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 ocean. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Some stains just never get out of the shirt.  Before you panic, though, maybe visit my guest Miles Frank. Dry Clean Miles owns and operates C&R Quality Cleaners, a dry cleaning business with four locations across Acadiana. Trained as a mechanical engineer, Miles hit the road as a field service technician after college. Which meant he was away from his family for long stretches at a time. In 1996, the birth of his twins changed his calculus. He started looking for something closer to home. A dry-cleaning business in Crowley came up for sale, and Miles saw his opening and bought it.  Over time, Miles added locations and consolidated operations, applying an engineer's eye to efficiency along the way. Today he runs Park Avenue Cleaners in Crowley and three C&R locations in Lafayette. He says the secret to his success is adaptation. C&R invests a lot in updated equipment and has added 24-hour, automated kiosks to cut down on emergency pickups, for instance.  Nationally, the dry cleaning industry is worth roughly nine and a half billion dollars a year — and Miles runs a piece of it right here in Acadiana.  Auto In some ways, cars have changed a lot. But when it comes down to it, a car is an engine, a chassis and four wheels. No matter the make and model — or whatever computer is doing the driving — it’s going to need a tune-up once in a while, or maybe something more.  My guest Mitchel St. Romain can help you. He owns and operates Driven Results, a Lafayette-based auto shop.  Mitchel was born in Alexandria but grew up in Lafayette. He spent his early career in sales and marketing. Then a layoff in the oil industry forced a reckoning. Jobless, he turned to his passion: cars. He had grown up watching his dad fix cars the old fashioned way. Mitchel himself has spent the better part of two decades loving and working on an old Porsche. Fixing cars for other people was a natural next step. Mitchel started doing repair, paint and body work out of a shop at his house. Word of mouth grew the business and in 2020, he made it official. He keeps the operation intentionally small, working alongside his brother-in-law, with subcontractors brought in as needed, so he can keep the experience personal. Out to Lunch Acadiana was recorded one final time live over lunch at Tsunami Sushi before we packed up our chopsticks, picked up our plate lunch, and moved to our new location, Gravy, just a few blocks away in Downtown Lafayette. Join us next week at Gravy.  Meantime, you can find photos from this farewell to Tsunami show by Astor Morgan at itsacadiana.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 businesses around helping people find their voice. For Sarah Mary Toce-Donlon, that voice often comes from above.  Sarah Mary works in communications at UL Lafayette and is building a business as a professional speaker.  She offers speaking engagements, retreats, workshops, and leadership development . Her presentations weave together theology, philosophy, psychology, and leadership principles.  Sarah Mary grew up in Lafayette, and an internship with Homeland Security during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill led her to an early career in nonprofit work and disaster management. She later earned a Master of Divinity from Boston College — and that move to Massachusetts was a turning point. She describes the experience as one that broke her mind open, that challenged her worldview and deepened her understanding of faith and humanity. After years in nonprofit work and communications, she came back to her calling as a public speaker.  Her clients include Catholic school teacher retreats, corporate leadership trainings, church lecture series, and continuing education workshops for educators. Having a strong voice is pretty important if you want to be a good writer. We talk about it all the time in my newsroom. Voice communicates everything, and it’s just as essential on the page as it is from the stage. If you’re an author looking to develop a strong voice, you might need the services of a good editor like my guest Keondria Francis.  Keondria is owner operator of The Assembly Literary, a brand that houses her services as an editor-for-hire for independent authors.  Independent authors carry a particular burden: they are the publisher, the marketer, and the writer, all at once. Keondria tries to lighten that load. She offers manuscript evaluation, copy and line editing, proofreading, coaching sessions, and digital resources — including character development outlines she created after noticing how many authors struggled to build believable, relatable characters. Her editing philosophy centers on one principle: improve the manuscript without losing the writer's voice — an approach that blends African American Vernacular English with traditional grammar standards when it serves the story.  Keondria works with two to three clients a month, most of them repeat authors. About 95 percent are self-published. She's now expanding — adding a proofreader to her team, and planning to launch her own publishing company by end of year. Her first project will be her own novel. Out to Lunch Acadiana was recorded live over lunch at Tsunami Sushi in downtown Lafayette. You can find photos from this show by Astor Morgan at itsacadiana.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 partner Scott LaGrange own and operate Cypress Cove Landing — a marina, dance hall, restaurant, bait shop, and alligator hunt outfitter.   Born on Cypress Island, Jourdan was raised speaking French by his grandmother, self-taught on a pawn shop fiddle. Everything he does is a kind of cultural advocacy. So you’re probably not surprised that he thinks of Cypress Cove Landing as a cultural hub.  And a hub it certainly is. Cypress Cove offers boat slips, houseboat rentals, guided alligator hunts, fishing, and weekly Cajun dances that regularly draw five to six hundred people. The venue also hosts music tour groups through SOKO Music Tours. It's deliberately family friendly — all ages, all parts of the property. For Jourdan, it’s a place that exists because he got tired of watching authentic Cajun culture get replaced by a commercial version of it. Cypress Cove is a mission driven kind of entrepreneurship.  But, as Jourdan will tell you, that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Cypress Cove employs ten people, and Jourdan puts whatever the business earns back into the operation and the community. Real estate broker Beau Bourque, has always wanted to run something of his own. He grew up in New Iberia, studied business at UL Lafayette, and came out of school looking for work with an entrepreneurial edge. He found it selling beer and liquor for Crescent Crown Distributing — out front, making things happen. Then real estate called. Beaux joined a commercial team at Van Eaton Romero in 2011, built a niche in mobile home parks and industrial properties, and in 2020 launched Beacon Realty — his own commercial brokerage in Lafayette. Beacon serves local and national clients. It completes an average of a transaction every couple of weeks, which is impressive for a company that, so far, runs lean. Beau has brought on a second commercial agent and sees room to grow to five or six. About eight out of ten deals come through online leads, though Beau still makes at least an hour of calls every day and mails letters to prospective clients. The fundamentals, he'll tell you, don't go out of style. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Tsunami Sushi in downtown Lafayette.You can find photos from this show by Alisha Zachery Lazard at itsacadiana.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 engineered fluids underground to drill for oil.  Christiaan's guests on this edition of Out to Lunch both work in industries that sit mostly out of sight — below ground, behind fences, or buried in technical jargon — but when they’re needed, they’re really needed.  Scott Russo is co-owner and water specialist at Waterboys LLC, a water well services company serving residential, commercial, and agricultural clients in Acadiana. Most people get their water from large public or private utility systems. But more than 23 million U.S. households rely on private groundwater wells for their drinking water. That’s about 15 percent of the U.S. population who aren’t connected to municipal water systems and must maintain their own sources. Waterboys, founded in 2020, offers well drilling, pump installation, maintenance, and emergency repair — often with Scott himself answering the phone at all hours.  Water is a round-the-clock need, so Scott is always on call.  Scott grew up in Kaplan, studied geology, lived overseas and in Las Vegas, and eventually found his way back home and into the water well industry.  Zach West is president of Downhole Chemical Solutions, a Lafayette-based company operating in the hydraulic fracturing industry. Downhole plays a big role in the hydraulic part of fracking, providing the tech and engineering needed to get oil and gas out of the ground.  The fracking boom revived the domestic oil industry over the last decade. The hydraulic fracturing services industry alone is estimated at more than $40 billion in size in 2025. Downhole is an employee owned company with over 200 people on staff and serves a mix of major and mid-sized energy operators.  Zach grew up in central Louisiana in a family of engineers, earned degrees in chemical engineering and business, and returned to Lafayette to build his company.  Out to Lunch Acadiana was recorded live over lunch at Tsunami Sushi in downtown Lafayette. You can find photos from this show by Astor Morgan at itsacadiana.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 — and suddenly you’re wondering why you ever thought this was a good idea. And yet, people keep opening them. Maybe that’s because a successful restaurant can be an institution, a fixture of community from generation to generation. Take Ton’s, the diner and plate-lunch place founded in 1963 by the grandparents of Christiaan's lunch guest, Hollie Girouard.  Hollie grew up in the restaurant. Ton’s was her second home long before it was her responsibility. A volleyball scholarship brought her to UL, where she studied graphic design and imagined a future in the visual arts. But restaurant life always sucked her back in.   In 2023, Hollie opened Ton’s Downtown in Downtown Lafayette. It’s got all the Ton’s staples people expect — gumbo, burgers, plate lunches — with a little bit of a Downtown twist. Belly up to the bar and you can grab fresh juice, vegan options, frozen coffee, cocktails, and late-night service on weekends. Between the Broussard and downtown locations, Ton’s employs about thirty people. Hollie runs both, takes a long-term view of growth, and describes her downtown strategy as a “slow burn.” Dillon Van Way is the founder of Uncle Bob’s Food Truck Roundup, a boutique food truck park in downtown Lafayette.  A food truck park makes a lot of sense in Downtown Lafayette — a dense area with relatively high foot traffic and a reputation as a food destination. But Dillon will be the first tell you it’s not easy getting a no-brainer.  Dillon is an architect by trade. And as you can by now guess, his name is not Uncle Bob.  The food truck park grew out of a real estate project. Dillon redeveloped a building into apartments and found himself with a vacant adjacent lot. Rising construction costs and inflation made traditional development unattractive, so he tried something else: a carefully designed food truck park. Uncle Bob’s opened during Mardi Gras of 2025.  Out to Lunch Acadiana was recorded live over lunch at Tsunami Sushi in downtown Lafayette. You can find photos from this show by Astor Morgan at itsacadiana.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 everyone is signed up for extinction.  Christiaan's guests on this edition of Out to Lunch are young cattle farmers who have thrown out the conventional big ag playbook, putting their sweat equity into sustainable practices that emphasize high standards of animal care and meat quality.  Their meat story starts with a meet-cute in an animal science lab.  Molly (Abshire) LeJeune met Hayden LeJeune while at McNeese State.  She is from Little Cypress, Texas, where her family owned a big piece of land her grandfather once farmed. The land stayed in the family even after the farming stopped, which meant Molly grew up with a kind of open-ended question: What should this land be? That question followed Molly into high school, where her family started buying beef from a woman practicing sustainable agriculture. That was Molly’s lightbulb moment. “I think I could do that,” she thought. By the time she graduated, she’d decided she wanted to farm — and not just farm, but farm differently. At McNeese, Molly built her own curriculum — regenerative farming, soil biology, direct-to-consumer models.  Meanwhile, about 80 miles east, Hayden LeJeune was growing up on a rice, crawfish, and cattle farm in Richard, Louisiana. Like a lot of farm kids, he wanted to stay on the land — but the math didn’t work. Most small farms can barely support one family, much less two. So Hayden went to McNeese for agribusiness, figuring he’d become a feed rep or crop consultant and farm on the side like everybody else. Then he met Molly. By the time they graduated, Hayden’s dad decided to get out of cattle — and handed his son a small starter herd. Today, Molly and Hayden run Cypress Prairie Farms, a regenerative beef operation in Richard with about 40 head of cattle on 70 acres. No pesticides, no fertilizers, no grain byproducts, no antibiotics. Their cows rotate on pasture to rebuild soil, reduce pests naturally, and create something rare these days — a farm that is building land instead of depleting it. At Cypress Prairie Farms, Molly and Hayden sell everything from steaks to marrow bones to beef shares at local farmers markets and online. Their beef is USDA processed, dry aged for flavor, and delivered with the kind of transparency you only get when you personally know the people raising your dinner. Out to Lunch Acadiana was recorded live over lunch at Tsunami Sushi in downtown Lafayette. You can find photos from this show by Astor Morgan at itsacadiana.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. Allyson Romero is the founder of Grow Leadership Coaching. She spent eight years teaching in Lafayette public schools and later moved into management roles in the private sector. Allyson thrived as a manager, but it wasn't until she received leadership coaching as part of her own professional development that something clicked.  She realized she loved coaching, she was good at it, and it aligned with who she actually was. When she was laid off in 2024, instead of looking for another management job, she took it as a sign to start Grow Leadership Coaching. Grow Leadership Coaching is a local firm that offers individualized coaching to help managers and executives maximize their performance and reach their goals. They work on skills like effective communication and time management through one-on-one sessions or team coaching.  Most of Allyson's clients are already in leadership roles, and she's intentional about finding the right fit—she meets with prospective clients first to make sure it's a good match for both of them. Right now, it's a side venture for her, but one she's committed to growing with intention and a strong reputation. While Allyson is sizing up the right client, Mary Hays is getting runners into the right pair of shoes. Mary is the owner of Geaux Run by Fleet Feet in Lafayette.  Mary has been active her whole life—cross-country runner in high school, swimmer, golfer, paddleboarder. But she spent her career at Teche Electric before being hired as manager of Geaux Run in 2012. She bought out the shop’s owners to become sole proprietor. When the opportunity came to join the Fleet Feet franchise in 2018, she was strategic about it — and she didn't sacrifice local control.  Geaux Run is a specialty athletic shoe and apparel retailer focused on proper fit. They carry running shoes, socks, GPS watches, inserts — everything the avid runner needs. What sets them apart is their commitment to fitting. They use 3D foot scans to ensure every customer gets the right shoe for their needs. The store also hosts free demo runs when new shoes release, collaborates with podiatrists and physical therapists to offer their customers discounts, and is a major sponsor of local running clubs and youth programs like Girls on the Run. Out to Lunch Acadiana was recorded live over lunch at Tsunami Sushi in downtown Lafayette. You can find photos from this show by Astor Morgan at itsacadiana.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 a pine tree into a broadband company. Both, you might say, made something from nothing. Matthew Latiolais is the owner of Cajun Salvage Company. Matthew grew up in Lafayette and got his first lesson in welding at sixteen from a boatbuilder — thanks to his grandfather, who volunteered him for the job. After college, Matthew spent his early career in the oilfield, but when the industry hit a downturn, he found himself sending out résumés to nowhere. Eventually, he decided the only thing left to do was work for himself. In 2015, Matthew founded Cajun Salvage, a shop specializing in woodworking, metal fabrication, and architectural salvage. His first jobs came from tearing down barns and reclaiming materials. Now he builds everything from custom cabinets to cypress tables to barn doors — often based on whatever clients find on Pinterest. He’s also a Master Craftsman and a member of the Louisiana Crafts Guild. Chris Disher is Managing Director of Cajun Broadband. Chris is a mechanical engineer by training, born in Ponchatoula and raised in Morgan City. He spent more than two decades in oil and gas, living and working all over the world. When Chris and his family moved to a blueberry farm in St. Martin Parish, they ran into a different kind of problem: terrible internet. Chris’s kids begged him to sell the farm and move to the city, but instead Chris and a friend stuck an antenna in a pine tree and got 60 megabits per second. That was the start of Cajun Broadband. Founded in 2017, the company now provides fiber and wireless internet to nine parishes, and employs 10 people. Cajun Broadband grew even faster through state and federal broadband grants: the company landed a $26 million grant to connect 9,000 homes.  Chris says they started in a tree, and now their service is faster than some city providers. Chris and Matthew's business histories, though as different as analog wood and digital fiber, are both proof that sometimes the best way forward is to stop waiting for someone else to solve the problem, and just build the solution yourself. It doesn't get much more Cajun than that. And that's how you get Cajun Salvage and Cajun Broadband. Out to Lunch Acadiana was recorded live over lunch at Tsunami Sushi in downtown Lafayette. You can find photos from this show by Astor Morgan at itsacadiana.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.