Louisiana's New Jobs Pay $87,000. The State Average Was $56,000.

Yeah, you know, I have I have a little bit of a background in politics a long time ago, had the pleasure of working for then Governor Mike Foster.

So that was my last stint in actual state government.

Before that, I had the privilege of being at the White House briefly and done some other work in D.C., but born and raised in Louisiana and have really lived.

you know, we're all kind of the same age, have really lived the Louisiana so many of us today know, where we know we had potential, but we've sort of watched it slowly go away over the last many, many years.

So for the last 20 years, since Hurricane Katrina founded and ran a community foundation for the North Shore and had decided to retire, I had worked since I was 16 years old, and I thought, OK, let's see what it's like to, I don't know, do yoga on a Tuesday and Thursday.

So did that.

Six months later, Jeff Landry gets elected.

And I had not met the governor.

I had worked on his campaign, but I did know from all of our mutual friends and interests that his intention was to blow up any system inside of state government that wasn't producing the outcomes that Louisiana deserved.

And because of some work I had done with GNO Inc., I was the chairman of the board there, I knew certainly the economic development world in Louisiana, both from what we were producing and even how we were functioning, was not working in a way Louisiana deserved.

So the governor offered me the opportunity, and I took it for one fundamental reason.

And that is exactly, you know, I have 20 somethings now.

I'm of that age where my kids were making the decisions that we have all wrung our hands about it for so long.

And for some reason, I think we have as Louisianians, we just decided to accept it as our reality.

Like it was our lot in life or something, you know, and I said, well, if there's ever a chance for me to professionally change something that I'm living personally and that countless other Louisianians had lived personally.

This was my shot.

So I took the opportunity to change the department and then ultimately to change our outcomes, hopefully.

Susan, you mentioned Governor Landry's desire to in some ways blow up those organizations in state government that weren't performing in LED.

While it had had some success over the years, obviously there were some things that needed to change to get it in line with other organizations aggressive and progressive state organizations.

And I know our mutual friend Adam Knapp and Leaders for a Better Louisiana.

I know that Lobby was involved, other organizations, but there was a lot of work that was done to reset LED as you were preparing to come in.

And then you get there and you develop this great strategic plan positioning Louisiana to win.

tell us about that and the changes that have been made that we're going to talk about all the success and a lot of the work that you've done but set the stage for how it was how you prepared the organization to be different

yeah so there was a lot there's a lot to that um there was a lot to that from a best practices perspective and that's what adam and then c100 right um had done an immense amount of research on.

They brought in some consultants to really look at the most high performing states in the country from an economic development perspective.