The early bird behind the bar – Into the ethos of entrepreneur Danny Breaux

By the time most of the storefronts and restaurants in Perkins Rowe open their doors for work, serial entrepreneur Danny Breaux is taking an afternoon coffee break in his nearby office. It’s a rare set of hours for someone in the service industry, but after seven years of daysleeping, Breaux has earned his peaceful evenings.

Now 28, he moved to Baton Rouge from Lafayette about 11 years ago to earn a degree in finance from LSU, and even before he flipped his tassel, he gifted Baton Rouge with a new production company: WildFlower Presents. For the better part of a decade, Breaux’s WildFlower has been the entity behind the curtains of many serial nightclub events in Baton Rouge, from Latin Salsa Night at the Varsity to the seasonal F.A.M.E. fashion shows.

But after earning his MBA last May, he started looking at the sun differently—a common occurrence in nightclub contractors, owners and employees.

“I loved the work I did, and I loved everything about WildFlower,” Breaux says. “The late nights got a little bit too much for me.”

Generally, leaving the service industry kills a daysleeping habit, but he wouldn’t have it. He knew too much about club environments and their inner workings to leave for good. Where others would have hit a brick wall, however, Breaux searched for a solution. Within the year, he found a franchise opportunity that would allow him to work both where and when he wanted to—a company out of Vancouver and D.C. called Barmetrix. He now owns one of the four Barmetrix locations in the country, out of 11 worldwide, and he still gets to work with restaurants and bars.

No big deal. That’s just the way serial entrepreneurs do things.

“Our days are pretty long right now,” Breaux says of his new Barmetrix franchise. “I get to work at 6 a.m.; I’m done by 7 p.m.; I’m off weekends. But that’s compared to 3 p.m. to who knows how early in the morning doing WildFlower. It was a pretty big flip-flop, so it was fun getting my sleep schedule back in order.”

According to him, it took the help of “every coffee shop in town” to correct his sleep cycle. His morning routine now involves the Starbucks in Perkins Rowe, where he has befriended the makers of his espresso. Breaux says they’re good friends to make.

“I used to get a normal venti, the big one, but then it turned into a venti with an extra shot,” he explains. “Today, it was, ‘Just get me a strong one, whatever’s gonna wake me up the best,’ so she made me this double espresso called The Undertow. They’re like bartenders or something.”

Breaux’s approach to the business life is part of his personality, and perhaps part of the reason why he says he wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he won the lottery. He likes challenges too much.

“Right now, I have everything to lose and everything to gain,” he says. “If there was nothing to lose, I wouldn’t see the point.”

Perhaps less risk-loving people assume successful business owners are just bold at birth, but that’s not entirely true. In the entrepreneur arena, there’s more than enough room for error and self-doubt, and the anxiety that comes with them. While Breaux knew a long time ago that he wanted to own his own businesses, he wasn’t born ready for it. In fact, he worries whether his plans will pan out “pretty much daily,” he says. Dealing with that kind of pressure comes with time and experience.

“I’ll always make time to do right by the people I’m working for, but if you think about all the details for too long, you’re gonna freak out and lose focus.”

Breaux took a lot of risks with WildFlower events, and working to bring new and interesting elements to an entertainment scene always has a meticulous planning process. If you ask Varsity General Manager Brent McLellan, Breaux succeeded.

“He has brought in international events, art battles on our stage, and our fashion and hair show, just to list a few,” McLellan says. “Since our focus is live music, these are things that would have remained outside of our scope.”

Also an active member of Forum 35, Breaux is among the forces in Baton Rouge seeking creative change within the city. “He has a lot of energy,” Forum 35 President Eric Dexter says of Breaux. The two met about four years ago at a WildFlower event. “I’ve seen him become more business-minded. He’s looking five or 10 years down the line as opposed to next month or next weekend.”

It’s not too much of a stretch to correlate Breaux’s WildFlower connections with his future customer base at Barmetrix—he’s already worked with a lot of them, and he knows the owners by name. And, as with his work at WildFlower, Barmetrix aims to help sustain a business. The company is something of a hands-on consulting firm for managing inventory losses, in an industry with an average 10- to 20-percent loss rate.

“This is something that helps people run their businesses better,” Breaux says, “and I’m all for that. If I can help, I certainly want to.”

For more information on Breaux’s events and his businesses, visit wildflowerpresents.com and barmetrix.com.