When you buy a Starbucks coffee, you’re not just buying the product in your hand. You’re paying for an experience; personalized yet strikingly uniform, it turns ordinary into extraordinary by consistently fulfilling consumer expectations.
It wouldn’t make sense, therefore, for each Starbucks to use a different coffee supplier. It wouldn’t be advantageous to implement different training plans for each branch’s personnel, either.
One store striving to create any kind of differentiator unique from the brand experience just won’t add value to the company as a whole — particularly if it creates confusion, diverts customers away from other branded locations, and fails to satisfy those well-defined expectations.
This fragmented management strategy doesn’t benefit your parking assets, either.
Nonetheless, a piecemeal approach to parking management is shockingly common for commercial property owners and asset managers. Properties are all too often divvied up and designated to different parking providers, each delivering different products, services, consumer experiences and, most worryingly, results.
Taking a holistic, portfolio approach to parking management instead has multiple benefits. Here are four of them.
1. Economies of Scale
When you bring a sizeable portfolio to the negotiating table, your bargaining power is significantly increased, driving economies of scale and efficiencies beyond the traditional one-off model.
After the initial contract negotiations, portfolio-based volume will allow you to realize optimal top-line results while driving greater discounts on all ongoing products and services you require to operate your parking facility, including equipment maintenance, ticket stock, and so on. This greatly enhances efficiencies and delivers a hefty cost advantage to your property portfolio.
2. Best Practices
Aggregating your entire property portfolio under the umbrella of one parking management company allows you to cultivate a formidable set of tried-and-tested best practices. Strategies and approaches that are driving great results in one location can be easily leveraged and replicated across the board. Internal checks and balances can also be refined and standardized, like audits, analytics, or your mystery shopper research scheme. “A rising tide lifts all boats,” as the saying goes.
3. Simplicity
When partnered with a single parking management company, your deal structure is drastically simplified. There’s just one management fee to consider across the board and just one turnkey solution to implement, effectively eliminating internal friction arising from variances in service delivery and fees for both your tenants and your property management team.
Having a single point of contact for all your parking management needs also helps to streamline and improve operational efficiencies, particularly when it comes to accounts receivable responsibilities and monthly parking data management.
4. Consistency
Partnering with a single parking management company not only improves the efficiency and integrity of your monthly parking management program from an operational and data management perspective, it also ensures that all interested stakeholders experience consistent service delivery at all of your properties.
In a world where we’re exposed to up to 5,000 brand messages every day, it’s more important than ever to offer brand consistency that cuts through the noise of competing service providers.
Impark
If you want to provide your customers with a strongly branded and consistently delivered experience, and benefit from significant bargaining power, a streamlined management experience, and a maximized net return from your parking assets, Impark can help.
Using our depth of resources, extensive in-house capabilities, and customer-focused solutions, we’ve consistently engineered value across sizable portfolios for over 55 years.
Get in touch to see how Impark can help you — we’ll bring the coffee.
Ian Hodgins is a business development manager at Impark. Email him at ihodgins@impark.com.
