The idea started with local entrepreneur Paul Collins, who had retired from the earlier parking business he co-founded with Dave Mackie, also based in Cambridge.
What exactly is Parking Sense?
It’s a unique, parking technology business, essentially made up of three pieces.
At the core of it, you have the parking guidance – the lights and the signs that guide you around a facility – very similar to what you see at The Base’s [Te Awa] underground parking. The Parking Sense team re-engineered that concept, but a much smarter version including a Bluetooth beacon in every space so it could link up to a mobile phone app – the second piece of innovation.
The phone app means you no longer need barrier gates or tickets or anything like that. Before you leave home, you jump on the app, it shows you how many spaces are available wherever you’re going and you can either reserve a space or just drive down. When you arrive, you pull into a space and the app pops up with what space you’re in, how much the charge is, or whether it’s free, or time restricted and you accept. Then you just walk away.
When you drive out of the space, the charge automatically calculates and the app sends you a digital receipt, so it’s genuinely like ‘Uber’ for parking.
The third piece of the technology, is the back-end management system, SpaceNet, which captures all the data – where people are parking, how long they’re parking for and when they’re parking. It allows the cities and the building owners to utilise the spaces better.
For example, they may have 100 parent and child spaces, but at any one time they’re only using 20 per cent of them so the Parking Sense system will tell them that and they can allocate more of those to the general public or the other way around.
“Paul saw a gap in the market for effective parking guidance, payment portals, phone apps and really taking parking into the 21stCentury, particularly in America,” Jake said.
But, Jake said, Paul soon realised he needed help to execute his idea. That’s when Dave Mackie came back on board to design the product and make it a reality.
“Paul is the guy that sleeps one or two hours a night, has a million ideas at a time, sees things that no one else sees - gaps in the market, etc. And Dave is the guy with an electrical engineering background who makes it a reality – he figures out how to make it possible in the real world.”
So how does Jake fit in? He was the legal counsel for the duo’s first company and then moved into the operational side of the business.
Paul asked Jake if he’d be interested in joining the new business as chief operating officer with a focus on finding a way to launch the technology successfully in the US market.
Jake said within the first three years - Parking Sense was founded in 2013 - they’d become the dominant provider of this sort of technology.
“The fact there is still no one else in the world that provides a total solution like we do, where you’ve got the parking guidance, the phone apps, the payment portals, the back-end management systems, meant we had pretty fast growth.”
And that’s set to continue now that Movac, New Zealand’s largest technology investor, has invested in Parking Sense.
“They invested in TradeMe, they invested in Vend and a number of others in Silicon Valley at the moment, so they’re a good backer to have on board. It’s been a good story so far,” Jake said.
But he believes it never would have happened if they hadn’t been the right team for the job and he says Paul was the reason that team came together.
“I’ve never met anyone who is more driven or motivated to get a business off the ground. Paul has been a serial entrepreneur for his entire life and I guess what he learned at Smart Parking from that publicly listed environment, was he needed to put the right team in place. It doesn’t matter how good your product is, if you haven’t got the right team, then you’re not going to be successful.
“So, from the moment we got together, it has been about putting the right team in place with the right people – the ones that were going to make it successful.
“In late 2015 - 18 months after we were founded - we won the Los Angeles Metro contract, the largest guidance contract in the world - 87 locations, 21,000 spaces across two phases.
“We always knew that we had a great product, that we had put a great team in place, but to win that huge contract only 18 months into the business is unheard of anywhere. That was when we knew that we had something pretty special.”
Parking Sense is now in nine countries.
Jake said they focused on a couple of the large countries first – the US and the UK, and now they’ve launched in Europe, which is going really well. But, he said, the US was always the goal because it’s the largest market in the world.
Jake went to Cambridge High School and after two years studying law in Wellington he came back to finish his degree at Waikato University. He is now based in the US as the global CEO of Parking Sense.
Three days after they started, Jake got on a plane and came to the US. For the first 18 months he was back and forth a lot and then in the past two and a half years he’s been based out of the US.
“I go back to New Zealand once a quarter for a board meeting. I spend a bit of time in Europe and UK visiting the teams there as well.”
He said he enjoyed going home when he got the chance, but for now “it’s exciting to be dominating the largest market in the world”.
And New Zealand and the Waikato is benefitting from Parking Sense’s success.
“We manufacture and produce all the hardware – the lights and signs – in New Zealand. All our research, development and technology is developed here. We’ve got Millennium Plastics and Company-X working with us – both Waikato businesses – and our global head office is based in Cambridge.”
Jake believes they’ve only just scratched the surface of what they could accomplish in America.
“We want to continue to dominate the US market. Becoming the ‘Uber’ for parking is the plan. We absolutely believe we have the right technology and the right team to become the global leader in this space and continue our amazing US story into our other markets.”
The young CEO said it had been an incredible experience so far and he was humbled to be able to run such an amazing company.
Jake was brought into Paul’s first business as company lawyer when he was still at university doing his law degree.
“I was very fortunate to come in and was mentored through from a young age. I was 21, so learned a lot there. And it’s pretty cool at 29, to now be in this position.
“I came into Parking Sense and was given the reins of the US business. I obviously showed what we could achieve and I became our US CEO inside 18 months. Over the last 12 months we have done a transition where I’ve been taking a more global role with overview and support from Paul.”
Jake said it’d been an excellent way to do things and he’d been very fortunate to have that mentorship.
“Think big and take every opportunity that comes in front of you, that’s all you can do – don’t say no to an opportunity.”