Healthcare is big business, and it’s only getting bigger. In 2021, healthcare expenditures topped $4B in the U.S. By 2028, that figure is expected to reach $6.2B.

Within this growing and rapidly changing sector, nurses play an outsized role. They comprise the largest component of the healthcare workforce, they're the primary providers of hospital patient care and they deliver most of the nation’s longterm care. They’re also helping to lead the charge in new ways of delivering care, creating companies right here in Baton Rouge that are reinventing the way nursing is done.

Renita Williams Thomas is a pediatric nurse specialist and the owner and CEO of In Loving Arms Pediatric Day Health Center, an outpatient center for children with medically complex needs such as congenital heart disease, traecheotomy, seizure, and genetic and neurological disorders, among others.

The center combines skilled nursing, education and therapy and enables children with chronic conditions to interact with other kids their age who may also be going through similar health challenges. Renita founded the center in 2012 after spending more than two decades in the field with the Southern University School of Nursing - where she earned her bachelors and master’s degrees in nursing - Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center, the Louisiana State Department of Health and the Lousiaina School for the Visually Impaired. 

Blasia Rivet is a Registered nurse and the founder and owner of Decision Critical, a concierge nursing agency that offers in home and mobile private duty nursing services in the Baton Rouge region. Services are tailored to fit patient and caretaker needs and include acute and chronic conditions, elderly care support, post op recovery, and more.

Blasia founded Decision Critical in 2014 to fill the need she saw in the community for a higher level of personalized care than one can get beyond the doctor’s office. Blasia is a native of Baton Rouge and a graduate of southeastern Louisiana university school of nursing. 

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs On the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Brian Newton at itsbatonrouge.la.

Healthcare is big business, and it’s only getting bigger. In 2021, healthcare expenditures topped $4B in the U.S. By 2028, that figure is expected to reach $6.2B.
Within this growing and rapidly changing sector, nurses play an outsized role. They comprise the largest component of the healthcare workforce, they're the primary providers of hospital patient care and they deliver most of the nation’s longterm care. They’re also helping to lead the charge in new ways of delivering care, creating companies right here in Baton Rouge that are reinventing the way nursing is done.
Renita Williams Thomas is a pediatric nurse specialist and the owner and CEO of <a href="https://www.inlovingarmskids.com/">In Loving Arms Pediatric Day Health Center</a>, an outpatient center for children with medically complex needs such as congenital heart disease, traecheotomy, seizure, and genetic and neurological disorders, among others.
The center combines skilled nursing, education and therapy and enables children with chronic conditions to interact with other kids their age who may also be going through similar health challenges. Renita founded the center in 2012 after spending more than two decades in the field with the Southern University School of Nursing - where she earned her bachelors and master’s degrees in nursing - Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center, the Louisiana State Department of Health and the Lousiaina School for the Visually Impaired. 
Blasia Rivet is a Registered nurse and the founder and owner of <a href="https://decisioncriticalbr.com/">Decision Critical</a>, a concierge nursing agency that offers in home and mobile private duty nursing services in the Baton Rouge region. Services are tailored to fit patient and caretaker needs and include acute and chronic conditions, elderly care support, post op recovery, and more.
Blasia founded Decision Critical in 2014 to fill the need she saw in the community for a higher level of personalized care than one can get beyond the doctor’s office. Blasia is a native of Baton Rouge and a graduate of southeastern Louisiana university school of nursing. 
Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at <a href="https://www.mansursontheboulevard.com/">Mansurs On the Boulevard</a>. You can find photos from this show by Brian Newton at itsbatonrouge.la.

OUT TO LUNCH finds Baton Rouge Business Report Editor Stephanie Riegel combining her hard news journalist skills and food background: conducting business over lunch. Baton Rouge has long had a storied history of politics being conducted over meals, now the Capital Region has an equivalent culinary home for business: Mansur's. Each week Stephanie holds court over lunch at Mansur's and invites members of the Baton Rouge business community to join her. You can also hear the show on WRKF 89.3FM.

It's Baton Rouge: Out to Lunch

Nurse

Sometime around 100,000 years ago, what we think of as modern humans started wearing clothes. In the centuries since, the outfits and accessories we people have come up with have evolved from utilitarian garments to elaborate expressions of our culture and creativity.

Clothes and accessories are fun, fanciful and define who we are. Baton Rouge entrepreneurs are building successful businesses that capitalize on our desire to define ourselves by what we put on our bodies and atop our heads.

Karla Coreil, co-owner of Chapeaux, a Baton Rouge based millinery business that combines 19th-century British quality and tradition with South Louisiana style and flair.

Karla and her partner in Chapeaux, Jenn Loftin, opened the business in 2022 and custom make creative head pieces for high end occasions like the Kentucky Derby and down home celebrations like the St Patricks Day Parade.

Chapeaux also hosts private parties, which they call Chapeaux Party, at which guests can make their own festive hats and head pieces.

Karla is an attorney. Jenn has a Ph.D in education and works in educational publishing. When they started the business they said they were worried about how to spread the word. Turns out, Chapeaux caught on so fast their problem now is keeping up with demand.

Joey Redditt is founder and owner of Jo Design Studio, a Baton Rouge couturier that makes custom clothing for men, women and children, with a particular focus on  special occasion dresses.

Joey has been designing clothes since 2010, when he was gifted a sewing machine. At the time, he had his own successful teeshirt company, Grab it Rabbit. After that business took off, he decided to try his hand at designing clothes. Today he has 35 thousand followers on Instagram, his own studio and a growing number of customers.

Joey works fast and Jo Design Studio offers to make bespoke creations -- sometimes in just a few hours. 

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs On the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Brian Newton at itsbatonrouge.la.

Sometime around 100,000 years ago, what we think of as modern humans started wearing clothes. In the centuries since, the outfits and accessories we people have come up with have evolved from utilitarian garments to elaborate expressions of our culture and creativity.
Clothes and accessories are fun, fanciful and define who we are. Baton Rouge entrepreneurs are building successful businesses that capitalize on our desire to define ourselves by what we put on our bodies and atop our heads.
Karla Coreil, co-owner of <a href="https://www.chapeauxparty.com/">Chapeaux</a>, a Baton Rouge based millinery business that combines 19th-century British quality and tradition with South Louisiana style and flair.
Karla and her partner in Chapeaux, Jenn Loftin, opened the business in 2022 and custom make creative head pieces for high end occasions like the Kentucky Derby and down home celebrations like the St Patricks Day Parade.
Chapeaux also hosts private parties, which they call Chapeaux Party, at which guests can make their own festive hats and head pieces.
Karla is an attorney. Jenn has a Ph.D in education and works in educational publishing. When they started the business they said they were worried about how to spread the word. Turns out, Chapeaux caught on so fast their problem now is keeping up with demand.
Joey Redditt is founder and owner of <a href="https://www.thejodesignstudio.com/">Jo Design Studio</a>, a Baton Rouge couturier that makes custom clothing for men, women and children, with a particular focus on  special occasion dresses.
Joey has been designing clothes since 2010, when he was gifted a sewing machine. At the time, he had his own successful teeshirt company, <a href="https://www.chapeauxparty.com/home#FAQ">Grab it Rabbit</a>. After that business took off, he decided to try his hand at designing clothes. Today he has 35 thousand followers on Instagram, his own studio and a growing number of customers.
Joey works fast and Jo Design Studio offers to make bespoke creations -- sometimes in just a few hours. 
Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at <a href="https://www.mansursontheboulevard.com/">Mansurs On the Boulevard</a>. You can find photos from this show by Brian Newton at <a href="https://itsbatonrouge.la/2024/04/10/chapeaux-jo/">itsbatonrouge.la</a>.

Chapeaux Jo

Technology has opened doors in so many industries and enabled us to do so many things we couldn’t even imagine in the past. At the same time, we’ve made things more complicated for ourselves, creating systems that don’t always talk to each other and languages we don’t understand.

On this edition of Out to Lunch, two lunch guests who are helping break through the clutter, with products and services that are enabling our tech systems to work for us more effectively - and helping businesses better communicate their messaging.

John Morello, is Chief Technology Officer of Gutsy, a tech firm that has come up with a better way to help companies protect themselves against cyberthreat. More specifically, Gutsy uses process mining – and we’ll get into that in a minute – to ensure that the various cybersecurity systems a complex organization has in place are talking to one another and doing what they’re supposed to be doing.

If John’s name is familiar to you, it may be because he was a guest on Out to Lunch in 2019, when he was running Twistlock, a tech firm that developed cloud-based cybersecurity solutions. In the years since then, John and his partners in Twistlock have grown that company, attracted new investors, and created the spinoff, Gutsy, to address a need they identified running Twistolock.

John is a 14-year veteran of Microsoft, who lives in Baton Rouge and is also a master diver and very active in coastal conservation. 

Kenny Nguyen is founder and CEO of ThreeSixtyEight, a Baton Rouge-based creative and strategic media agency that focuses on branding, marketing and advertising with a high tech, high energy super creative approach. The company’s origins date back to 2011, when Kenny and his friend were still students at LSU and started Big Fish Presentations, which specialized in public speaking and presentation services. In 2016, it merged with another local firm to form ThreeSixtyEight. In the years since, it has grown to include clients that include Alfa, Tomb Raider, and Compass Datacenters. 

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs On the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Brian Newton at itsbatonrouge.la.

Technology has opened doors in so many industries and enabled us to do so many things we couldn’t even imagine in the past. At the same time, we’ve made things more complicated for ourselves, creating systems that don’t always talk to each other and languages we don’t understand.
On this edition of Out to Lunch, two lunch guests who are helping break through the clutter, with products and services that are enabling our tech systems to work for us more effectively - and helping businesses better communicate their messaging.
John Morello, is Chief Technology Officer of <a href="https://gutsy.com/">Gutsy</a>, a tech firm that has come up with a better way to help companies protect themselves against cyberthreat. More specifically, Gutsy uses process mining – and we’ll get into that in a minute – to ensure that the various cybersecurity systems a complex organization has in place are talking to one another and doing what they’re supposed to be doing.
If John’s name is familiar to you, it may be because he was <a href="https://itsbatonrouge.la/2019/04/04/tech-talk-out-to-lunch-its-baton-rouge/">a guest on Out to Lunch in 2019, when he was running Twistlock</a>, a tech firm that developed cloud-based cybersecurity solutions. In the years since then, John and his partners in Twistlock have grown that company, attracted new investors, and created the spinoff, Gutsy, to address a need they identified running Twistolock.
John is a 14-year veteran of Microsoft, who lives in Baton Rouge and is also a master diver and very active in coastal conservation. 
Kenny Nguyen is founder and CEO of <a href="https://www.threesixtyeight.com/">ThreeSixtyEight</a>, a Baton Rouge-based creative and strategic media agency that focuses on branding, marketing and advertising with a high tech, high energy super creative approach. The company’s origins date back to 2011, when Kenny and his friend were still students at LSU and started Big Fish Presentations, which specialized in public speaking and presentation services. In 2016, it merged with another local firm to form ThreeSixtyEight. In the years since, it has grown to include clients that include Alfa, Tomb Raider, and Compass Datacenters. 
Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at <a href="https://www.mansursontheboulevard.com/">Mansurs On the Boulevard</a>. You can find photos from this show by Brian Newton at<a href="https://itsbatonrouge.la/2024/03/27/tech-bros/"> itsbatonrouge.la</a>.

Tech BRos

Despite the ease and convenience of online shopping, which enables us to procure almost anything we want from anywhere in the world in short order, there’s still something wonderful about buying clothes, apparel, decorations for the home or, really anything for that matter, from a store that we know and love and a brand we have come to trust.

Baton Rouge - which likes to call itself "a big small town" -  has several homegrown brands that have been in business for generations. In the years since Katrina we've also welcomed a number of well known retailers from downriver in New Orleans.

One of them is Perlis, a family-owned apparel retailer has been a fixture in New Orleans since 1939 that has dressed generations of Uptown gentlemen and, in more recent decades, women, in what the company calls Southern Style.

In 2009 the Perlis family opened its first Baton Rouge location on Jefferson Highway. Bobby Berthelot has been the store's manager since 2013.

A native of New Orleans, Bobby majored in business and after graduating learned about the ropes of merchandising, retail and made-to-order menswear at the venerable Rubenstein’s on Canal Street in New Orleans then Brook’s Brothers before becoming GM at Perlis in Baton Rouge. 

Lauren LeBlanc Haydel is the founder and owner of Fleurty Girl, another well known south Louisiana brand that hasn’t been around as long as Perlis but is taking the region by storm.

Lauren founded the company in 2009 when she was a single mother of three and decided to risk it all creating t-shirts for women that celebrated New Orleans. Today, there are nine FLeurty Girls, including a location in Baton Rouge that opened in the summer of 2023, and Fleurty Girl ships its south Louisiana-inspired merchandise – including t-shirts, gifts, door hangers, gifts for the home and an amazing array of sparkly Mardi Gras stuff – all over the world. 

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs On the Boulevard. Photos by Brian Newton.

Despite the ease and convenience of online shopping, which enables us to procure almost anything we want from anywhere in the world in short order, there’s still something wonderful about buying clothes, apparel, decorations for the home or, really anything for that matter, from a store that we know and love and a brand we have come to trust.
Baton Rouge - which likes to call itself "a big small town" -  has several homegrown brands that have been in business for generations. In the years since Katrina we've also welcomed a number of well known retailers from downriver in New Orleans.
One of them is <a href="https://www.perlis.com/">Perlis</a>, a family-owned apparel retailer has been a fixture in New Orleans since 1939 that has dressed generations of Uptown gentlemen and, in more recent decades, women, in what the company calls Southern Style.
In 2009 the Perlis family opened its first <a href="https://www.perlis.com/amlocator/baton_rouge/">Baton Rouge location on Jefferson Highway</a>. Bobby Berthelot has been the store's manager since 2013.
A native of New Orleans, Bobby majored in business and after graduating learned about the ropes of merchandising, retail and made-to-order menswear at the venerable Rubenstein’s on Canal Street in New Orleans then Brook’s Brothers before becoming GM at Perlis in Baton Rouge. 
Lauren LeBlanc Haydel is the founder and owner of <a href="https://www.fleurtygirl.net/">Fleurty Girl</a>, another well known south Louisiana brand that hasn’t been around as long as Perlis but is taking the region by storm.
Lauren founded the company in 2009 when she was a single mother of three and decided to risk it all creating t-shirts for women that celebrated New Orleans. Today, there are nine FLeurty Girls, including <a href="https://www.fleurtygirl.net/service/our-stores/">a location in Baton Rouge</a> that opened in the summer of 2023, and Fleurty Girl ships its south Louisiana-inspired merchandise – including t-shirts, gifts, door hangers, gifts for the home and an amazing array of sparkly Mardi Gras stuff – all over the world. 
Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at <a href="https://www.mansursontheboulevard.com/">Mansurs On the Boulevard</a>. Photos by Brian Newton.

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