Meet The Disruptors: Mark Lawrence Of SpotHero On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
What you say no to matters.
It’s very common for people to focus on saying “yes” to everything and everyone, especially at startups. I’ve found that what you say “no” to is just as powerful. By saying “no” to expansion beyond Chicago in our first 3 years, we were able to create a smooth playbook for scaling to additional cities in the future.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Mark Lawrence.
Mark Lawrence is Co-Founder and CEO of SpotHero, the digital parking leader and only independent off-street parking marketplace in North America. Millions of drivers use SpotHero’s mobile apps and website to find, book and access off-street parking in over 8,000 locations across 300 cities in the U.S. and Canada.
As CEO, Mark drives the overall vision and strategic direction for SpotHero, recognized by TIME magazine as one of 50 Genius Companies inventing the future. Before founding SpotHero, Mark was a Financial Analyst at Bank of America, and graduated with a B.S. in Finance from Bradley University.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I didn’t necessarily follow a particular career path per say, but more so set out to solve a personal problem. Funny enough, the idea for SpotHero started because I was getting a lot of parking tickets. At the time, I believe I had racked up about $5,000 dollars in parking tickets. I loved to drive, but parking was beyond frustrating, and I knew there had to be a better way.
The more research I did, the more I realized that the problem wasn’t a lack of parking but rather no efficient way to use parking that was already widely available. SpotHero started with one parking space by Wrigley Field in 2011. This year we became the official parking partner of the Chicago Cubs — a true full circle moment for the SpotHero team.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
Almost everyone has to worry about parking. When creating SpotHero, we figured, why not make something that we’re forced to do even easier? With SpotHero, you can find your parking spot and know how much you’re going to pay, all before you leave your house. Our app is disruptive in the best way; it gives back the one thing customers value the most — time.
Think of the many moments that are often interrupted when you’re stuck, searching for parking — showing up late to an interview, missing the beginning of a show or worse, your flight. The list goes on and on.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
The first year I started SpotHero, I trekked through Chicago’s snowy streets, going door to door, asking if people wanted to list their parking spots with us. Mistake number one was thinking people would want to open their doors in that horrible weather!
The true mistake here was thinking that we needed to bring parking to the market. In reality, there was plenty of existing parking to work with — it just wasn’t easy for drivers to access. With my initial approach, it took a year for us to get 50 parking spots in Chicago on SpotHero. In year two, I had lunch with a parking company and left the restaurant with 1,000 new spots to add to SpotHero.
There are two takeaways here: You don’t always have to build from scratch, and there are ways to scale your business without involving snow boots.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
Sam Yagan is a member of the SpotHero board, and he’s been my top mentor ever since we started SpotHero in 2011. When the business first started, we were growing fast and facing challenges none of us had experienced before. One of those challenges being that we started SpotHero with only $6,000.
Sam was on the board at the time and suggested raising money. Back then, I didn’t understand venture capital, let alone that there were people out there willing to help fund us.
Since then, Sam has continued to be a resource for the company and me. He also happens to be THE top user of the SpotHero app and is always providing feedback and helping us create more efficient, user-friendly experiences for the customer.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
I’ve always found disruption in an industry to be a positive thing, especially if it adds significant value to the user experience. Often a disruption occurs, and you can’t imagine what life was like before it because of how much value it brings to the table.
With that being said, if it simply extracts value — meaning it doesn’t better the customer experience or add to it in any way — then what’s the point? Since the beginning, SpotHero has made it a point to only introduce features that add value. Otherwise, it’s not worth it. For instance, look at our new partnership with Lyft — we’ve integrated ridesharing and parking, two different parts of the transit industry, as we continue to seek ways to transform the parking and mobility space by adapting to shifting user preferences and thus, adding value.
Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey?
1. Ignore the Echo Chamber Du Jour.
People often conflate current topics or trends to be indicative of the past or future. It’s important to be able to cut through the noise and determine what matters. Business problems can feel like the weather. When there’s a hurricane, you may forget there will be sunny days. But don’t lose sight of the complete forecast. There will be snow, sunshine and everything in-between; all temporary and always changing.
2. Do what’s right and the rest will follow.
I created SpotHero to make life easier for drivers. Doing right by our drivers has always been my top priority, even when that’s created challenges. For example, we refunded all reservations in March of 2020, including millions of dollars in reservations for future events that were “postponed” during the initial COVID shutdown. Not all businesses made this choice, but we knew that this was the SpotHero way of doing things, to put our drivers first. Decisions like this have kept people coming back to SpotHero. Drivers know we’re dependable and looking out for them.
3. Solve problems instead of finding problems.
This empowering advice allows us to take control of the issues that bog us down. For me, starting SpotHero wasn’t about becoming a founder or entrepreneur; it stemmed from racking up thousands of dollars in parking tickets and wanting to make parking easier. The desire to solve this problem still drives our decision-making today. When you encounter a problem, there’s an opportunity for innovation — challenge yourself to work through potential solutions.
4. What you say no to matters.
It’s very common for people to focus on saying “yes” to everything and everyone, especially at startups. I’ve found that what you say “no” to is just as powerful. By saying “no” to expansion beyond Chicago in our first 3 years, we were able to create a smooth playbook for scaling to additional cities in the future.
5. How you spend your time matters.
This may seem obvious, but I’ve found that we often default to autopilot when it comes to scheduled meetings or ways of working. It’s so important to be thoughtful with how you spend your days. I block out hours each week for focused flow work and honor that the same way I would a meeting.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
Even though SpotHero is number one in the mobile parking app space, digital parking is still a fairly low percent of the overall market — 30 to 50% of parking is still paid for in cash.
Think of how many places you park that still require you to physically walk up to a machine and manually pay for your parking spot. Moving forward, our main focus is to continue to bring more and more parking online and build better experiences for our drivers and parking operator partners.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
Without a doubt I would say the book, “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowtiz. This book resonated with me, because simply put, building a company is really hard. Sometimes, the public perception is that it’s easy to raise a bunch of money and start a company overnight. This book offers a great perspective on resilience, an honest account of the hardships involved when building a company and overall, great lessons and takeaways. Personally, I still go back to this advice, “No matter how difficult things get, it’s going to be ok.”
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
It’s difficult to choose just one, but I would say my favorite quote is, “Life is too important to be taken seriously.” So often, life is taken very seriously, including things that shouldn’t be. Little things in life always seem to feel like a big deal when you’re in the moment, so I find it helpful to take a step back, evaluate the situation and decide how easily (or not) we can find a solution.
A few others I’ve always really liked are:
O “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” Henry Ford
O “The word impossible is not in my dictionary.” Napoleon
How can our readers follow you online?
You can learn more about SpotHero by visiting our website at spothero.com or check out our social channels — find us @spothero on Instagram, @SpotHero on Twitter, or @SpotHero on Facebook.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Meet The Disruptors: Mark Lawrence Of SpotHero On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
