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After closing its doors for winter break, The Point has reopened with a spicy late-night menu and a variety of new marketing strategies.
“The market research shows that the main thing [students] wanted was late night food because the only place to get that requires a car,” said Shelagh O’Kane, finance manager for The Point.
The new menu includes an array of foods including pulled-pork sandwiches, smores, cinnamon rolls, pizzas, and Irish style nachos as well as a variety of local brews and wines.
To create more of a community-based atmosphere, The Point placed hefty emphasis on acquiring local products for its dishes.
“It’s all local,” O’Kane said. “We want to be able to incorporate different parts of the community, and we want to build the connections because this is a hard business to start.”
All of The Point’s bread products and pizza crust is purchased from Papa Kelsey’s while brews have been brought in from Palisade and local restaurants Kannah Creek and Rockslide.
The Point was shut down over winter break for a variety of reasons, though O’Kane identified two prominent issues of operating a student-based business during a school break.
“Most of our clientele are students, and most of them go home over break,” O’Kane said. “Secondary, over break all of our employees leave.”
For student employees that were in town during break, academic advisor and professor Georgeann Jouflas offered a Small Business Development course to restructure management strategies. O’Kane took the class and lamented on the difficulty in tackling such a huge development project.
“We went through and tried to redo all the marketing,” O’Kane said. “We came up with six different customer segments we wanted to go for.”
The students split up into six different groups to tackle the different clientele and created plans on how to effectively market to them. Those plans have been steadily implemented over the last two weeks of operations.
“We want it to be more of a personal place,” O’Kane said. “We’ve already seen an increase.”
In addition to altering menu and market strategies, The Point hopes to bring a variety of news events to CMU in efforts to create a student-oriented culture.
“An idea we talked about was trying to do Keg-a-thon here,” O’Kane said. “We want to promote responsible drinking behavior, but at the same time we want to be able to build a culture.”
The Point also hopes that more student clubs will begin using its facility as a meeting point, and special guest servers will make appearances every Thursday night.
“There was a lot of emphasis on personal touch because we’re a part of the students,” O’Kane said. “It’s a social place.”
cferganc@mavs.coloradomesa.edu
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