Caroline: [00:00:00] Welcome to this Weekend Trucking. My name is Caroline, and today we have an awesome guest with us here, the CEO of truck parking club.com. Evan Shelley, thanks so much for being here, Evan.

Evan: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Caroline: Alright, so tell us a little bit about how in the world you got into the truck parking issue.

Evan: Yeah, so my background is in real estate and through doing real estate deals back in 2021, I figured out about the truck parking issue. I had a piece of property under contract that was zoned industrial that I was looking at to build warehousing on. And ultimately it wasn’t a good fit for warehousing.

Evan: So I started looking at other alternatives came across truck parking. Everyone was telling me it’s a great investment. There’s not enough demand. Through those conversations, I’m like, this seems to make a lot of sense to develop this particular parcel for truck parking. So I take the parcel to the municipality and say, Hey, here’s what I wanna do.

Evan: I wanna develop truck parking. And they’re like, we’re not gonna support it. None [00:01:00] of the surrounding parcels are gonna support it. And that’s when the light bulb went off. I’m like, okay, based on my conversations. But it appears difficult to build more of what’s really going on here. So that was in 2021.

Evan: And over the next six to 12 months really looked into the business of truck parking, why it’s happening, understanding transportation and trucking in general and really saw that there was a really interesting problem to be solved.

Caroline: Yeah. Tell us about the issue of truck parking, just in trucking in general. Why is it so hard? To find places to park. Why is this even an issue to begin with?

Evan: Yeah, so you know, the stats thrown around are one space for every 11 trucks. On average, it takes a driver 56 minutes per day look to look for parking. I think the issue is really part of what I just said. So nimby, not in my backyard. No one really wants it around them. Another thing is from the public side governments haven’t really [00:02:00] thought or coordinated enough into their zoning and also on the, on the public funding side where there just hasn’t been enough built on like rest areas. It just wasn’t planned properly quite clearly over the last two to three decades wasn’t really considered as much as it should have been. And that all comes together to where you just have this massive lack of supply of parking.

Evan: And it’s expensive to build on top of that. So you gotta make sense of the ROI. So it, it’s you have, four factors, three or four factors that really contribute to this problem.

Caroline: Yeah, I wanna talk a little bit about that. The NIMBY thing, it reminds me of the issue with the housing crisis, right? We know that there’s not enough houses, there’s not enough housing supply, and part of the reason there’s not enough housing supplies, because there’s a lot of people that don’t want multifamily buildings built around them or near their home.

Caroline: They think it’s gonna, reduce their their property values. Now that seems to be one [00:03:00] of the big drivers here. And changing zoning laws can be really difficult and government is slow and we’re really diff slow to understand the even the problem, let alone the solutions to it. How did truck parking club come in and change what was going on and how did you speed up the development of truck parking?

Evan: Yeah, so it’s funny you say that. Out of all the podcasts I’ve done, no one’s ever brought up the affordable housing crisis. I actually, my background I used to consult for affordable housing nonprofit.

Caroline: And your real

Evan: they are very similar. Yeah, they are very similar. It, it’s an interesting analogy because.

Evan: They do experience nimby right in, in affordable housing and housing in general and multifamily housing. But yeah I definitely, there are very clear sim similarities in nimby being, being the biggest one. Ultimately what we did at Truck Parking Club is really flip it on its head and say, there’s all this existing space that’s already properly zoned.

Evan: The problem is it’s. [00:04:00] 10 spaces in the back of a trucking company’s yard. It’s 35 spaces at a warehouse where you have to take that supply, put it on a marketplace like truck parking club, and then aggregate that demand to it and do it all in a very seamless. Way where the drivers have a great experience where they, when they book with you, and also the property owners have a great experience and they make money and they feel like it’s worth their time and their effort and the maintenance of the property.

Evan: So you have to take this theory of leveraging existing space that’s already out there and then really apply it and then execute. So you deliver a great experience to both parties. But if you do that, like what we’ve done, it’s a very big world out there. And that you can create a lot of new truck parking and you can deliver, you can get a lot of drivers safely parked by leveraging all this existing space.

Evan: And it’s, it’s easy to theorize it, it’s much harder to put into action and then put it together and get it to, 1500 locations and tens of.

Caroline: And [00:05:00] I guess what the big barrier there is if I have space for 10 trucks in the back of my warehouse, for me to try and offer that to drivers. I guess I could do it for drivers that are coming to my warehouse to drop stuff off, but now I have to administer it and I have to figure out how to market it.

Caroline: I have to figure out how to price it. It’s like a lot of hassle. That if I just had a platform to put it up and look, I have these 10 spaces and people can come here and park. Everything else is managed for me. Plus, then that gets added to all the other spaces. You know that times a hundred, now you’ve got a thousand parking places, parking spots on one app, and it’s not one app for every state or every county or every.

Caroline: Jurisdiction, you’ve got just one app with all of the spaces on it. So there’s something about aggregating that, that makes it a lot more useful and available to people.

Evan: Yeah, exactly. You said it really well, the taking. Realizing that, okay, it’s [00:06:00] great. You have 10 extra spaces in the back of your yard. In a perfect world, drivers come and go. They get leased out. Not a big deal. But in reality taking those spaces and maximizing those spaces and making money on them and offering them up to drivers is quite a bit of work.

Evan: And I would say without that platform that you referenced. It’s probably not worth your time. Perhaps if someone rents all 10 spaces on a long-term lease, that’s an ideal scenario. There’s still gonna be administrative costs and things that are involved in your time and effort. But what we’ve done is considered, hey, this property owner is a business owner in a whole other business.

Evan: They’re running this warehouse. They’re doing their respective business inside of that warehouse. Whatever the case may be, we wanna just automate the entire experience for them. From 24 7, 365 customer service made up of former drivers, the app that, that any driver can go on and book the payments, the payouts, the billing, the collections all these things that, that you don’t really consider until [00:07:00] you start doing it.

Evan: We’ve really automated that entire process so that business owner, that respective property owner can go about all their other things. And monetize this extra space, and most importantly, offer up those spaces for safe parking for.

Caroline: Yeah, let’s talk about that experience from the driver’s perspective then. You said that it takes on average, almost an hour for drivers to find a place to park on average. What does that do to a business owner that’s trying to run a trucking business? How does that impact them?

Evan: I think up, up until us, I think it’s just the cost of doing business. I think it’s just something that you accept and I think that you just accept that your drivers are gonna park on the side of shoulders of interstates, on ramps, off ramps, random lots, et cetera. I think it’s just became a bit of a normalcy.

Evan: What’s, what started to change is that. Municipalities start, have started finding drivers, nuclear verdicts from collisions and fatalities, [00:08:00] predatory towing, predatory fining, predatory booting. All these things have come to, come together to where now I. Carriers are actively seeking alternatives to get their drivers safely parked because they can really reduce a ton of costs, become more efficient and most importantly, keep their drivers safe.

Evan: So it’s been a cost of doing business and what we’re doing is really taking that and saying, Hey, what about you take the surety of saying your driver’s gonna have a space. Another two hours down the road, instead of them driving around for an hour looking for parking and you create inefficiencies, although that parking is costing you money, perhaps it costs you $20, but you made 80 on the fact that your driver got that much further down the road.

Evan: Didn’t it didn’t have to worry about finding, booting, towing, didn’t have to worry about wasting time and fuel. Like all these things that are considered.

Caroline: So you’ve got on one end, the most mundane thing that people just can just get used to on a day-to-day basis. Oh, it’s just a fact that I have to spend this [00:09:00] much time. Running my truck just trying to find parking. So it’s one cost there that you might not, if you’re used to it, you might not really feel it.

Caroline: You’re definitely gonna feel a fine if you get fined for something. You are definitely gonna feel it if you have to get towed and now you have to pay thousands of dollars to get your truck back. But there’s also a huge safety concern there. And not only could you get fined, could you get towed?

Caroline: You could get hit. You might be parked somewhere that’s not safe, that’s not safe for you as a person, not safe for your equipment, not safe for the cargo that you’re hauling. You might not be in a secure location. So all of those things add up to putting costs on businesses for a big mega carrier that those costs, they might wanna.

Caroline: Reduce that, and they might have a whole department focused on reducing that. But if you’re a one truck, or two truck, or even 10 truck operation, you probably, you don’t have the resources to deal with a catastrophe like that. And you certainly don’t wanna have to deal with a [00:10:00] catastrophe of not parking well right now.

Caroline: I think you’re, what you’re getting to is maybe people aren’t used to paying for parking all the time, but maybe it’s worth it. There’s been some controversy over this. And truck parking club was the center of some controversy last year where it was unclear to some people.

Caroline: Okay. Is Truck parking club actually making new spaces available or are they just taking spaces that used to be free? And charging for them. Can you talk about how that came about and how you responded to that?

Evan: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, we I mean we get pushback sporadically. It comes and goes, but the controversy was, or is around essentially that our business is we, help drivers get safely parked. We provide parking for truckers by monetizing vacant properties for landowners, right?

Evan: And that’s what’s written on our site and pretty much anywhere you go, some version of that, you’re gonna find that well truck stop started approaching us. [00:11:00] Pretty early on just saying, Hey, I have these spaces in my lot and I wanna monetize them. I’ve heard about you guys, have this app and everything.

Evan: What can you do with us? And we curated a solution for them. And I didn’t, at the time really.

Evan: Think about it. It’s a business owner that is wanting to do paid parking on their, at their truck stop, which, in America is their right until they become regulated. If truck stops become regulated, then maybe they won’t have a choice anymore.

Evan: But they ultimately the reason truck stops do that is because their parking lot remains full, but no one comes in their store and spends money, or they don’t buy fuel. And so truck stopped. We started adding truck stops to the platform, and now I think they’re three to 4% of our business. But if you looked at some of the controversy they would say it’s 97% of our business.

Evan: But how we see it is that the business owner has a choice to do what they want with their property. We’re. We’re the backend solution, the software to that. We don’t own the property. We don’t [00:12:00] hold contract to the property. We don’t put a gun to the truck stop owner’s head and say, you have to do this.

Evan: And a lot of them already do paid parking themselves. I think we just created a system to where it runs smoothly within their operations. And ultimately that got a lot of pushback. But, looking at the, from the driver’s perspective, paid parking, has been around for decades, but to start seeing it more and more often.

Evan: And it’s not just truck parking club by the way, there, there are many other companies that do it. We just have a pretty large following, so we get, we get the brunt of it, but, I understand that from the driver’s perspective, a hundred percent going from almost no paid parking to a world in the last five to 10 years.

Evan: Where it’s like much more often, especially, you’ve got pilot doing it, TAs doing it actively. I see from their perspective, and it sucks. And especially for company drivers where they’re not. Getting reimbursed for that parking and their and some of the carriers, not all of them, some of the carriers aren’t offering to reimburse ’em.

Evan: Some carriers do [00:13:00] pay for it, and we have the data to show that, but some of them don’t. And I feel for company drivers that are driving around someone else’s truck and trailer and trying to, and then having to be asked to pay for parking, I understand that it sucks. But I also see.

Evan: The truck stops perspective, and I think it’s a free market, right? And the truck stop’s gonna have to do what they think is best for their business. And that carrier is making the decision not to reimburse their company driver. And they’re saying, that’s the best decision for my business. Now, the, ultimately the company driver takes the brunt of it because that’s coming out of their paycheck.

Evan: I, I think that really sucks, right? Because you think about like business travel, typically for an employee, if it’s not a salesperson. They’re getting all that business travel paid for. In this situation, that company driver’s not getting it paid for. And I think that sucks. Now the thing that you won’t really hear people say hopefully it becomes more and more common is like carriers are actively starting to pay for driving more for truck parking more often.

Evan: We see it and it’s happening more and we’re [00:14:00] actually promoting it because we make it very easy for carriers to reimburse them. Historically, it’s been like very, a very clunky process to get that reimbursed. What we’ve created is something that we make it now very easy in second nature to reimburse.

Evan: Drivers for parking. I could talk for hours about it, but ultimately that’s kind of it. It is, it’s a tough scenario and feel for everyone on all sides. Truck stops go out of business carriers go out of business company drivers leave carriers. And the tension between those three parties, truck parking is stuck in the middle.

Evan: And truck parking club is the, become the face of it. Which is fine because at the end of the day, half of our team is former drivers. Everything we do, we’re trying to push to make it easier on the driver. We do think paying $20 for a parking spot is much safer. For a driver, then parking on the side of the road.

Evan: And ideally the carrier that company driver is working for is reimbursing them and, or hopefully in the near future they will [00:15:00] start paying for a driver’s parking is a very strong retention tool as well. So I think it’s a very interesting thing and perhaps sometime in the, in, in the future, we’ll put out kinda a long form.

Evan: Podcast or article about it. But there it’s a great question. It’s a very interesting topic and honestly we don’t mind it because we think as long as our ethics and our morals and our values are aligned and we are doing everything we can for the driver we feel okay about it.

Caroline: Tell me more about what you’re doing for drivers. One of the things that you worked, had talked about in another interview last year was maybe being able to accept points. So drivers will, get points for fueling, for showers, for buying stuff at a truck stop. And then often we’ll use those points to pay for those spaces.

Caroline: Now if those spaces are now truck parking club and I, now I can’t use my points, that’s an issue. Have you been able to add that to your, that functionality to your app already?

Evan: So loyalty points you are saying for from a third party, let’s say pilot or something of that [00:16:00] nature. We’ve been talk in talks with them really since the first controversy came out, maybe a year or so ago. No, we haven’t been able to get any traction on getting them to add it. It’s not our decision.

Evan: We would do it tomorrow. We would’ve done it 12 months ago. I think it’s. If Pilot doesn’t allow it, it’s not to say they don’t even allow it, it’s more of they’re this huge company. And these things take a lot of time. We actively press them to get it added. Because I think we have maybe eight to 10 pilots dealer pilots.

Evan: Our platform and we’re ready when they’re ready. I would be more than happy to offer them and we’re actively talking with other truck stops and associations about adding their loyalty points as well. We think it’s a no brainer and we’re all in on adding that.

Caroline: And to be clear of the over a thousand stops parking spots that you have on truck parking club.com, what percentage of those are at big truck stops? I.

Evan: Big truck stops or just truck stops.

Caroline: Truck stops where the spots used to be free [00:17:00] or you could pay for them with points and are now paid spots on truck parking club.com.

Evan: I don’t know the separator between the big ones and the smaller ones. Like I mentioned, I think we have eight or 10 pilots. There are independent truck stops that you wouldn’t call them big, but when you get there, it’s like a really huge play. So I. I don’t know about the nuance of the exact question, but I’ll just tell you.

Evan: Total number of truck stops. I think we have 40 to 45 of them and about, and we just crossed over 1500 locations, so around 3%. That number obviously fluctuates. It may be 3.2%. Tomorrow, it may be 2.8, it may be four. It moves around, but as we sit here today, it’s around 3%.

Caroline: So you would say about 3% of the spots, total number of parking spots maybe used to be free to people buying things at those truck stops. Now are paid and 97% of the spots are actually new places. That wouldn’t, new spots that wouldn’t be available without truck parking club.

Evan: I think generally speaking, yes, but a lot of them if not some percentage of them were already doing paid [00:18:00] parking.

Caroline: Got it. And they just came

Evan: of them were. Yeah. Yeah. And think about the pilot locations. They have the option to do prime parking through pilot. It’s not like we are forcing them to use truck parking club.

Evan: That property owner that runs that pilot chooses to use us. It’s once again one of those things and where. They my understanding perhaps they were doing park paid parking in some capacity. I don’t know if it was through pilot or not. And then they came to us and wanted to use us.

Evan: But just generally speaking, you could say yes, that. Property owner, that truck stop owner made the decision to either continue doing paid parking or start doing paid parking on some percentage of their lot. There’s the also part of it too is okay, paid parking is fine, but you can’t go to a hundred percent.

Evan: That’s the truck stop owner’s decision as well. And I think maybe we have two out of the 45. We’ll say under five out of the 45 go to a hundred percent paid parking. And all it is a function of that truck stop owner [00:19:00] making a decision on how many people are walking in this door and how many people are in that lot.

Evan: So if my parking lot is full, and let’s say it’s a hundred drivers. And 50 of them come in the door and spend money or 50 of them fuel up, let’s say 50 outta the a hundred total, how many of them are you gonna make paid so you can at least make something on someone using your lot? Let’s say perhaps maybe it’s 50%.

Evan: Maybe that makes sense, but it may be a situation where it’s much slower than that. It may be a situation where it’s much higher than that. It’s a decision for that truck stop. Interesting thing is, if that. That truck stop is making a decision to alienate drivers from parking in their lot.

Evan: And in theory, spending money with them. But they still make that decision because they know the numbers. These are, a lot of them are small business owners. Every dollar counts. They’re trying, they’re not printing money. Just like driver are in a tough spot. Truck stop. Most truck stops.

Evan: I’m not saying all truck stops, but most truck stops aren’t killing it by any means. So it’s such, it is a very interesting concept. But yeah, 3% to answer [00:20:00] your question.

Caroline: Cool. It’s not entirely clear to me exactly, why that controversy blew up in the first place. It seems like truck parking club has actually opened up a lot more spaces, even more than some of the big truck stop brands have been able to. Can you talk about the evolution of that? Like, how many stops did you start with?

Caroline: How many have you grown to, what’s the projection to the future? I.

Evan: Yeah we call them property member locations. We just passed over 1500 last night. We’re at about 30,000 spaces. We’re the largest aggregation of truck parking in the US outside the major truck stops, and we did it in 26 months. As far as like the controversy side of things we, we have definitely added more.

Evan: New spaces than taking free spaces at truck stops. I still understand, why they don’t like it. It doesn’t, ma they’re not gonna, drivers aren’t gonna care any less what the good things that we’ve done on the other side of it. I think [00:21:00] it is it is just the realities and, like I said earlier, I think company drivers really do, it’s a tough situation and I do think that narrative’s changing though. But yeah, we went from, zero to 1500 locations in 26 months. And we’ve added I guess at this point, tens of thousands of spaces that were never before available.

Evan: We help tens of thousands of drivers get, get safely parked and we’re, we’re very proud of that, but we also think we’re just getting started and we’re gonna keep doing our thing and focus on our core mission. And at the end of the day truck parking club’s mission is to help trucker save time and fuel by efficiently finding or reserving truck parking across the us.

Evan: As long as we stay aligned with that mission and do good for the driver and do everything we can and be the best stewards that we can, we’re very proud of what we’ve done, although the controversy.

Caroline: Can you talk about how that compares to other projects? There’s a lot of government funding that goes into infrastructure. There’s truck stops themselves that build new locations and obviously that’s, a whole other [00:22:00] thing ’cause they have to build out fueling infrastructure and their stores and everything.

Caroline: But how does your growth of the number of spots that you’ve been able to open up compared to other projects that are going on.

Evan: Yeah I guess one thing I would comment on is on average it costs the. We’ll say state and federal government, $150,000 plus per truck parking space. It’s quite a substantial number.

Caroline: Is that

Evan: let’s

Caroline: year or just to open it up, or what does that number represent?

Evan: So if you pull into a rest area, and let’s say it just been developed anywhere in the us on average, the cost for one of those truck parking spaces to build is $150,000. So if there is a hundred spaces, what is that? $15 million?

Caroline: So that’s not including maintenance afterward. That’s just to open it up.

Evan: Yeah. Yeah. That’s just to open it up. So $15 million for a hundred spaces. And some of them go much higher than that and some of them are maybe a little bit less than that, but on average what we’ve seen is about [00:23:00] $150,000. We’ll, so that same $15 million, we do that in a couple days of creating new space, leveraging existing space.

Evan: We’ll do that in two days, three days.

Caroline: And is it just because the, those government projects are trying to acquire new land? And and build that out by just acquiring new land instead of trying to work with the property owner themselves.

Evan: Yeah, so I think it’s a function of they have to go out, they have to do all the entitlements, engineering, acquisition of the site. Development of the site, and you’re doing that all in inside of a government municipality. And it, it can become quite costly. And that’s not unusual for government projects.

Evan: I think private sector gets it down less than that, which is great. I think, but for private sector, they have to make a return and they still have an asset. Then that comes with ramifications. If you can’t deliver the right. Yeah, it’s just an immense cost. It’s a, an immense undertaking for something that, you look out and you see this [00:24:00] 75 by 12 spot and you’re like, that costs it $150,000.

Evan: But when it’s all, when it all comes down to it, it does there’s a lot of work to it. But if you leverage existing space, like what we do there’s no assets. There’s essentially zero cost compared to what the government’s spending or even what the private sector’s spending on it.

Caroline: I

Evan: the, but then the other question mark, is that private property owner wants to get paid. Yeah. So

Caroline: So it’s just that cost isn’t paid up front. So how much can I make as a property owner on one, on a single spot in a year on average?

Evan: I think it, yeah it, we get asked that, the, that question all the time by really, prospective property owners and things of that nature. It all depends on the market really. It’s a market by market basis, and it varies widely. I can speak to let’s just say daily prices. So

Caroline: Like you said, $20, right?

Evan: yeah.

Caroline: 20 bucks is the average, so it’s $7,000 in a year if I’m renting it every single day.

Evan: Yeah. Yeah. There’s definitely nuance to it. And there’s, [00:25:00] and just because you have it at $20, does it get rented out? Does it, is it occupied? Half the time, but if you change the price, it’d be a hundred percent full. If you went to 10. So I don’t a hundred, that, that’s the same, that’s the same number.

Evan: I don’t know why I said that, but let’s say you went to $15 and you doubled your occupancy, but there, there is, there’s definitely nuance to it. But some markets, 20, $25 a day and it does stay full. And we continually look for more capacity. So I’m in Vegas right now for a conference.

Evan: We have a handful of lots around here and they essentially just stay full and it’s just a supply constrained market.

Caroline: Just trying to think like, how would you even get to that 150? Thousand dollars of a spot. Just alone if you, if it’s gonna, if I can, if I have to pay a private property owner $7,000 a year to, use a space for truck parking and that’s, doing it every single day of that year, it would take me like 20 years to get to that 150,000.

Caroline: There’s also, it’s not free to maintain a [00:26:00] lot that. Class eight trucks drive on, right? So it’s, that’s, there’s also a cost in that. But that $150,000, like what you said, that’s actually not including any of the maintenance. That’s just upfront cost of developing that one spot. But again, it would take you like 20 years to get to $150,000.

Caroline: So it’s just an enormous differential.

Evan: Yeah, it’s an interesting conversation. The 150 K comes from taxpayers, right? So instead of the cost becoming from just drivers, it gets split from not just drivers, but also all taxpayers. So it, it’s an interesting conversation. That considering there’s no such thing as a free lunch and like where does the cost go and where should the cost go?

Evan: The cost does have to go somewhere.

Caroline: where does the cost and who’s paying the cost?

Evan: Exactly. And who’s benefiting? Who? It’s who’s benefiting from the parking? Who’s the main stakeholders? Who should pay for the parking? Is it taxpayers? Is it co, is it company drivers? Is it carriers? I think there’s pretty common sense [00:27:00] approaches to like a decent amount of this stuff.

Evan: It’s on who, who bears the, who should bear the cost and who bears the cost now. But it’s, yeah, you could write a book. You could write a book on it. It’s a really interesting. Topic that when I started this company I was very ignorant to it and have become enlightened on like the entire thing.

Evan: And I, I honestly feel for all parties involved because it’s a complex topic, but I think net we push to to make it a little bit better.

Caroline: Can you talk about the safety concerns that drivers have? How do you manage, and make sure that the spaces that you’re opening up for drivers are safe and compliant? I. What happens, with enforcement, for example, somebody else is in my spot, or, how do you deal with those conflicts and issues for drivers?

Evan: Yeah. So I would say on your first part of your question, as far as like the safety of the lots and things of that nature we do everything we can to ensure that the lot is a suitable place for truck parking. But what you’ll find in freight is that if someone, let’s just say it’s [00:28:00] a high value load or something. If a thief wants to get that high value load, I don’t care if you have a 10 foot wall with electric fencing on the top, like they’re gonna figure out a way to get to that load and steal the goods. And people in the industry are well aware of that. So you can never do enough to a hundred percent guarantee, but what we do is we make sure it is our obligation to make sure.

Evan: That we show the driver, the fleet manager, the dispatcher, whoever’s booking this parking spot that they know exactly what they’re getting. And that can be, security fence gated cameras, lighting or it could just be an open lot. Or it could be something in between. And what our job is to do is say, to say, Hey, here’s everything you’re getting.

Evan: Here’s photos of the property you have. Now you have, you know exactly what you’re getting. And then when they book with us, the experience they get matches what we say they’re gonna get. Because just an open lot [00:29:00] works in a lot of scenarios and it’s much safer than the on ramp or off ramp of an interstate.

Evan: And at this point, 99% of truck stops are open lots. You go look at them, there’s some assumption that there’s security but there’s not. It’s literally just an open lot and 99% of the time. There isn’t any more safety there than just any other open lot.

Evan: It’s like I said we have to deliver exactly what we say that driver’s gonna get at the lot. And if we execute on that, then we do our jobs and drivers are happy. If we don’t do that, then we deliver bad experiences, not good for us, not good for the brand, not good for the driver.

Evan: So we are very strict about the properties we approve, and we’re very strict about making sure we know exactly what we’re delivering to the driver. And then in the cases of booking spots and not getting spaces and things of that nature we actively track that. It’s extremely rare in the case of something happening and enforcement is needed and stuff like that.

Evan: But we do everything we can [00:30:00] to just resolve the issue. I know stops. A lot of controversy with Hey, I reserve this spot and then someone’s in my spot, and then no one does anything about it, which, which sucks. Fortunately we have private lots, so it’s an anomaly if something like that ever happens.

Caroline: You mentioned about your customer service team. Talk about what you did differently. I think this is the first time that I’ve heard about a trucking app employing drivers. To do their customer service. What gave you that idea and what how did you build that team?

Evan: Yeah, it was just this grand, it was this grand idea that like just came to me. No. It was literally, I started the app. I started getting a little bit of traction. I got some customers I was calling every single customer, talking to them. Just asking ’em about the app what they thought, how I could improve their experience at the property.

Evan: And one of the ladies I talked to was just really good over the phone and I was like, I’m gonna need customer service soon. You have any interest? And she’s we’re actually getting off the road [00:31:00] soon. She drove team with her husband and, the timing was just really good. And she came on as customer service.

Evan: We call it customer care. She was a former driver and now she runs a team of 12 people. And she built the entire department from scratch. And they’re all former drivers. Actually. She has a team of 16 people. Yeah. But she she built the entire department from scratch and we. We could tell, it was just she and I for a while.

Evan: Like the company was, she and I were essentially the ops for the business for the first six months plus maybe eight months, and. We could tell that it was it worked really well because she could resonate with the with the drivers. And it’s I wanna keep doing this. And now we hire drivers, like all the way across the company.

Evan: We have former drivers in all kinds of different positions. Now. We actually don’t talk about it enough, but we exclude try to exclusively hire former drivers. It’s not always possible, obviously, but like we, we try to as much as possible. But it works really well because the drivers, resonate with when speaking with our [00:32:00] team that, that have been there and done that and experienced the really tough days. And you’re in a bad mood and you’re having an issue. You can’t find parking. Our team’s experienced that too, so it we’re able to just make their day hopefully a little bit easier.

Caroline: That’s awesome. All right, thank you so much Evan for joining us. Is there anything else that you want people to know about Truck parking club?

Evan: No I thought your questions were awesome. You asked two or three questions that I never get asked which is great. Just go check us out truck. All our socials are in the footer. You can book right through the app onboarding zz. If you wanna add a property you can do that as well, right?

Evan: Right through the app or website. And if you wanna call in and talk to a former driver, you can call 8 8 8 8 9 9 Park. That’s 8 8 8 8 9 9 7 2 7 5.

Caroline: Awesome. Thanks so much, Evan. If you enjoyed this conversation with Evan Shelley, CEO of Truck Parking Club, make sure you subscribe to our channel this week in trucking and also leave any questions or comments that you have for Evan in the comments below. [00:33:00] And we will get those questions to him and get you some answers.

Caroline: Thanks again, Evan.