When I came to this campus in 2017, the student-run business, Pace Delivers, was one of the businesses struggling the most. They had cancelled their lunchtime runs due to lack of student interest, they were doing business with only two to three restaurants, and food was often delivered to students over an hour late.

By the fall of 2017, even the students in charge believed that if changes weren’t made soon. Pace Delivers would be shut down. What to do? What to do?

Well, it’s two years later, and needless to say, Pace Delivers is still around, and in my opinion, doing better than ever. They’ve gone back to doing two food runs—one at 10 p.m. and one at midnight— doing business with six different restaurants— possibly added even more next semester— and food consistently gets delivered to students promptly.

Like any business, Pace Delivers didn’t go from on the brink of closing its doors to working with six restaurants and counting overnight. Towards the end of the 2017 fall semester, they allowed students to pay with Flex dollars, which wasn’t done before. I think that’s where and when the business started to slowly take a turn for the better.

Kyle Coimbra, senior Accounting major at Pace, and his management team helped the business progress even more. Coimbra introduced the earlier delivery time as soon as he took over in September 2018. This time attracted more restaurants to work with the business.

“I added the 10:00 delivery time which got restaurants like Chipotle and Applebee’s to start working with us,” Coimbra said. “Before (the earlier time), they weren’t working with us.”

Chipotle and Applebee’s were added to the roster last year, but this semester, the Chinese restaurant Asian Legend also agreed to work with them.

Coimbra attributes the business’s recent steady growth to all of the students on the student management team and their ability to adapt and willingness to solve and figure out any problems that they may have encountered.

“At first, there were a lot of problems that were happening all the time,” he explained, “but once you get used to it and figure out how to solve them, then (running the business) becomes much easier.”

According to Coimbra, the business doesn’t have many problems at this point in time, resulting in the business now running more smoothly.

The business is considering adding a third, earlier delivery time or adding another restaurant to its roster during the spring semester, but nothing is set in stone yet.

As a whole, I think that the growth of Pace Delivers within these past of couple of years shows just how persistent and resilient Pace students are, and their willingness to try new methods to make things progress and succeed, even if the conventional or easy ones fail. Good luck, Pace Delivers, and keep doing what you guys do!