Parking - March 2010 - 24

To drive this home, please allow me to quickly justify the Money Train. I’ll try to be as brief as possible. If your parking garage is illuminated via 175 watt Metal Halide lighting, 150 watt High Pressure Sodium lighting or T12 Fluorescent lighting, you are sitting on a gold mine of money to do whatever you want on your property. Any of these old, high energy, high maintenance, short life technologies can be replaced with state of the art, proven, low energy, long life, low maintenance induction lighting, and the financial justification is simple. I am the owner, and I am approving any project with a payback of six years or less. In that, I just told you that I have an additional $150,000 to spend on my subjective needs. Painting upgrades will cost $87,000 and new ticketspitters will cost $60,000 for a total of $147,000. As an owner, I can now use my lighting changeout (my financial validation) and get improved lighting performance and look, and also get the new painting and deck identification with cool neon colors, as well as some new ticketing technology, all paid for by lighting, at no cost to me. Can you say board approval? Creative property managers across the country are throwing in lighting retrofits for free as a means to extending their contacts with their existing customer base. In today’s market, anything you can do to keep a contract re-bid off the street is something you need to consider. As a property manager, your owner will appreciate that you are looking out for their best interest. After all, isn’t that why they chose you in the first place? Property owners: Contact a reputable lighting company to learn how much money is available to move Be creative, be aware. In dealing with property owners, ask questions. Get to know what they want. What is their hot button, their pet project? If you are listening correctly, you will hear their subjective desires, the ones that are harder to justify. You will hear what you need to do for them to get the job. If you are a reader of my regular PARKING monthly column, Marketing Minute, you might recall a story of a trip I took to Boston some years ago. While working for another company at the time, a client at our Boston feedback session complained that our pricing was too high and not affordable. I challenged him as to the kind of car he drove. He was taken back. He really didn’t want to admit that while a Yugo or Kia could get him to work, his subjective desires had him driving a BMW, and in his mind, he could rationalize the value. Why not take advantage of the strong subjective desires of property owners to move forward on projects that stand alone and are hard to justify, but, by sprinkling in a dash of financial justification through a lighting replacement, can give them some legs? Your take away today varies on what role you play in the business equation: forward on your pet projects. One of your desires may be simply a lighting upgrade. If you learned one thing today, lighting change outs make you big money. What are you waiting for? Property managers: Contact a reputable lighting company to learn how to use lighting on your managed properties to extend your contracts and get pet projects completed. Other parking industry suppliers: If you sell painting services, power washing, gates, ticketspitters, tickets, elevators, HVAC, or whatever, lighting could be the answer to your dilemma. Combine the piggy back of lighting changeouts with your product and offer package deals to your owner relationships. Call a reputable lighting company today to find out how much money you have available to spend. Be creative, be aware. Hop aboard the Money Train Express to destination: Success!  Jeff Pinyot is the founder and vice president of Business Development for ECO Parking Lights. He is a graduate engineer from the University of Pittsburgh. ECO Parking Lights is a member of the NPA and the U.S. Green Building Council. He can be reached at jspinyot@ECOparkinglights.com. National Parking Association PArkiNG March 2010

Parking - March 2010

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