Hit the ‘I believe’ button,” said my colleague Diego, entirely too early on a Monday morning. I hadn’t yet poured my first cup of coffee, and my ‘I believe’ button at that point was about two miles west of Smarking’s office somewhere between my sheets and pillows.
“I believe” has become a bit of a rallying cry around our office in San Francisco. If you’ve talked with Diego for more than 10 minutes, you might have heard him say it yourself. I’ll be the first person to tell you: I thought that “I believe” was cheesy at first. This isn’t some remake of Disney’s “Miracle,” the epic retelling of U.S.A. hockey’s victory over Soviet Russia in the 1980 Winter Olympics. We are a software company that writes code to slice and dice parking data.
But over time, I’ve become fond of the phrase. Smarking has grown from a small idea born in Cambridge, MA, to a unique team of experts united with one goal – to introduce cutting-edge software to the parking industry.
When I catch myself nodding off in the morning or having difficulty getting out of bed at 6:30 a.m., I remind myself that our client onboarding engineers Mike and Canoee are routinely awakened at odd hours in the early morning by Pager Duty, a program designed to notify our engineers when the data feed breaks — all to make sure that when our East coast clients get to the office at 7 a.m., things are running smoothly.
Or when Diego asks me to run through “the pitch” again. And I’m thinking, “Man, if I say ‘data-driven decision-making’ one more time…” I take a breath and think about our customer success team — Bill, Kelly and Christine — and the countless hours they spend poring through parking data on behalf of our clients, working to uncover trends and opportunities.
The energy, the intellect, the passion, the effort. It’s palpable. Everyone who works here could be somewhere else. Maokai was at Facebook and then Morgan Stanley. Tony was at LinkedIn. Diana had an offer to work at Bridgewater! But she chose to work here?!? At a parking data company?
Smarking is not a “big data” analytics company.
I think what attracts these folks to Smarking is the mission: There is no reason that the same sort of yield-management technologies that exist in the airline and hotel industries cannot thrive in parking.
Smarking is not a “big data” analytics company. It is a business automation, business intelligence and yield management tool designed for parking professionals. Our goal is to be your trusted data and software partner.
Smarking is about being 10% better day in, day out. It’s about getting organized around the existing data your business is already generating, and leveraging that data in ways designed to increase customer satisfaction, reduce expenses, increase revenue and perhaps most important: increase employee satisfaction.
We recently began working with WallyPark, one of the premier providers of off-airport parking here in the U.S. Kevin Montgomery, COO at WallyPark, hit the “I believe” button in a big way. His organization was generating a tremendous amount of not only PARCS data, but also reservations data, marketing data, staffing data — you name it.
We spent the last few months interviewing employees at WallyPark, everyone from the head of revenue management to garage managers. Now we are pleased to announce the release of our newest feature: Smarking’s yield-management tool.
The new functionality will incorporate broader data sets into our dashboard, beyond the data generated by traditional parking revenue control systems, and will optimize the pricing and inventory allocation associated with online parking sales.
If you’re interested in shaping the future of technology in the parking industry, please reach out. Our clients are truly our partners. If we hit the “I believe” button together, we can really make your parking data count.
Contact Cassius Jones, Growth Manager at Smarking, at cassius@smarking.net.
