When Geoff Labe joined Lafayette College as Assistant Vice President for Operations, he was barely in the door before it became clear the dining program needed a hard look. Budget pressures were real, but the louder signal was coming from the campus community: students, faculty, and staff who wanted a program that felt more modern, more responsive, and more theirs.

What followed was a limited RFP process: deliberate, compressed, and grounded in genuine stakeholder engagement. Lafayette didn’t send the RFP to everyone. They identified a short list of partners who aligned with what the college was trying to build, gathered community feedback through dining committees, focus groups, and firsthand observation, and made a decision they were prepared to own publicly, even when the first year brought the inevitable rough patches.

In this conversation with Mindy Segal, Geoff traces the full arc of that process. He talks about what the assessment work actually surfaced, including a common lunch hour that was overwhelming two dining halls while five others sat underutilized. He shares how Lafayette integrated the Easton restaurant community into its meal plan, and why students started adding more dining dollars, not fewer, once they could use them off campus. And he reflects honestly on the first year: what was hard, what worked, and why standing behind a new partner during that period mattered as much as the RFP process itself.

Two and a half years later, Lafayette has a Starbucks drawing nearly a thousand students a day on a campus of 2,700, a new Mexican concept that immediately redistributed dining traffic across campus, and a partnership that Geoff describes as a unified front.

Geoff’s takeaway = Budgetary concerns are always part of the equation. But transparency and communication (with the campus community, with your dining partner, and across every stage of the process) are what actually determine whether a transition succeeds.