Out to Lunch Emerald Coast

Around 75,000 people live in Walton County. That’s the same number of people who live in a beachside city in France, called Cannes.

There are 85 other cities in France the same size as Cannes, but you probably couldn’t name them. You know about Cannes because it’s home to the world’s most prestigious film festival.

It costs Cannes around $6m a year to stage the festival. Its economic impact to the city is ar...

If you live in a small community and you have big ideas, you have two choices. You can move to a city with a population large enough to support your dreams. Or you can stay home and try and make the impossible happen.

If you're a theater actor and you'd like to appear in a Broadway musical or a professional production of playwrights like William Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams, you could move to New York, Chicago or Los Angeles....

I’m going to start out today’s show by making a generalization. I know I’m not supposed to do that, but I’m pretty sure you’ll agree with me. So here goes: "Previous generations were a lot more dedicated to their work and their careers than we are today." 

Our parents and grandparents used to talk about “getting your priorities right.” When it came to work, that generally meant sacrifi...

Most people who move to the Emerald Coast come here to slow down — to trade the hustle for white sand and blue water. Fletcher's lunch guests on this edition of Out to Lunch did something altogether different. They came here, fell in love with the place, put down roots — and then turned their attention to some of the most remote and demanding terrain on earth.

Jim Sumpter is a man who has spent more than 25 years leadin...

Hi, it's Fletcher Isacks, host of Out to Lunch. When you listen to a show like this you expect a person in my position to give you verifiable,  factual information. But it turns out that statisticians are not collecting information about every subject I'm interested in.

I'm interested in the structure of businesses owned and operated by couples. That is, people who got married because they fell in love with each other, and dec...

When you ask people about the benefits of living in this part of the world, the first response you often get is about natural beauty. We typically assume “the natural beauty of The Panhandle” refers to the white sands and turquoise water of our beaches. People sometimes also refer to our lakes and piney woods.

These appreciations of nature are primarily visual. We love how the appearance of the natural setting makes us ...

There’s a pretty good chance that by now you’ve checked your calendar today. There’s stuff you’ve got to accomplish this week, there are things you have to show up on time for during the day, and if you break it down even further, you can plan and account for your time minute by minute.

Life is, after all, a series of fleeting moments.

The moments that are the happiest and most memorable to most of us, are t...

If you could get your hands on, say, somewhere between 70 and one hundred-some-odd acres of beachside property, and you wanted to start a business, what would you do with it?

Back in 1969, the answer to that question was the Santa Rosa Golf & Beach Club, sometimes known as the Santa Rosa Golf Club, or simply The Santa Rosa Club.

The club started out a lot more modestly than it looks today. It was originally a 9 hole golf club w...

From kids in preschool, to activity groups in retirement villages, people make art. Look around any room. From your doctor's waiting room to your sister's bedroom, you'll almost invariably find art on the walls. Art is everywhere.

We often talk about art and commerce as if they’re opposites, like salt and pepper, or oil and water. But in fact, art makes up a significant segment of the American economy. According to the Nation...

We’re all motivated by different things.

Some of us are striving for the C-Suite and a 7 figure salary. Others of us are thrilled to have a job with no stress that pays enough to cover the bills.

Some of us are very invested in the type of car we drive. Others are happy to walk and take Uber.

And of course, from the same set of circumstances and facts, we arrive at vastly different conclusions about politics.

But we pretty mu...

If you’ve been in a pre-k-to-12th grade school lately, or you currently have kids in school, you’re familiar with what education is like today. For the most part, it’s not about experiencing the joy of numbers in math, or discovering the lyrical beauty of words in literature – it’s about achievement. Reading to your grade level. Passing standardized tests. Graduating to the next grade. And ultimately g...

This is a show about local business and entrepreneurship in The Panhandle.

We started making the show in 2025. If we’d started out twenty, or even ten years ago, a show about local business would have been principally about rental property management and allied businesses, like cleaners and HVAC companies.

Or, we could have made a show about all the talented people who grew up in this area and who moved to big cities for a ca...

Back in the days of the California gold rush, you could make a lot of money. If you struck gold. If you didn’t - and most people didn’t - you would typically spend every waking minute till you ran out of money and strength, doing back-breaking labor, swinging a pick and digging with a shovel.

Along with the prospectors, there were business people who figured they wouldn’t strike it rich like the lucky few, but the...

Are you the type of person who finds yourself texting people, “sorry, running late, on the way”? Are you typically the last one to arrive to pick up your kids? Are you “that guy” or “that girl”? The one running through the airport who only just makes it to the departure gate before they close the airplane doors?

If any of these are you, you have what behavioral scientists call “poor Executi...

If you live around here, you may have heard this piece of business advice: Do you know how make a small fortune in the Florida Panhandle? Start with a large one.

Over the last decade or so, as real estate prices and the cost of living have climbed, it’s become commonplace for people who have already done well financially to move here. Or buy a second home here. But there are still people who move here for the same reason most...

In 1988 Nike was one of many sports shoe  manufacturers when they launched a marketing campaign with the slogan, “Just do it.”

It wasn't so much the words themselves as the spirit behind them -  an enthusiasm for life itself -that captured the attention of the American public and catapulted Nike into a position of market dominance and extraordinary financial success.

Nearly 20 years later, in 2007, a similar t...

If you’re looking to get into retail and open a store, the first piece of advice you’ll get from any business consultant is, “Sell something everybody needs.” Well, nobody needs a cigar and nobody needs a guitar. So in theory our guests on this edition of Out to Lunch should be out of business. But far from it. One of them has a thriving music store, and the  other has two super-successful cigar stores.