Kevin Couhig’s first parish office was a cramped conference room. There were maps, documents and a laptop. For someone who had spent years deciding which businesses deserved capital, the arrangement offered an immediate lesson in municipal glamour: winning an election did not necessarily mean acquiring a desk.
He had arrived there through a family conversation. In 2013, his half brother Sam LeBlanc, who had helped draft West Feliciana’s new home rule charter, suggested he run for parish president. Couhig’s initial reaction was disbelief. The idea stayed with him. On November 26, he began work as the first person to hold the office.
His career already contained enough changes of direction to make a conventional retirement seem unlikely. He had worked in state economic development, founded a finance business and backed entrepreneurs. Now he would help a rural Louisiana parish learn how to govern under a new arrangement. Later, he would publish a novel. The interesting thread is how often he chose work whose results required somebody else to carry an idea forward.
The patient money behind the music
One of those people was Jim Odom. In 1995, a banker in Odom’s family introduced the entrepreneur to Couhig. Odom brought a business plan for PreSonus, the Baton Rouge audio company. Couhig’s Source Capital became an early investor. Recording equipment might look like a technical proposition, but Couhig’s assessment began with the people who intended to make it.
The company took time to find its footing. It also needed inventory financing that traditional banks struggled to understand. Source supplied further investment and loans. When a financing arrangement became restrictive, Couhig helped negotiate a buyout of the lender’s interest and provided additional capital. The mechanics are less photogenic than a mixing console, but a manufacturer cannot ship enthusiasm.
His account of the business emphasized discipline: PreSonus had grown largely through its own cash flow. That detail complicates the familiar picture of venture investment as a chase for immediate expansion. Here, money bought the opportunity to keep learning, making and selling. The investor’s contribution included staying around when the first business plan encountered the less accommodating world outside the spreadsheet.
By 2014, Odom was publicly crediting Couhig’s advice and support with helping PreSonus through the difficulties of becoming a manufacturing business. The relationship had lasted well beyond the introduction. Couhig had become chairman and adviser, participating in the life of a company whose products reached musicians far outside Louisiana.
At the opening of its new headquarters that April, he described an earlier ambition: find entrepreneurs working in Baton Rouge garages, then help them build businesses capable of attracting people from elsewhere. The new building gave that aspiration an address. Its 44,000 square feet made a useful answer to anyone who thought a garage was necessarily a permanent business location.
The headquarters opening also showed the scale of the change. PreSonus was selling in more than 60 countries. Its staff included people from Ireland, Germany and Hong Kong, alongside employees from across the United States. Couhig’s local investment had helped create an enterprise with an international working life. Baton Rouge remained the place where that enterprise gathered.
A lantern with a civic purpose
In June 2014, PreSonus received a Louisiana Lantern Award, representing the Capital Region. The awards recognized manufacturing and community service together. That combination appealed to Couhig: he treated the company’s relationship with its home city as part of its work, alongside the hardware and software it produced.
There was a pleasingly literal quality to the honor. Winners received actual lanterns, handcrafted in New Orleans. A business that helped musicians manipulate sound was being thanked with a device for producing light. The ceremony joined industry to place in a way Couhig seemed to appreciate. He spoke about giving back to Baton Rouge and Louisiana, where the enterprise had begun.
When Fender announced its acquisition agreement in November 2021, Couhig was still identified as PreSonus’s chairman. His statement thanked the Baton Rouge and Louisiana community that had supported the company. A relationship that began with a business plan in 1995 had reached a transaction with a much larger music business. Even at that moment, his language returned to the company’s local supporters.
A parish with room for another choice
West Feliciana presented a different problem. In his early days as president, Couhig argued that the parish risked being left behind while its surrounding region grew. He wanted more businesses and homes that younger families could afford, particularly around St. Francisville. His examples were deliberately ordinary: everyday services, practical housing, places where people could work and live.
He planned to approach businesses himself, including car care companies, which he identified as a local need. That is a revealing scale for an economic development pitch. A parish does not live entirely through the arrival of a celebrated employer. It also lives through the errands residents can complete nearby and the houses available to people who cannot buy acreage.
The difficulty became visible in 2016. Signs at the West Feliciana Sports Park encouraged visitors to relocate. One, inviting people to leave crime and tuition behind, prompted questions about whether the parish was taking a swipe at Baton Rouge. Couhig responded that Baton Rouge was a place he knew and valued; West Feliciana offered a more rural choice.
Behind the advertising lay a tax problem. River Bend’s nuclear plant supplied much of the parish’s property tax revenue, while depreciation reduced the facility’s assessed value. Couhig wanted residential development to broaden that base. Yet low property taxes also gave large landowners little incentive to sell. The very conditions that made the parish attractive could make new housing difficult to deliver.
That tension gives his presidency more texture than a simple description of him as friendly to business. Growth required decisions about land, public income and the kinds of residents a community could accommodate. Selling the rural setting was easier than arranging for more people to live in it. The signs could advertise a choice; government still had to make the choice practical.
Seventy-two acres at the water’s edge
In June 2018, Couhig announced the acquisition of the former Mississippi River ferry landing. The parcel covered 72 acres and 2,672 feet of river frontage. Following years of dispute, the parish bought it through expropriation for $540,000. The plans included public recreation and improved access for riverboats.
Mississippi River access: a public park, boats and a gateway for visitors.
The acquisition was a milestone rather than the completion of every proposed improvement. State funding, design work and approvals still stood between ownership and construction. Couhig acknowledged the council’s work and the help of legislators Kenny Havard and Neil Riser. A riverfront may look like a single location on a map, but putting it into public use involves many desks.
“It connects us to one of our greatest assets, the Mississippi River.”Kevin Couhig / June 2018
The emphasis was access. Residents, boat owners and visitors arriving by water would all have reasons to use the same place. After years in which the landing had been an argument, the administration proposed making it a shared destination.
The mentor who left room for an answer
Long before taking office, Couhig had learned from John Barton Sr. The two worked on the formation of Louisiana Seed Capital, the predecessor to Source Capital. Barton became a mentor in the mid-1980s. For more than 20 years, they met monthly to discuss operations and strategy.
Couhig valued Barton’s optimism, but his description of the relationship went beyond encouragement. Barton understood a problem and asked questions that helped another person reach a solution. He did not impose an answer. That is a useful detail in a career spent around entrepreneurs: a financier can supply capital and still leave the founder responsible for thinking.
The monthly rhythm matters too. Mentorship here meant repeated conversations across years, rather than a single introduction followed by a flattering recollection. It offers a quieter explanation for Couhig’s own long association with PreSonus. The work of helping somebody build a company often continues long after anyone has stopped calling that company a startup.
The next appointment was with a reader
Couhig announced his intention to retire from the presidency in April 2018, setting his departure for December. He pointed out that choosing the date early would allow a successor’s election to fit the existing November and December election calendar. Even leaving office involved a small calculation about public expense.
He subsequently made writing a focus. His first novel, A Man for Others, follows an Irish protagonist through music, upheaval and questions of justice, with a story that eventually reaches a southern American courtroom. A bookseller’s biography described its author as a retired businessman and a “recovering politician.” Public office, apparently, had earned a place in the author blurb.
In May 2024, the Cashiers library advertised an afternoon appearance with Couhig to discuss the novel, its inspiration and his process. The invitation put a familiar activity into a new setting. Instead of explaining an investment or a parish proposal, he would talk about the choices involved in writing a story.
There was humor elsewhere in his life. He supported Liverpool, coached soccer and liked telling stories. He also offered a decidedly unheroic assessment of his own high school quarterbacking. The accomplished adult had preserved room for the teenager who, by his own account, had been rather bad at throwing the ball.
Couhig died in July 2025, aged 73. Kenny Havard, his successor, credited him with helping establish the foundation of the new parish government. The career leaves several kinds of work to consider: a company supported through uncertain years, a public landing acquired for shared use, a book put before readers. Each involved making an opening, then allowing other people to enter it.