When I work in a coffee shop, I don’t get much done. Honestly, I didn’t go to the coffee shop to work. That’s just a little white lie I tell myself to get out of the house.
Coffee shops might be the easiest place to track down if you travel for work. You know there’s wifi, but the environment can be unpredictable. Is the cappuccino machine too loud? Too bad.
Well, what if you could plug into a space meant for work. Not easy to do unless you know somebody in town. You’ve heard of co-working spaces like WeWork, but that’s still a commitment. When you travel a lot you need something for 20 minutes, an hour, half a day and you’re gone.
Clerc Bertrand has a solution for that. Workaroo: a network of office space for those of us hopping from place to place. Workaroo uses an app to connect itinerant workers with office space.
Clerc lives in the Lake Charles area, but has grown Workaroo on the go herself, dodging lockdowns and hurricanes. Today, Workaroo has spaces in Lake Charles, Lafayette and Baton Rouge. Clerc plans to grow the company to stretch the I-10 corridor. When she’s not building Workaroo, Clerc runs the McNeese State University Athletic Foundation.
If your workspace is the great outdoors, maybe this isn’t so much a problem for you. Anywhere is the place to be.
Artist and muralist Hannah Gumbo is building a career for herself with the world outside as her canvas. An avid traveler herself, Hannah is passionate about Louisiana and creating vibrant spaces that tease out our traditions with abstract flourishes and surprising detail.
You can find Hannah’s work on Downtown brick walls or barns scattered around Acadiana, and her work bubbles against the backdrop of our region’s rustic colors. She got her start with an ArtSpark grant from the Lafayette Economic Development Authority and recently won a second one to expand her work to business portraits.
Hannah will also shake up the stuffy headshot with a portable wooden booth packed with fun backdrops to make portraits of Louisiana business owners.
Out to Lunch Acadiana is recorded live over lunch at Tula Tacos + Amigos in Downtown Lafayette. You can see photos from this show by Astor Morgan at our website. Here’s more lunchtime conversation about other work options in which one of Lafayette’s most successful college dropouts talks with the dean of the UL grad school.