If you live in New Orleans, you’ve probably had this happen: A friend gets in touch and says they’re coming to town for something to do with their work. Usually a convention. They’ll be in touch when they get here and know their schedule. The next communication you get is an apology. They’re on the way home. They went to Bourbon Street their first night here, and everything else is kind of a blur.

That doesn’t do a lot for your friendship. And their bleary-eyed, dragging, hung-over 3 days at the conference didn’t do a lot for their professional standing either.

Vacation

What if your friend could have done this a whole other way? What if making the most of New Orleans was integrated into a visit, so it becomes a part of the professional, work-related reason a business- person comes here? That’s, broadly, the concept behind Lelia Gowland’s business, Strategic Vacations.

Strategic Vacations is a business consultancy for purpose-driven women and non-binary leaders in business, with a very New Orleans perspective. It’s a New Orleans vacation that balances the benefit of getting away from it all with strategic planning and personal consultancy - so attendees get their professional and personal priorities right.

Tattoo Removal

Now, back to your friend who hadn’t heard about Strategic Vacations – the one who’s stumbling around the French Quarter.

Maybe at some point in the evening, after a second Hurricane and a Big Ass Beer, your friend might have the brilliant idea of getting a tattoo.

Some tattoos are awesome. They have cultural significance, or they mean something special to the person wearing them. But time has a way of changing your opinions and circumstances. And if either of those change and your tattoo doesn’t, what seemed like a good idea at the time is now a permanent reminder of a regrettable decision.

Well, the good news about that is, even if you can’t erase the memory, you can now erase the tattoo. As easily as you wandered into the tattoo shop, you can now wander into the tattoo removal shop. It’s called Removery. It’s on Magazine Street. It’s also in 162 other locations across the US, Canada, and Australia, and it’s expanding to Europe.

Removery is the biggest dedicated tattoo removal company in the world. Its Co-Founder and Vice President of Clinical Advancement is Carmen Brodie.

Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There’s a reason you’re familiar with Jack Nicholson’s character in the movie A Few Good Men yelling, “You can’t handle the truth!” Partly it’s because of the intensity of Nicholson’s performance, but mostly it’s because it’s a hard-hitting piece of universal reality: A lot of the time we’d rather not know the truth.

It can be as bland as the ubiquitous, “How are you?” When you ask somebody that, you don’t really want their verified health summary. Similarly, when someone asks, “How’s business?” the expected answer is, “Great!” If you’re on the verge of bankruptcy you might answer, “Hey we’re hangin’ in.”

The problem is, “Fake it till you make it” doesn’t always work. Sometimes in business, as in other aspects of life, the only way you can change and grow is if you deal with the truth.

A business consultant or a board of directors will typically only go so far in that regard. And that’s the reason David Purvis started up The Alternative Board in New Orleans.

The Alternative Board is exactly what it says: an alternative to a typical board of directors. It’s more like a business support group. A business owner joins a group of other business owners They meet regularly, have honest conversations about their issues, and draw on their experiences to critique and help each other.

The Alternative Board is an international organization. It’s in 22 countries. It has contributed to the success of more than 25,000 businesses over the past 30 years and members of the organization reportedly grow their businesses two-and-a-half times faster than the national average.

David Purvis launched the New Orleans branch after a successful 36 year career as an engineer and executive in the oil and gas business.

Even if you don’t have a business yourself, you’ve more than likely had to do business at some point with the city, or municipality you live in.

Whether that’s here in New Orleans, or pretty much any other city in the country, you’ve more than likely been amazed at the apparent dysfunction and bureaucratic b.s. you have to go through to get anything accomplished.

Here in New Orleans, our everyday stories are legendary about road repair, street lighting, building permits, burst water mains, boil water advisories, and the list goes on.

Here’s a true story. On a street near my house, the city dug up the whole street and sidewalk and repaired and re-paved it. It was beautiful. For about a month. Then some other city contractor came along and dug up a section of the sidewalk. Now a sheet of plywood covers that bit. It’s been like that for 9 months and now the plywood’s beginning to rot.

I know you’ve got a similar story. We all do. But, imagine living in a city where this kind of dysfunction doesn’t happen. That is what Sevetri Wilson Taylor’s company, Prosperall, is setting out achieve.

Prosperall is an AI-driven platform that lets cities and municipalities consolidate data across departments so that disconnected systems that were never designed to talk to each other, communicate and coordinate.

Sevetri Co-Founded Prosperall in 2025 and it’s already at work in 11 cities, including New Orleans.

It doesn’t matter who you are, what you do, or how successful you are, all of us to one degree or another believe that however well we’re doing now, we can do better. Whether it’s about making more money for yourself, or making life better for somebody else, the desire to do better - at least in the Western world - is probably one of the biggest motivators of human activity.

Sevetri and David are both focused on making things better. For lots of people. David is focused on making things better for people in business. Sevetri is focused on making things better for everybody – everybody who lives and works in a city. It takes a special balance of drive and selflessness to pull off what each of them are doing.

Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you’ve lived in New Orleans for any length of time, you know we love to rebuild. We rebuilt the levees. We rebuilt the schools. We rebuilt the Superdome. After every storm, we rebuild thousands of roofs and hundreds of homes.

After Hurricane Katrina, a small group of New Orleanians decided that the way they could make a contribution toward saving the city was to help build companies. They revived a small volunteer-run organization called Social Entrepreneurs of New Orleans. Three years later they turned it into a registered non-profit and gave it a new name. They called it, “Propeller.”

The idea was - Find people in New Orleans who had identified a problem in their community and were trying to build a business or nonprofit to fix it. Get these folks in a room. Teach them how to read a balance sheet, how to apply for a grant, how to write a marketing plan, how to hire a bookkeeper. Then turn them loose.

It worked. Today, Propeller is a business accelerator and co-working space that has seen more than 300 ventures go through its program. Those companies have generated over $290 million in revenue and external financing, and they’ve created more than 485 full and part-time jobs in the city.

The CEO of Propeller is Jessica Allen.

If you happened to watch HGTV in 2024, you may have caught a series called “Bargain Block: New Orleans.” It was a New Orleans spinoff of HGTV’s Detroit-based home renovation show.

The two hosts had design ambitions. The person on the show who turned those ambitions into actual buildings, walls, and floors was a New Orleans general contractor named Charles Aponza.

Charles came to New Orleans in 2012 to teach in the Recovery School District. He bought a fixer-upper, restored it himself, and then friends started asking him to help with their houses. In 2015 he turned his home building skills into a business - Brighter Horizons Construction.

Charles and Brighter Horizons came up through Propeller’s Impact Accelerator.

Then there’s the other side of what comes out of Propeller. A nonprofit.

In 2014, Kimberly Novod and her husband Aaron were expecting their first child. Their son Saul was born prematurely at 28 weeks. He spent 20 days in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. He died there.

Kimberly has said publicly that the question she was left with was, “What do I do with all the love?” Her answer was Saul’s Light – a New Orleans nonprofit she founded to support NICU families and bereaved families across Louisiana.

Today, Saul’s Light serves around 200 Louisiana families a year.Beyond emotional support, they provide financial assistance. And as an advocacy group, Saul’s Light has produced two Louisiana state laws – a tax credit for stillborn children, and a requirement that health insurance, including Medicaid, cover prescription human milk.

There’s a tendency, when we talk about business in New Orleans, to default to conversations about tourism, hospitality, Jazz Fest, Mardi Gras… The fun stuff. We don’t hear so much about the social justice economy: people who are building businesses and organizations to fix things that are broken.

At Propeller they put that work at the center of their existence.

Charles came up through Propeller and grew a construction business that builds homes New Orleanians can actually afford. Kimberly came up through Propeller and built an organization that helps 200 families a year go through one of the hardest things a person can experience.

As in music, sometimes in business the silence is as powerful as the conversation.

Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.