Louisiana › Who’s Miles
Your 24/7 Louisiana business advisor
Free business advice in Louisiana already exists, and it is good. It also runs on appointments, in office hours. Miles is the same kind of help at nine on a Sunday night, for your parish and your town.
Updated 27 August 2026
Miles is an AI agent, which in plain terms means an advisor you can ask anything, at any hour, for free. No appointment, no waiting for a callback, no drive to a center in office hours.
What makes him worth asking is that he knows how business actually works here. Not business in general. Louisiana, down to which parish collector takes the local part of your sales tax and whether your town charges an occupational license.
He has read the things nobody reads
Every parish publishes its own rules, in its own format, on its own website, and almost nobody reads all of them. Miles has.
Ask him about Ville Platte and you get Ville Platte, not a page about Louisiana with a phone number at the bottom.
How he answersAsk a chatbot the tax rate. Ask Miles what you charge.
Those are different questions and only one of them helps. Say you run a shop in Opelousas and you are quoting a job over in Ville Platte.
I’m in Opelousas and I’ve got a job in Ville Platte. What do I charge?
Charge 11.00 percent, not your Opelousas rate. Louisiana tax follows where the work happens, and that job is in Evangeline Parish.
The state takes 5.00 percent of it. The other 6.00 percent goes to the Evangeline Parish collector, not to Baton Rouge, and you have to be signed up with them separately. Their number is (337) 363-3004.
Want me to check whether you’re already registered over there?
A general purpose chatbot would have given you a statewide average and sounded confident about it. A search would have given you a rate table and left the rest to you. What you needed was the number, who gets it, and the thing to do next.
What to ask himThe questions people actually bring him
What do I charge on this job in Abbeville?The parish, the rate, and who collects each part of it.
Do I need an occupational license in Kaplan?Your town specifically, and what it would cost at your level of sales.
What does it cost to set up an LLC right now?Today’s fee, and the one coming on 1 October.
I’m hiring my first employee. What do I have to do?The four separate registrations, and which office handles each.
Is there any funding I’d be a good fit for?What is actually open in 2026, and why you would or would not match.
What am I missing?The one people should ask more often, and the one he is best at.
Louisiana already has good free advisors. They keep office hours.
The Louisiana Small Business Development Center is the real thing: nationally accredited, ten centers covering all 64 parishes, and genuinely free. An hour with an LSBDC advisor is worth having, and if you are writing a business plan or putting a loan package together you should book one.
But you have to book it. You request a consultation, someone gets back to you, and you meet during the working day. Which is fine for planning, and no use at all at nine on a Sunday night when you are pricing a job for Monday morning.
Use both. Book the appointment for the things that deserve a person. Ask Miles everything in between, including all the questions you would feel a bit silly taking up an advisor’s hour with.
Free, then free againAsk him free. Sign in free and he keeps it.
There are two ways to use Miles and neither of them costs anything.
No account at all
Use the box at the bottom of this page. No card, no email address, nothing to fill in. Ask him as much as you like and he answers.
The catch, and it is a real one: he forgets you the moment you close the tab.
With a Bizer account
He remembers your business. Your trade, your parish, how you are set up, what you already told him last month.
And he keeps track of what you are actually working on.
That second part is the one people underrate. Most business advice arrives as a one-off: you get a good answer, you mean to act on it, and three weeks later you are re-explaining your whole situation to somebody new.
With an account, the things you are working on stay open. The LLC you are halfway through setting up. The parish you still have to register with. The contract you are chasing and the certifications it needs. The loan paperwork you started gathering. Come back on a Tuesday night and Miles picks up where you left off, and he will tell you what is still outstanding rather than waiting to be asked.
It is the difference between advice and an advisor. Advice you get once. An advisor knows what you are in the middle of.
And if you ever want him doing the work instead of advising on it, that is the paid side: connect your books, your inbox, your calendar and your business phone, and he drafts the invoice, chases the quote and picks up when you cannot. Nothing ever leaves your business without your tap.
Plenty of people never go that far, and get a lot out of him anyway. See what that looks like
Hand him a question you already know the answer to
It is the fairest test there is. Ask what tax you charge at your address, or what an LLC costs this month, then mark his homework against the parish guides or the startup costs on this site. If he gets right the things you can check, that tells you something about the things you cannot.
Ask him something
No account, no card, no appointment. Ask him now, and sign in free afterwards if you want him to remember what you are working on.
Free, no account needed. Answered by Miles, Bizer’s Louisiana business AI agent.