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.
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A key focus for Hutto and the Truck Parking Club team in 2025 will be making it easier for fleets to provide the Truck Parking Club solution as a benefit to their drivers.
Currently, many fleets struggle with the administrative burden of reimbursing drivers for parking expenses. Hutto and the team aim to remove this obstacle, allowing fleets to seamlessly integrate the Truck Parking Club platform and ensure their drivers have access to parking options.
“A criticism we get is that company drivers aren’t often reimbursed for parking for a multitude of reasons including the administration work that would be needed to track that spending,” Loustalot said. “We want to remove that difficulty and give large enterprise fleets the option to onboard their drivers and manage their parking funds in our app as they see fit so that drivers aren’t having to get reimbursed for spending their own money. … We now have a product in place where we can facilitate this for large fleets, and Brent is the perfect person to facilitate those conversations.”
Looking ahead to 2025, the team emphasized Truck Parking Club’s potential to continue scaling and solving the critical problem of inadequate truck parking for the industry.
“I know that fleets love their drivers and want to do what’s best for them, because what are they without them?” Hutto said. “Truck parking is such a worthy problem to solve, and this team has put their heart into doing that, including having a whole lot of fun, and it’s an amazing thing to see. I’ve also seen the power of technology and have been around technology innovation with Truckstop for over a decade now, and I think it’s the right time for Truck Parking Club and the marketplace they have built to radically change the industry.”
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