You Have to Spend Money to Make Money

The D2 ($6.5 million), West End ($5 million) and Owens Banquet Room ($1.4 million) projects convincingly demonstrate that the right investment can prime the revenue pump, and that Johnson is not afraid of making those kinds of investments — and very good at selling them to administrators. This ability is especially valuable in large public institutions, where major spending proposals can be hard to keep on the priority list.

Johnson credits his success to a “capacity for perseverance.”

“In a state system you just have to be able to persevere,” he says. “No matter how great your ideas are, how good your plans are, or how self-evident what you're trying to do is, there's a system you have to work through.”

Next up, a major new dining operation, scheduled to open in 2011 as part of a new administrative center. Foodservice will have three of the five floors of the new building, some 35,000 sq.ft. altogether, with as much as a thousand seats inside and outside. The rest of the building will house academic offices.

“This will provide a major dining facility on the academic side of campus,” Johnson says, noting that there currently are no easily reachable department-run dining options in this section of campus. So a heretofore almost untapped population of some 4,000 university staffers soon could become regular customers.

The new facility will also be located next to the major commuter parking area. Johnson expects a bump up in off-campus meal plan purchases once it opens, expanding an already impressive voluntary meal plan purchase total (half of non-residents already purchase plans).

While the specific concepts have yet to be finalized, Johnson says the new dining venue will have 10 separate serving stations offering a mix of nationally branded and in-house concepts. He projects the customer mix to be about 65 percent students and 35 percent staff.

The new facility will replace one of the current all-you-care-to-eat dining halls (Shultz), leaving its thousand-some daily transactions to filter to the other venues. Shultz is in a lightly populated corner of the campus anyway. Its building will become part of a new performing arts center that will itself represent more catering opportunities.

With the new venue, and a modest expansion of West End scheduled for 2010, it sounds like Tech Dining may not be finished with either the awards or the accolades.