Truck parking remains the top concern for drivers, according to industry surveys, highlighting how lack of parking affects driver safety, efficiency and compliance with hours-of-service rules.
The widespread issue has caught the attention of innovative founders, including Truck Parking Club CEO Evan Shelley, a real estate professional turned truck parking advocate. Shelley has developed a website and mobile apps that simplifies parking access for truck drivers at over 1,400 locations across the U.S. by connecting them with property owners with space suitable for truck parking, such as trucking companies, repair shops, towing companies, truck parking operators, warehouses and truck stops.
On Tuesday, Truck Parking Club announced the addition of industry veteran Brent Hutto as chief relationship officer, the position he formerly held at Truckstop. With decades of experience, including time at Randall Reilly, parent company of Overdrive, Hutto is widely recognized for his work in developing solutions to critical industry challenges, including the truck parking crisis.
“With your work, you want to feel like what you do matters to people and that what you are doing is fundamentally helping them. So when I met Evan almost two years ago and he was telling me about his idea, I said as a friend, how can I help you solve this problem? It is such an important problem to solve for this industry and more importantly for the truck driver, for them to be safe and to create more efficiency for their operations,” Hutto told FreightWaves.
From Shelley’s perspective, bringing Hutto on board is a strategic move as Truck Parking Club transitions to the next phase of growth. Initially, the company focused on building a bottom-up approach, gaining traction with individual drivers and fleet managers.
Now, with a proven product, it is ready to scale by establishing enterprise-level relationships with large fleets.
“Last year, I started to think about how we establish ourselves at that level, and the top person that came to mind was Brent,” Shelley told FreightWaves.
Reed Loustalot, Truck Parking Club’s chief marketing officer, said Hutto’s industry experience and personal network make him an ideal person to leverage the company’s current traction to facilitate partnerships with large fleets.
“Truck Parking Club grew organically and doing that we coincidentally have drivers in 60 of the top 100 fleets booking parking with us and we have never talked to the fleets directly about having their drivers use our app. It’s their drivers, their dispatchers and their fleet managers finding us. … Truck Parking Club is clearly bringing value to them and most importantly, their employees like our product and now Brent can use those hundreds of bookings as a proof of need to build upon these relationships,” Loustalot explained.