A Parking Business Gets Stuck in Park One entrepreneur's plan to publish parking guides detours to success when she leverages existing assets.
By Jason Meyers
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The Original Plan: Margot Tohn launched her Park It! Guides publishing venture in 2006 with a guide to New York City parking garages. Her intention was to model her business on the Zagat restaurant guides, selling the parking guides via retail outlets and printing custom guides featuring the logos of real estate brokers, financial advisors and other potential clients.
The Problem: The overhead involved and the costs of printing and distributing the guides were prohibitively high. Plus potential sponsors didn't see the value of offering parking guides as giveaways in a challenging economy.
Plan B: "I had really good relationships with all the garage operators," Tohn says. "So I decided to leverage those relationships to match garages up with people looking for monthly parking."
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