When you own a business you generally believe that nobody knows more about your business than you. But there are times in the lives of many businesses that growth or success complicates things. At these points specialist consultants outside of your company can have greater insight than you about what you need to do to achieve your goals.

When your business comes into contact in any way with local, State, or Federal government, working with specialist consultants becomes less of an option and more of a necessity. In Acadiana, one of the leading governmental affairs consultants is The Picard Group.

The Picard Group has offices in Lafayette, Baton Rouge, and Washington DC. The company’s Principal is Tyron Picard.

In discussions of business strategy you often hear the advice that to grow you have to stop working in your company and start working on your company. Part of that task is to come up with a strategy for presenting your company to the world. Otherwise known as marketing.

When you start thinking about marketing, you’ve got a million questions to answer about how you want your company to look to clients or customers. You need to decide everything from the color of your logo to the attitude you want to present on social media. You can answer these questions yourself as they come up.  Or you can turn to expert consultants to craft an overall strategy for you. That’s the specialist mission of a company called Healthy Image.

Healthy Image is in Lake Charles, but their work is spread far and wide. Healthy Image’s Creative Director is Barbara VanGossen.

Although this show is called Out to Lunch Acadiana, the insights in this conversation about business, and business’s relationship to government, go beyond the bayou and well beyond the Louisiana border.

Photos at Cafe Vermilionville by Gwen Aucoin.