Change in any industry happens in many different ways, but it’s funny that most people, even those inside a specific industry, see only the surface-level changes.  The parking industry seems to have changed very slowly, but beginning about 10 years ago and accelerating five years ago, the industry has changed at an alarming rate, with very few checks on the quality and consideration of its impact. The big changes are that we have moved away from cash through credit cards and into a growing e-commerce revenue stream.  Creating, controlling, and managing e-commerce is totally separate from the requirements of the recent past.  Technology changes have also dramatically improved our ability to communicate with customers and management, and the expectation to do so frequently. A weighty result of these new revenue management controls and communication highways is that they have suddenly arrived with little accountability and almost no rules. 

How do the changes happening in Our Industry impact our ability to meet our goals (recap from previous articles: our goal is always to provide a parking space for time) and hold to the three rules of parking?  Our three rules that glue our industry together are: 

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1. Parking is an “on the streets” business. If you are not on the streets, you are not in the parking business.

2. Get the tickets on the cars and the money in the bank. 

3. Know your numbers. 

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These are tried and true rules written many years ago in a very different industry, but if you read them carefully with an open mind, you will see they are still perfect for today's challenges.  In my early days in the industry, I realized no written (or unwritten, for that matter) rules existed because no one knew yet how to manage parking!  Up to that point, everything I had been involved in that required any level of knowledge or accountability had some written rules to live by, so 6 or 7 years into the parking industry, I wrote these three basic rules above that seemed to give me direction.  Then, 18 years later, starting TPN, we realized the only way to survive was a manual of very focused rules that would get us through reviewing new operations.  The manual has grown significantly in the last five years and seems to be ever evolving. 

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When TPN conducts a financial review of a parking operation today, it is very different from the reviews TPN completed two decades ago. In all the changes, however, there is one very important part of our reviews that has not only remained but intensified to a large degree.  When TPN started financial reviews 28 years ago, one of the largest challenges was working with billions of dollars, mainly collected in cash, and there were no accountability rules.  Yes, in revenue accountability, there are standard accounting rules like Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) that must be followed. Still, GAAP did not help with the field level of financial accountability decisions. If my memory serves me accurately, there were few accounting graduates and CPAs in the field offices. We also realized that CPAs were not very helpful regarding operational accountability.  TPN was at that time the only professional parking financial review company in the industry, trying to conduct financial reviews in an industry without rules.  So, 28 years ago, TPN started creating financial accountability rules. It seems we are 28 years later in an industry that has changed significantly, and we are still required to continue creating financial accountability rules.   

Clients always believed that we found mainly theft when we conducted these financial reviews.  We did find theft, which always becomes the most popular and exciting discussion about the results of our reviews.  But really, in almost every review, theft was the smallest part of the finding.  The significant findings were the financial management issues, typically those that impacted the day-to-day operation.  Today, the cash is mostly gone, so petty theft is not found, but the financial and operational management issues that were such a large part of our past reviews have grown to an overwhelming number, and the potential loss is staggering.   

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The challenge 28 years ago was a lack of rules in managing a parking operation's financial and operational accountability.  Today, parking financial and operational accountability is 10 times more difficult to manage, and there are still no rules.  TPN still has the rules we made up in the past to be an outstanding review company, and today, we still create standards that cover a much wider variety of income streams. Today, if you are not specifically looking for a revenue stream, you will simply not see the potentially missing accountability.  At TPN, our financial review outline and rules must be reviewed and rewritten every four to six months.  We are always trying to do a better job of discussing our observations internally to better understand the challenges and develop ways to assist the operations we review.   

We have great funny stories about some of the reviews where there was a high level of theft, and I was concerned that I would miss those days as we moved away from being a cash industry. They are funny stories, but as it turns out, I don’t miss them. Today's stories in the making are much more intellectual than the cash stories and much more challenging to find, prove, and correct.