There’s a particular kind of business story that you can really only tell about Louisiana. It usually starts with somebody who barely had two nickels to rub together, an idea that almost nobody else took seriously, and a lot of stubbornness. It almost never starts in a glass tower in a major metropolis. It starts in places like a front yard near LSU. Or in a small office somewhere on the way to the oil patch. Both of my lunch guests today are Louisiana people who built something out of, more or less, nothing. One of them runs a national company that has 400 vehicles, 25 offices around the country, and was a Super Bowl LIX vendor. He started it the year after he graduated from LSU. The other one runs a nonprofit in Mid City Baton Rouge that began with one neighborhood kid showing up at his front door asking him to fix a bike. Today it has worked on more than 10,000 bikes, and is the centerpiece of a $2 million renovation of a former church and rug shop on Government Street. Both of these guys are in their thirties. Both went to LSU. And both of them have grown their organizations far faster, and far further, than anybody would have predicted when they started. Corey Rosales is a New Orleans native who came to Baton Rouge for college and then stayed long enough to start a company. He graduated from LSU with a degree in petroleum engineering in 2018. A year later, in 2019, he founded American Safety. American Safety started out as an environmental response and industrial services company. Then COVID happened, and a record-breaking hurricane season happened, and Corey kept saying yes to opportunities. Today American Safety is a multi-division operation – industrial services, environmental response, disaster relief, and transportation. They have 25 offices, more than 400 vehicles, and somewhere between 300 and 500 employees, depending on the time of year. They were a vendor at Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans, where they moved more than 10,000 people during the event. They’re now the official transportation partner of the New Orleans Saints and the Pelicans. And, as part of their expansion, they recently acquired Baton Rouge–based Dixieland Tours. The President and CEO of American Safety is Corey Rosales. In 2010, Dustin LaFont was a recent LSU graduate, an AmeriCorps alum, and a middle school history teacher in East Baton Rouge Parish. He had grown up biking to school in Houma, and he commuted by bike at LSU to save money on gas and parking. In his spare time he’d sit in his front yard fixing up old bikes. One day a kid from the neighborhood came up to him and asked if he could fix his bike. Then more kids showed up. Then more. The neighbors started calling it “the front yard bike shop.” Dustin made it a nonprofit. After two years of running it on top of teaching, he quit his teaching job to do it full time. That nonprofit is called Front Yard Bikes. It’s now the largest community bike shop in Louisiana. Kids ages 6 to 18 earn credits by learning bike mechanics, welding, gardening, cooking, and cycling safety, and they apply those credits toward a bike of their own. Older kids can move into paid internships and earn job certifications in mechanics. In 2022, CNN named Dustin a CNN Hero. In 2023, City Year gave him their national Alumni Leadership Award. And right now, on Government Street in Mid City, Dustin and three other Baton Rouge nonprofits are in the middle of a $2 million build-out of a place called Youth City Lab – a former church and rug shop they’re turning into a bike shop, a performance stage, a barber shop and library, and a community gathering place for young people. The Founder and Executive Director of Front Yard Bikes is Dustin LaFont. There’s a tendency, when we talk about Baton Rouge business, to look toward the big oil and gas companies, the chemical plants, the institutions on the river. And those are real, and they matter. But the story of Baton Rouge is also Corey Rosales – a kid from New Orleans who came here for college and ended up running a transportation and disaster response company that helped move 10,000 people through Super Bowl LIX. And it’s also Dustin LaFont – a kid from Houma who came here for college and ended up creating a youth workforce development program in his front yard that now occupies an entire renovated block on Government Street. Both of these entrepreneuras are doing what Louisiana, at its best, has always done – they saw a need, they said yes, and then figured out the rest as they went. 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.
