It's Acadiana: Out to Lunch

Oil is still big business in Acadiana, even if it’s not quite as big it used to be. The IT business is quietly growing here too, specially in Lafayette. What's interesting about both the natural resource industry and the broadband-based-business is the way they're growing beyond our borders. We're now looking at Acadiana-based oil, gas, and IT from China to Houston. Christiaan's guests on th...

How often is it that we aim for one career and land in another? You go to college to be a painter and you end up a graphic designer, or you study philosophy and end up a lawyer. For most of us, we're lucky if we can do work we love on nights and weekends. Finding meaning in your work and the opportunity to express yourself - and get paid - is the career path less traveled.  Christiaan's guest...

Everybody likes a pretty picture, and a good cheese. Well, maybe not everybody likes cheese, but when you team it up with grapes, chocolate, and other goodies it becomes something altogether different - an edible work of art. Running a startup in any industry is building a plane in midair. You might think you know how fly, but then you hit turbulence. Or you figure out that you need to also know h...

If you don't have hours to spare in a doctor's waiting room, or you live in a remote spot of Acadiana, you're going to love the advent of Tele-Health: You can get first-class healthcare anywhere in Acadiana. Now. We’re getting a lot of what we need from the internet these days. You can pick up your iPhone, unlock it with your face, and get a month’s supply of dog food delivered in two...

Your grocery and drug store purchase cards allow the stores to predict when you're going to need laundry detergent and Advil, and when you don't buy it in time they send you a coupon to get you to come back in. Then there's an even more advanced (some might call it "insidious") form of Artificial Iintelligence (A.I), like Frankie Russo's. Frankie's A.I knows you want to buy a car before you do. &n...

When you’re starting a new business, every consultant will tell you, rule number one is - make sure your business solves a problem that people want solved. That last part of the sentence is considered to be vital. If you don’t have a product that people are looking for, you’ll never sell it and your business will never work. Then, of course, there’s the exception to th...

Until a few years ago, if you wanted to know what's going on in the world or in your backyard, you had to buy a newspaper. Today we primarily get our news online. In this information society we expect information to be free. That trend has led to the well-documented demise of the daily paper. Except, not here. Here in Acadiana we are in the atypical position of having a newspaper that is actually...

There are two ways of launching a successful business these days. One is to come up with an idea. Write a business plan. Create a pitch. Hire a pitch coach to sharpen your message. Go through a business incubator, followed by a business accelerator program. Go to friends and family for financing. Then raise investment capital, and finally become profitable. The other method is to stumble by chance...

As humans, we have two ways to communicate. Sight and sound. We started out beating on wooden logs and scratching figures onto the walls of caves. We ve evolved to where we are today talking to a hand held device and telling it to play music or movies. The biggest part of those millions of years of artistic and technological revolution has occurred in the past hundred years. First there was the in...

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The decision to go in to business for yourself is a big one. On the one hand, you can do exactly what you want at any hour of the day without having to ask for anyone's permission. On the other hand, you're not getting paid. Aileen Bennett's two lunch guests on this edition of out to Lunch Acaiana made the decision to go into business for themselves for two very different reasons. And in two diffe...

At the end of the day, business is all about sales. You might have a revolutionary idea for a business or a product. You might even be a genius. But if you can't sell, you might as well just leave all your brilliant ideas in your desk drawer. The art of sales is a particular skill. And it doesn't come naturally to everyone. That's why Reece Theriot started up his company, Fulcrum Sales and Marketi...

No matter who you are, what you do, or where you live, there's no doubt that you're looking for same thing out of life as every other human being in the world: Happiness. Happiness is the stated goal of almost every societal organization in recorded history - from ancient Hindu writings to the United States Declaration of Independence. Here in Acadiana, Taylor McMahon is doing his part to increase...

Acadiana is changing. Yes, we still jealously guard our traditions and our culture, but we also embrace change. We re happy to have the fastest internet in the country. We re happy to be home to some very cool tech businesses. And we re happy to be able to go downtown to a coffee shop like Reve, which is as hip as any place in any major American City. But none of this fell out of the sky. Somebody...

If you re young you might find this hard to believe, but it s only been within the last generation that we have made the link between our health and our diet. It started with the realization that inhaling cigarette smoke can cause the formation of cancerous cells in our lungs. It took quite some time for us to believe that. And, as obvious as it seems now, it took even longer for us to learn and a...

There s a lot of talk these days about Artificial Intelligence. Economists and pundits are betting on who s still going to have a job in 20 years and who s going to be replaced by a robot or an algorithm. Some say the jobs most likely to disappear are taxi drivers, Uber, and truck drivers. Others say it s tax preparers and loan officers. As an illustration of how difficult it can be to predict how...

Here's a question for you. What is Art? There are various possible answers. From the personal and pragmatic, "I know it when I see it," to the wide-ranging and ideological, "Anything that holds up a mirror to society." When we talk about art on a show that is about business, I can tell you one thing that art is not. It's not something you go into to get rich. It's hard to imagine any other human e...

If you'd lived in the United States in the early 1900's, you would have been part of a fierce debate about alcohol. For many years there were people in Washington DC, and all across the country, who believed that alcohol was a drug that was so bad for us, that for our own good it should be totally banned. Eventually, that argument won out. In January 1920, alcohol was banned for sale or consumptio...

If everything worked out the way you thought it was going to, 10 or 20 years ago, what kind of a life would you be leading today? It's fascinating to ponder how different the world might be if Jeff Bezos didn't quit his job and start Amazon. Or if William Shakespeare had been content to make a living as an actor and hadn't started writing. We all change course. We change our minds. We fall in love...

We all know about the enormous economic challenges that newspapers are facing. With access to information that's posted online almost the minute it happens, it's become more difficult to convince people that reading the news next day in print has any value. The fact is that a good journalist can frame an issue, give it context, and deliver information in a way that you simply can't get on social m...

You're probably familiar with the term "Art versus commerce." It's one of the concepts that we take for granted are opposites. "Good versus evil." "Communism versus capitalism." "Left versus right." The problem with lumping art versus commerce into this list is that if you are an artist, you're required to find a place where art and commerce meet, or you're not going to pay the rent or keep the li...

Any conversation about the global economy today is bound to include a discussion of China. Economists and pundits frequently refer to China as "the world's fastest growing economy." Or "the world's second biggest economy." The unspoken intimation in this choice of language is that we in the United States better look out - China is catching up to us. The truth is, the United States has been around...

You probably know the line from the 1989 movie, Field of Dreams, "If you build it they will come." Decades after the movie came out this line continues to resonate with us, because it's about faith. Faith in ourselves. In our own courage to follow our dreams. And faith in our fellow humans - that others will recognize our courage and affirm it by buying into our dream. This is the exact opposite o...

Have you ever bought something on impulse? You see something you really like. You can't afford it. You know it's crazy, but you buy it anyway. Maybe you've done that with a piece of clothing. A pair of shoes. Even a car. How about a business? That's what happened to Camille Carloss. Camille's husband, Dylan, took Camille on a date to Alexander Books. While they were there, they heard the bookstore...

On this edition of Out to Lunch, Aileen Bennett sorts out the complex web of economic development organizations in Acadiana. Well, more or less. Aileen says there are so many of these business-boosting organizations that, "If I just read out a list of all the economic development and business support organizations in Acadiana and gave you a one-sentence description of what they do, I would still b...