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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In Hollywood, power couples from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, icons like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, and Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, exemplified glamour both on and off the screen. At the pinnacle of their careers, these romantic couples were closely followed and adored by movie-goers, capturing the public’s imagination during a Golden Age of film. Today, power couples are more often found on smaller screens, not in a seductive embrace but wielding power tools while knocking down interior walls or building decks. I’m thinking of course of the husband and wife teams on popular home decor and renovation shows, couples like Dave and Jenny Marrs of “Fixer to Fabulous,” and Egypt Sherrod and Mike Jackson of “Married to Real Estate.” You might not have ever heard of Don and Susan Charlet, co-owners of the home decor and furniture gallery The Corbel, but you can be sure that in social circles from Zachary to St. Francisville, Don and Susan are a local power couple. Don Charlet is no stranger to entrepreneurship—he worked in the family funeral home business for the first decade of his career. Then in 2000, with his brother, Don launched Charlet Brothers Construction, a custom residential homebuilder and remodeler responsible for some of the first homes built in the Copper Mill neighborhood. In 2003, Don and Susan opened The Corbel on Highway 61 between Zachary and St. Francisville. Then, after 20 years of business, they relocated The Corbel to downtown St. Francisville where the curated home goods and antique furniture shop became the anchor store for a multi-business redevelopment project called North Commerce. Today, North Commerce includes The Corbel, boutiques Barlow and Deyo, the eight-room Hotel Toussaint, event venue Mallory, a pizza restaurant and a microbrewery. Starting a business is stressful and challenging under most circumstances. What often determines whether a business succeeds or fails is the commitment and perseverance of the business partners. With 5 successful businesses and a lifetime of memories in marriage, it’s safe to say Don & Susan have struck the right balance for success. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Ian Ledo & Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There’s a line I keep hearing from people who run small businesses in Baton Rouge. It goes something like: I didn’t plan this. I was doing something else, I saw a gap, and I walked through it. Norisha Kirts Glover has a degree in mass communication and an MPA. She spent years in nonprofit fundraising in Washington, D.C. and California. In 2015 she walked through a door marked “commercial construction” — an industry where women and people of color were barely present — and decided that was exactly where she needed to be. Norisha is originally from the Alexandria area. She came to LSU for college and stayed. In 2015, an opportunity came along to enter commercial construction. She researched it, noticed that women and people of color were dramatically underrepresented, and decided to launch NRK Construction anyway — or maybe because of that. The firm picked up early traction after the 2016 floods, working through extensive residential renovation before moving deeper into commercial work. NRK is intentionally small — three to four employees, about $3 million in annual revenue, with two major projects at a time. Norisha says that’s not a limitation; it’s a choice. Her superintendent is on every job site and every client meeting comes with an agenda. Norisha’s aiming next at healthcare, education and federal contracting. Ralph Whalen grew up in New Orleans, studied English at Dartmouth, and has tried to leave Louisiana several times. Chicago, New Hampshire. He keeps coming back. Ralph started his career implementing Epic — the electronic health records platform that runs inside most major hospitals — and worked his way up to Senior Vice President at a healthcare IT firm called Divurgent. In September 2020, he launched Benzait, a consulting firm that helps hospitals and health systems figure out how to adopt artificial intelligence responsibly. Benzait works with medium to large health systems, building the governance frameworks and technical infrastructure that AI actually requires before it goes anywhere near a patient. Ralph says the biggest problem in healthcare AI right now isn’t a lack of technology — it’s organizations rushing to adopt it before they’ve figured out what problem they’re trying to solve. His job, a lot of the time, is to slow people down just enough to get it right. Ralph and Norisha both entered rooms where the conventional wisdom said they didn’t quite belong — a woman in commercial construction, an English major in healthcare tech — and found that being the unexpected person in the room turned out to be an advantage. 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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Think about the last time you showed your ID. Maybe at the airport, maybe at a bar, maybe somewhere you had to prove you were who you said you were. You pulled out a card. A piece of plastic. Maybe it was a little beat up. Maybe the photo was from ten years ago. There’s a decent chance that if you live in Louisiana, you’ve also used a phone to do that. That digital driver’s license on your phone — that was built right here, in Baton Rouge, by a company called Envoc. Calvin Fabre built it. Calvin is a long-time friend of Out to Lunch: he's made multiple appearances on this show over the years as he's developed his company, and some of Louisiana's most advanced tech. He's been writing code since he was 12 years old — 1978, give or take — when he got an Atari 800 and discovered that he could make a computer do exactly what he told it to do. He has essentially been doing that ever since. Calvin studied computer science at Southeastern Louisiana University and built Envoc into a software firm that now works on some of the most consequential identity technology in the country. You may know Envoc best as the company behind LA Wallet — Louisiana’s digital driver’s license. Calvin divested the IP on that about a year ago, but the work continues: he’s now sitting at international standards meetings with Apple, Samsung, Google, and representatives from Hong Kong, New Zealand and Canada, working out what digital identity should look like everywhere. He’s also thinking carefully about who gets left behind when identity goes digital — seniors, low-income users, people who don’t trust the technology or can’t easily access it. For Calvin, that’s not an afterthought. It’s the whole point. Samantha Morgan started her career as a journalist — arts writing, then Hurricane Katrina turned it into hard news overnight, then broadcast, then the BP oil spill, then digital. Eventually she stopped working for other people’s newsrooms and started her own production company - Quick Flip Media. She says she named it after a phrase she repeated every day for twenty years in television: flip it quick. Samantha is a Baton Rouge native — Old Goodwood, specifically — who has tried to leave more than once. She jokes that the natural disasters keep pulling her back. Calvin and Samantha have both ended up running their own business after years of building something for someone else. And in both cases, the reason seems to be the same: the problem was too interesting to leave to other people. Calvin has been at this long enough that he was building software before most of the people who use it were born. Samantha has covered enough Louisiana history that she has a personal archive most newsrooms would envy. Not surprisingly, neither one of them are done. Because, after all, tech never sleeps. 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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I’m Amy Irvin, host of Out to Lunch in Baton Rouge. I was a college student once. A long time ago. And like a lot of college students, I picked some of my classes based on the professor. Word of mouth, mostly. What my friends said. Whether the 8 a.m. course section was worth getting out of bed for or not. These days, there’s a website that tries to do that systematically. You’ve probably heard of it. Rate My Professor. And if you’ve ever spent time on it, you might have noticed it’s also a place where students settle scores, write reviews about a professor’s appearance, and occasionally make things up entirely. My lunch guest, Nash Mahmoud, noticed the same thing. He happens to be a professor. He also happens to be a software engineer. So he built something better. Nash came to the United States from Jordan in 2008 to pursue a graduate degree at Mississippi State. He got his master’s, then his PhD, then a tenure-track faculty offer at LSU — and somewhere along the way between learning his way around campus, walking to football games, and dining at local spots around town, Baton Rouge became home. He’s been teaching software engineering at LSU for the better part of a decade. A few years ago, while advising nearly 40 students at once, he started paying close attention to how they were using Rate My Professor to make decisions about their education. What he saw bothered him: anonymous reviews, no way to verify whether the reviewer was even a real student, bias against female faculty, and a single bad comment that could follow a professor for years. Nash spent a couple of years researching the problem. Then he started coding. On March 14th, 2024 — Pi Day — Nash launched Professor Index, a verified, AI-powered professor review platform designed to reduce misinformation and bias. It’s now live at 20 universities and has more than 3,500 downloads. Professor Index has become so popular that students are sending in requests to add more campuses faster than he can keep up. My other lunch guest, Courtney Sparkman, taught himself to code because a problem at his job was driving him crazy and he couldn’t find anyone else to fix it. He was running security companies, then. Now he runs a software company that serves 700 of them. Courtney is from Chicago and moved to Baton Rouge when his wife — his fiancée at the time — got a job here after pharmacy school. He says the thing that surprised him most about Baton Rouge was how welcoming the city is to newcomers. Courtney is a self-described serial entrepreneur. Before coming to Baton Rouge, he helped his father build a security guard company from the ground up — zero employees to about 300, and several million dollars in revenue — before they sold it. Then he went to work for a larger security firm and immediately recognized every problem he thought he’d left behind: guards showing up late, incident reports written hours after the fact, supervisors with no real-time visibility into what was happening in the field. Courtney taught himself to code and built the solution himself. It’s called OfficerApps. OfficerApps launched in 2013. Today, OfficerApps serves about 700 security companies, from five-person operations to firms with thousands of officers in the field. Nash and Courtney have both figured out — the hard way, mostly — that building the thing is only the beginning. Getting people to use it, trust it, and tell someone else about it: that’s the actual work. Nash launched his Professor Index app on Pi Day and is now traveling to college campuses to make the case in person. And in Courtney's case, besides being the software developer he also answers OfficerApps support calls himself so customers know somebody’s there. Neither of these fathers of apps born in Baton Rouge planned it quite the way it happened. That turns out to be a pretty common feature of good ideas. 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. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.