Margot Tohn: life in a garage

Margot Tohn is the creator of Park It!, a series of guides and an online authoritative resource for parking garage information in NYC.  In creating Park It!, Margot worked for 18 months, driving every single street in Manhattan, creating maps that are easy to read, and devoting endless hours to organizing and confirming data.

Margot told us the story about how the company got its start:

Everyone in my family has their own business.  I have grown up loving entrepreneurship, and all of my corporate jobs have been planning roles, starting new things, launching products, etc.  I used to merge banks, I’ve managed a campaign during Sydney Olympic games, and I have lived all over the world (New York, San Francisco,  Australia) – but I never would have thought my life would be about having meetings in garages!  Who would have thought that I would’ve been in and out of 1,100 parking garages to-date.

One day in 2006, I was driving into NYC with my family, and we found it impossible to find parking.  At that moment, I thought, “They have a book about New York City bathrooms, there has to be some resource about parking!”  There wasn’t.  So I thought it would be a cool project to create something like that – I ended up creating 3 books and got great media coverage (Entrepreneur, NYTimes, etc.).  I became a self-publisher and sold books through Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s (who put me up on their shelf within 9 weeks!).  My business model followed the Zagat’s model, and my main targets were real estate brokers, financial services advisors, and media people.  It was fun and it was successful.  But after a couple years, the thought of doing another book became unappealing; I realized that I don’t really like repetitive things.  What I really did like to do was make deals and work on something new and challenging.  I also really wanted job flexibility and, ideally, a passive recurring revenue stream (my plan is to take every 5th year of life off completely to travel).  

So in the fall of 2009, I launched an online monthly parking program and signed up 12 parking garage companies (600 garages) – whenever a customer signs up with a specific garage on my site, I earn a referral fee based on how much their monthly rental is.  I have become cash-flow positive in 6 months, my overhead is tiny and I’m self-funded.  I really don’t need a lot to run Park It!, but I want to expand aggressively – my goal is to have Park It! in 5 cities by the end of the year.