Denise Schuster: A Visionary Leader Solving Urban Mobility Issues

As the urban mobility landscape changes, the cities, across the globe are now gearing up to face the parking issues. With open and usable areas shrinking and the number of vehicles playing on roads increasing at an alarming rate, it is estimated that nearly 30% of all traffic on the city roads is due to vehicles in search of parking spaces.

At Park Your Truck GmbH, CEO Denise Schuster and her team search for already sealed areas every day, equip them with charging stations and alternative fuelling options, and operate these areas with their reservation system as waiting/charging and parking areas for all types of traffic. In this way, they reduce the shortage of truck parking spaces, improve the working conditions of truck drivers, and create bookable charging options.

The Parking Solution

First and foremost, Park Your Truck is a software company that has developed its own booking software for reserving truck parking spaces. In addition, they find spaces where customers need space. Most of their spaces are searched for truck parking, but they also solve other parking problems, e.g. they search and find spaces for holiday parking and any kind of filling stations, hydrogen filling stations, bio-LNG filling stations, or e-fuel filling stations.

Park Your Truck has over 20,000 parking spaces in its portfolio and is on the road with its own subsidiaries in Germany, England, Spain, Italy, and France. They have entered the Dutch market this year. For the past 2 years, they have been involved in the installation of charging stations for e-trucks and other vehicles. They are currently electrifying 20 large truck parks with fast charging points and night charging points.

“Our USP is the ability to find areas where there are actually none. Large and small companies commission us to find spaces at very short notice and then operate them. This ability and our huge portfolio of potential spaces that were not suitable for one client but might be for another, enables us to fulfill these client requests very quickly. We also focus on a certain type of space, which requires a very high acquisition effort that our competitors shy away from. Therefore, we have an advantage here,” says Denise.

Finding her Idea

After her first degree in business administration, Denise set up an advertising agency with a fellow student. This agency specializes in aircraft and airport advertising. They supported almost all airlines in Europe in bringing advertising on board and marketing it. She was in Kuwait for one year and advised the first Kuwaiti low-cost airline on how they could also implement this concept. At the same time, Denise started her own consulting company and advised founders on how to set up their businesses.

During her MBA studies at TU Munich and UC Berkeley in 2012 with a focus on entrepreneurship, Denise developed the business idea of sharing private parking spaces. This idea was already so successful that she decided to turn it into a business in 2013. After one year in the market of private parking spaces, however, it became clear that the problem of the lack of parking spaces is more of a big city problem. Her investor then asked her if she would rather solve the problem of the lack of truck parking spaces. The market would be more exciting. And now, 10 years later her company Park Your Truck is the biggest truck parking space operator in Europe.

Playing on her Strengths to Beat the Challenges

Denise is a very visionary person and likes to think big. She wants to leave a real footprint with her work and wants to solve real problems, not just develop the next Tamagotchi. That’s why she thinks very deeply about the market and talks to hundreds of people before she implements a new idea. Then she would have collected so much feedback that she could turn the idea into a business model. That’s how she develops the business.

“In the operational business, I am very pragmatic and try to manage my workload with 80% effort and not too perfectionist. For my employees, I am more like the head of the family. That’s why we have a very familiar working atmosphere,”.

However, starting the business was not as easy as getting the idea itself for Denise. There have been more big challenges. As an entrepreneur and moreover, as a female founder in a man-driven branch it was not easy to succeed with a visionary business idea, and getting money from investors was even harder.

“I needed 3 rounds and always starting from stretch to find new investors, believing first in me and secondly in the business model. I always had the mindset in a modern industry like ours, with equal women and men, that everyone has the same chance to receive funding money, especially from state funds. But this was not the case,” recalls Denise.

She experienced extremely hard discussions where her company and the business were not as important as the question if she was able to guide it as a woman. In that period, Denise was a young mother, freshly divorced, and proud to get her baby and her job under control. But for investors, this was the real question. A man would not have been asked any of those questions if he was divorced and had a young child. The investors said no, so she needed to start from new.

A second challenge was a situation where a competitor wanted to buy her company. After 1 year of data sharing, they made an offer to the investors and told them they would purchase the company but without Denise. She should go, waive the shares offer and that was the only way of making that deal. The company went almost broke at that time and the investor was about to take that deal, but Denise had a plan B in her pocket and could convince him not to sell. That was the right decision, but at that point, she had some sleepless nights.

Even with all the challenges, Denise wouldn’t like to change a single thing about her journey. “I would not change anything. Also, the negative things that happened formed me and helped me to do things in a specific way. If you just get positive feedback, you learn nothing,” she asserts.

Utilizing Technology and Staying Upgraded

Being a software company, Park Your Truck maintains its reservation system for parking spots every day integrating the new technologies, new payment methods, and new apps that could benefit from their API connection. Moreover, they try to push the technology forward. For example, the battery status of the trucks is an important measured value. They could use that value to propose suitable charging times and chargers nearby. The connection of the batterie status with the navigation system or other Apps would be great. They try to push that.

For Denise, logistic congresses and events where she can discuss with other people from the same branch are elementary. Moreover, she is responsible for sales, which means talking to a lot of people all the time, asking many questions and so she gets the impression and feeling of what the customers need, what they are afraid of, what they plan. This helps her create more solutions and upgrade the existing ones.

Expectations in the Coming Years

Team Park Your Truck will electrify all of its parking spaces for E-trucks, install H2, Bio-LNG, and e-fuel stations on its sites and massively expand to other European countries.

Words of Experience

Before signing off, Denise shares the following piece of advice for young budding entrepreneurs, “Don’t fear being an entrepreneur. For sure you have to take risks but achieving your own goals, and realizing your own vision is worth trying. You could not achieve this as an employee. Another big piece of advice is for all the female founders. Yes, there are a lot of injustices especially when it comes to investor decisions. Women are still disadvantaged. You need to be prepared for that.”

Quote: “Being willing is not enough, we must do. This is from Leonardo Da Vinci and it reminds me every day to just do things to move forward.”

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