Parking Predictions: Consolidation, Innovation, and Collaboration
Predicting the future can be a tricky business. If you don’t believe me, watch your weather every night on the news or check it on your favorite app three days out. I can almost guarantee it will be wrong because there are too many variables that affect the outcome. However, most times, the weather is close to what you expected because meteorologists can see the big picture.
It is with the weather as the backdrop that I take a stab at identifying three major trends changing the “forecast” for the parking industry. I expect to be as accurate as a meteorologist, meaning these predictions will be directionally correct.
Continued Consolidation
The first major trend for our industry is consolidation. The mid-majors and smaller regional private operators are being bought up by the larger national brands.
Among the reasons for the consolidation is the fact that many of these regional private companies have been in business for generations. In some cases, they are running out of generational leadership, and the families are monetizing the hard work of their great-grandfathers and grandfathers.
Innovation and Its Influence
Reinforcing this consolidation will be the second trend I see coming our way — increased technological innovation. As technology evolves apace, the national brands will continue to leverage scale and capital to build their own technology solutions, creating greater economies of scale that will squeeze non-national brands.
That said, I’m not convinced that even the largest national brands can compete with best-in-breed companies when it comes to bringing truly innovative capabilities to the masses. In fact, it’s been proven repeatedly that large companies become less innovative and more risk averse as they grow.
Therefore, I predict that large national brands with a one-stop-shop perspective will eventually realize that the consumer is driving the choice of technology as much or more than the owners of parking facilities. Upon this realization, the large national brands will be forced to embrace my last trend, collaboration.
Coming Collaboration
Consumers will vote with their dollars, and the dearth of choices will prompt them to demand offerings that large nationals won’t be able to meet but their smaller, more innovative competitors will. As they fail to keep up with these technological developments, the larger companies will look to integrate solutions.
It is certainly possible that smaller innovative companies could be consolidated further into larger companies. However, we’ve seen how disruptive rapid consolidation can be.
For those mid-major and regional operators not willing to sell, they will continue to seek out best-in-class solutions to meet customer choice and drive customer loyalty. That will certainly put more pressure on the best-in-class companies to work more closely together and create loose bonds of partnerships.
With all the connectivity among partners, the final benefit of collaboration will involve operators eventually ushering in a data-sharing approach that will treat the customer as sacred and deliver what they want — to know that a space is available and how much it costs.
Booms and Busts Ahead
As I make these predictions, what’s so obvious to me is that parking, through its embrace of technology, is finally leaving the shadows and entering the consciousness of the business world. As a result, we’ll undergo normal cycles of expansion and contraction and experience accelerating and slowing cycles of innovation.
For example, get ready to experience the valley of disillusionment with artificial intelligence. I was fortunate enough to ride the hype cycle in cloud computing up and down in the early 2000s. From experience, I know artificial intelligence will be transformative, but it won’t happen tomorrow.
Most importantly, what I did not put on my list of predictions is that parking will go away. We’ve learned through the years that predicting the demise of parking is a fool’s game. Americans love their cars, and the cars and their owners are getting smarter through advances in technology. Collaboration and choice will be the grease for the wheels of progress. Those who ignore these trends face being left behind. Is that you?
BRIAN WOLFF is President & CEO of Parker Technology. He can be reached at brian.wolff@parkertechnology.com or visit www.parkertechnology.com.
