply for grants, hold gumbo cook-offs, and hope the IRS sees things your way. But what if you didn’t need tax-exempt status to make the world better? What if turning a profit and doing good weren’t opposites — but the same business plan? Turns out, a lot of small business owners in...

There's a temptation in business to want everything fast. Fast growth, fast profits, fast success. But the most durable things—the things that actually last—are often built slowly and with intention. My guests on this edition of Out to Lunch understand that patience is a strategy. Both came to their current work almost by accident. And both are choosing growth on their own terms. Allys...

Some people discover their calling by accident. Literally. An injury or an illness or divine providence can lead to a vocation. You might call each of my guests today healers. But neither started out with the idea of becoming one. They were patients first — searching for relief when the medical system didn’t always have the answers. That journey led them to very different paths. One th...

Sometimes the best businesses don’t start with a big plan. They start with nothing: no money, no equipment, no idea what you’re doing. Just a problem to solve, a skill in your back pocket, and the determination to figure it out. That’s how Christiaan's two guests on this edition of Out to Lunch ended up where they are. One is making home furnishings from scraps. The other turned...