Parking Origin Stories is a series about the personal stories of passionate parking professionals — how they arrived in parking, their journey from that first step until today, and everything that’s inspired them along the way.
In this installment, we share the origin story of Scott Gould, the senior vice president of business development at Parker Technology, to celebrate his upcoming, well-deserved, hard-earned retirement. He’s been accelerating in parking for 25+ years and has made an indelible impression on not just the organizations he’s worked with and built, but on our industry as a whole. Let’s dive in and learn more about Scott — a problem solver, people leader, and “Cheetah Brother.” Don’t worry, you’ll find out what that last one means soon.
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By Sarah Becherer
Scott grew up in a family that owned a booming business in Fort Wayne, Indiana, wholesaling and distributing ceramic and art supplies to schools, nursing homes, prisons, mom ‘n’ pop shops, and hobbyists.
Gradually throughout the 1990s, Scott saw the industry undergo a transformation that would ultimately render the business untenable: Manufacturers were cutting out the middleman and selling directly to end users or dealers.
With the writing clearly on the wall, Scott chose to exit and take a beat to decide what he wanted to do next. Although he considered creating his own business, for one reason or another, none of his ideas felt right. So, he started hunting for jobs.
In this pre-internet era, it was common practice to scour the classifieds. That’s when he saw it: a clipping no more than an inch-and-a-half tall and an inch-and-a-half wide seeking a parking manager.
“My first reaction, and I’m gonna be honest here,” Scott shared, “is what the heck is a ‘parking manager’? I had no idea what to expect going into the interviews, but I had three of them, and they all felt really good. I could sense it was an opportunity to learn and grow.”
Putting pedal to the metal in parking
He started with Denison Parking on April Fool's Day, 1999. Somewhat appropriately, Scott couldn’t remember where in the lot he left his car. He ended his first day wandering around trying to find it — like in that episode of “Seinfeld” when the gang gets lost in the garage.
From the beginning, Scott’s success was meteoric. He soared up through management and continued to take on more responsibilities in the realm of operations.
At his zenith, Scott managed 60-70 properties, 25 managers, 40 supervisors, and hundreds of line-level employees in business units including, but not limited to, parking, shuttles, valets, maintenance, and snow removal.
One of these business units — remote parking monitoring — would eventually turn into Parker Technology. Here’s how it went down.
The Cheetah Brothers: Scott Gould and Brian Wolff
In 2010, Scott approached Mark Pratt — then the president and CEO of Denison Parking and today the president and chief operations officer (COO) of One Parking, Inc., and who Scott referred to in our interview as “the godfather of Parker Technology” — with a proposition: turn the remote parking monitoring unit into its own entity, positioning it as a business rather than a service and start churning profit.
This commenced a period of several years during which Scott worked mightily to develop the company, along with Brian Wolff, the current CEO of Parker Technology, who joined in 2015 to turn the crank on the company and prepare for astronomical growth.
At this point, cloud-hosted computing was all the rage, and Brian brought a wealth of experience in this area to the table. Together, they contracted a company to build two-way video hardware and developed a scalable software platform to take calls.
“For the longest time it was just me and Brian,” Scott recalled, “skinning our knees and learning the hard way. We called ourselves the Cheetah Brothers because we went out and hunted and then dragged the ‘meat’ home to feed the pack of people in the call center.”
By 2020, Scott, Brian, and their rapidly multiplying team of agents and parking technology and operations experts were signing a new deal every single day.
A different sort of busy
“Parking’s not hard, per se, but you have to pay attention to the details and be quick on your feet,” Scott said. “I have a running joke with myself that I go into work at 8:00 a.m. with all of these great ideas and big things that I want to do and by 8:30, it all goes in the trash.”
He clarified that it’s not that those things on his list aren’t important. Rather, he finds himself tackling challenges and opportunities with contracts and owners as they arise.
It’s “a different kind of busy,” Scott said, and one that he finds incredibly rewarding.
In our interview, Scott offered up some anecdotes that support this statement.
In the early 2000s, not a single garage in Indianapolis accepted credit cards, only checks and cash. Scott remembers people writing checks in the lane: It was chaos.
After a Colts game weekend, “it was nothing to walk to the bank with $40,000 in a wrinkled up brown paper bag,” Scott said. “Back then, no one had those secure wheelie suitcases. It would have been too conspicuous to use a suitcase, so we figured, well, brown paper bag it is!”
Another anecdote: In 2012, Scott had the opportunity to partner on a massive parking project with Mel Raines, former COO of the 2008 Republican National Convention, when she was hired as one of the principal architects and transportation coordinator for Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis.
“We hit it off and had such a good time,” Scott recalled. “She’s such a capable person. I made her life easy when other people were trying to put a gun to her head. Together, we decided just to do what was right, and doing right was good for everyone.”
One more: When Scott was vice president of operations at Denison Parking, a massive construction project occurred at a few local hospitals with 700-1200 workers on site every day. However, there was nowhere to park them. Making matters worse, no transportation infrastructure existed to relocate the workers, once parked, to the construction sites.
To solve problem #1, Scott and his team make-shifted a parking lot by dumping 200 truckloads of gravel in a vacant area down by the river. That settled, it was time to tackle problem #2 — shuttle service.
Scott and his team entertained the idea of buying shuttles for the 14-month project. However, the numbers didn’t shake out and the workers, dirty after a long day of work, would ruin the interiors. So, they came up with a more economical alternative — used school buses. No longer safe for children, the buses had been decommissioned but still inspected, approved, and regulated. Scott scooped them up at a steal, for only $15,000 each.
But as one might expect, strict regulations govern the use of school buses for anything other than their original purpose. So, the team had to modify them to remove the stop signs that swung out as well as change the distinctive “school bus yellow” color.
Ripping off the stop signs was easy enough, but Scott was quoted $12,000 a pop for a paint job — almost as much as the cost of the bus itself! His much more affordable solution involved wrapping them in white vinyl.
“It was a hoot, running these white vinyl buses up and down from the lot we made to the construction site,” Scott said. “The project ran for 14 months and then they wanted us for six more.”
“We made a bunch of cash, and at the end of the deal, the company we got the buses from bought them back at 50% of what we paid for them,” he said. “It was a big win, and something you don’t have the chance to do very often.
The “red face” test
Building relationships with clients and customers requires next-level honesty and transparency, which is a practice that Scott has diffused throughout Parker.
Scott told me that he can pass the “red face test” in front of anybody. He explained that you fail the red face test when you get flustered because you’re caught in a lie and the lies start compounding.
“You end up lying again to cover up that first lie,” Scott said, “so I never lie to begin with. The culture at Parker Technology is one of integrity. No red faces here.”
Scott’s attitude is that you don’t need to swing for the fences every time; singles and doubles will win the game. And the only way to truly win is to ensure everyone comes out ahead.
“Do the right thing,” Scott said. “That’s what it comes down to. A lot of that came with me and Brian and filtered into the leadership team and how we do things. At least I’d like to think so.”
Scott’s next adventure
Some say that the parking industry is like the Hotel California: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. But Scott said that he’s “about ready to ride off into the sunset.”
“It’s been 75+ tradeshows and 250+ flight legs in just the last few years,” Scott said of his hectic schedule. “Travel is great until you’re doing it all of the time. Then it gets a little less glamorous.”
There’s no better way to end this chapter than with a few words from Scott’s teammates at Parker Technology.
“Life around Parker will not be the same!” said Tammy Baker, Parker’s COO. “Scott is one of the ‘go-to’ people on my list. No matter if it is a question or a request for help, Scott is always there to provide a hand.”
“When I think of Parker, I think of Scott Gould, or Super G, as we affectionately call him,” said Heidi Barber, the company’s vice president of marketing. “I remember the early days when Scott, Brian, and I hit the road together for a handful of trade shows back in 2019 — great times! We were scrappy and grassroots then. Scott has always been a wealth of knowledge, sharing incredible parking stories and deep expertise in operations, our solution, PARCS functionality, and the brass tacks of running a business. To me, he’s a true parking OG — one of the greats. While he’ll be deeply missed in the day-to-day, I’m grateful to remain part of the ‘Parker Family’ with him and excited to see what’s next on his journey.”
And finally, from his fellow Cheetah Brother, Brian Wolff: “Twenty-six years ago, Scott Gould started his career in parking. I’m sure he had no idea what he was getting himself into. However, like all of us, he quickly learned that parking is a complicated and complex industry in which you can learn, grow, serve, and build a life-changing career. In those 26 years, Scott has done so many things, from carrying paper bags of cash to the bank on Monday morning to helping develop a truly innovative approach to improving the customer experience. We congratulate you, Scott, and we salute you for all you’ve done for our industry.”
SARAH BECHERER is the vice president of marketing @ Ocra. She can be reached at sarah@getocra.com. Interested in having your Parking Origin story featured? Email editor@parkingtoday.com.
