It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch

If you're starting out in business, or you're at an early stage of development, an incubator will help you with your business plan, your strategy for growth, and other guidance. They may even introduce you to investors. But, like being admitted to a good college, getting accepted into an incubator can be competitive. And, despite the best of intentions, the outcome of that competition is not alway...

Have you ever fantasized about how you're going to walk into work one day and tell them you're quitting? You're moving to Colorado and you're going to grow pot. Shane Mutter was President of Doerr Furniture when he did something close to that. It wasn't quite as dramatic, and it's not exactly pot he's growing, it's the non pot-smoking version of cannabis, the stuff you make CBD from. Today Shane i...

The Idea Village started at the turn of the 21st Century as a rebellious reaction to the business-as-usual cabal who, through an interlocking web of clubs, krewes, families, and cronyism, controlled most of the purse-strings in a then-shrinking New Orleans. Six years later, in the wake of the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, The Idea Village played a pivotal role in totally changing the...

When you start up a business, you're looking to hit milestones to reassure yourself things are going in the right direction. One of those milestones is simply being able to keep the doors open for the first year. And if you're still going two years after starting up, you can be pretty confident that your business plan is working. However, no matter how much of a forward-looking strategic thinker y...

Whether we're talking about economics, health, home ownership, personal income, or a host of other issues, we're often quick to suggest we can relate every outcome to one word: education. But, like everything else, education is not as simple as it sounds. If you're a teacher or an administrator in the education system you're forever looking for new and better ways to improve. One of those improved...

If you're like most people, when you do your taxes once a year you're genuinely surprised at the numbers staring up at you. You can't believe how much you spent on various items. Maybe it's car repair. School supplies. Travel. Eating out. Shoes. Or even groceries. You're so surprised at how much you spent, compared to how much you earned, that you tell yourself you won't do that again next year. T...

One criticism that used to be levelled at New Orleans was that we have a thousand restaurants but only ten recipes. Every restaurant served a variation of gumbo, jambalaya and fried seafood. Those days are gone. Take, for example, Marjie's Grill on Broad Street. Not only is Marjie's a popular New Orleans restaurant, it was named one of the best new restaurants in America by Bon Appetit magazine. I...

It's probably no exaggeration to say that the boom in entrepreneurial business in New Orleans wouldn't have happened without the business incubator, Idea Village. Robbie Vitrano was one of the founders of Idea Village. He was also one of the founders of the ad agency Trumpet and the revolutionary Naked Pizza. Today, Robbie talk to Peter Ricchiuti about his newest ventures, among them Good Spread,...

For most of recorded history, we humans have had a home from which we have gone forth to find food. Now, things have changed. Today, thanks to food delivery apps like Waitr, we can stay home and have food brought to us. In the course of human activity, it's a fundamental shift. Maybe that's why Waitr has caused such a sensation. Starting life in Lake Charles in 2015, Waitr is listed on the New Yor...

There's a fine line between business and gambling. In both, you're taking an amount of money and by doing something with it hoping to make it into a larger amount of money. Real gamblers will tell you it's not all chance, there's an element of skill in whatever it is they're doing. Real business people will tell you what they're doing is not all skill, there's an element of luck. What Andy Ellis i...

Whether you're listening to this as a podcast, or on the radio, you're not paying for it. You're not stealing it. So you're on the right side of the law. But when you listen to a song on YouTube, or you repost a photo on Facebook, can you be sure that's totally legal? As a consumer, it can be hard to know. If you're the creator of intellectual property, like music or photographs, and that's how yo...

Typically, on shows about business, hosts and guests talk about business in a way that avoids discussion of politics, socio-economic conditions, or social activism. In the real world, though, business is connected to everything else in our community. And so, once in a while, it's valuable to acknowledge that, and to talk to people who are in the business of creating social change. Melissa Sawyer i...

You can break everything in the world down to the cellular level. Cells create energy. And energy is what runs you, me, and every contraption we've built, from cell phones to the world wide web. When energy ebbs, things get bad. Have you ever had your cell service go out on your phone? Or, personally, have you felt so worn out during the middle of the afternoon that you don't know how you're going...

If you eat out in New Orleans you've probably noticed two things. One, there seem to be a lot more restaurants to choose from these days. And, two, everywhere you go seems to be busy. You're right on both counts. New Orleans has more restaurants than ever. Over twelve hundred. And we have a larger population than we've had in some time, so that means more people eating out. Although this is a good...

Movie plots often fall into one of a number of formulas. One of them is "Local boy makes good." Both of Peter Ricchiuti's guests on this edition of Out to Lunch fall into that category. Nobody is making a movie about either of them, but they're both making movies. Trey Burvant grew up in Covington. After a successful nationwide and international career as an actor, Trey returned to New Orleans aft...

One of the great things about the movie The Wizard of OZ, is the discovery that what makes everything in this magical world happen, is the man behind the curtain. Without likening New Orleans to Oz, there is a lot of magic here. From Mardi Gras to the splendor of the mansions in the Garden District. And, because it's New Orleans and not Oz, sometimes the man behind the curtain, is a woman. Eleanor...

Whatever you're doing today, whether you're at work or at home, or somewhere in between, you spend a great deal of the day thinking about yourself. Not in a bad or selfish way, just in the normal way most of us do. There are other people who are not thinking about themselves in quite the same way. They're thinking about the lives of others. And how to save them. Anoop Jain is saving lives in India...

We often hear people say they don t like certain foods. Like Brussels sprouts. Or blue cheese. But when was the last time you heard somebody say, "I don t like pie" Everybody likes pie, right So, if you have a company that makes pies, and they re pies everybody likes, you d think it wouldn t take long till you re a household name. Well, like most things, the pie business isn t quite as straight fo...

Have you heard this one Bill Gates walks into a bar... Actually, it s not a joke. It s a lesson about the definition of averages. Bill Gates walks into a bar. There s 20 people in there. The average net worth of everybody in the bar is now 5 billion dollars. In a similar manner, New Orleans business boosters like to say these days, "New Orleans is the fastest growing tech city in the country." As...

Show business has all kinds of folklore and superstitions. One of them is, "Never work with pets or kids." Not because entertainers don t like pets or kids, it s because they don t want to be up staged by them. Peter Ricchiuti s guests on today s Out to Lunch are both entertainers who have chosen to ignore this advice. They re not just working with kids, they re working for kids. Ann Mahoney is a...

The Small Business Association defines a small business as having fewer than 500 employees. By that definition, over 99 of all businesses in the US are small businesses. Even so, the businesses in the remaining 1 that they re competing against have a hugely outsized influence when it comes to marketing and other resources. How does a small business compete with the likes of Amazon and WalMart In N...

Each year around the holidays, we shift our collective focus for a few weeks. In addition to thinking about our own needs, we think about others. We buy gifts. We listen to music that s all about unanimity. And we give to charity. For some people, this kind of largesse is not confined to the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It s what they do every day. Oji Alexander is Executive Director...

We hear a lot about the link between the online world and the real world these days. Most real world purchases begin with an online search. Even purchases as big as a house. There s no better example of the influence of the online world on the real world of real estate than Curbed. Curbed is technically a nationwide real estate blog. But it s also an influencer. It reports on real estate trends, b...

New Orleans is the home of the poboy. And the muffuletta. Over the years we ve gotten pretty good at making French bread and muffuletta buns, but we haven t become known for any other kinds of bread that might be a little more sophisticated. Well, like a lot of other things around here, bread baking is changing too. Bellegarde Bakery bakes a range of bread, made from the stone ground flour that th...

We ve been here in New Orleans for 300 years. We wouldn t still be here if we didn t have the ability to adapt. But we don t like change. We still reminisce about long closed drugstores, bakeries, and supermarkets. And, 300 years later, we re still on the brink of flooding when it rains for an hour. The Urban Conservancy is on both sides of this street. They want to keep things as they are, and th...