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The Valet Parking Wars

Jack Boles Services has dominated Dallas' valet-parking business for decades. Now Boles is being challenged by scrappier upstarts. An inside look at the free-for-all.
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photography by Elizabeth Lavin
According to its website, PCA-Dallas offers valet services and manages more than 170 parking facilities and office-building garages in North Texas. With at least 90 employees and gross annual revenue exceeding $15 million, the site goes on, PCA-Dallas is led by its president, Fred Baker, and vice president, Erik Lee Ward. According to Curington of the DPD, which enforces Dallas valet laws, the company operates valet locations for the ZaZa hotel, as well as for commercial real estate company Gaedeke Holdings; nightclubs the Lizard Lounge and the Candleroom; and for restaurants Rensfield Corner, Sfuzzies, Hibiscus, and Campisi’s.

PCA-Dallas isn’t the only rival Boles has to worry about these days, however.

One of Boles’ most aggressive competitors is Gold Crown Valet Parking Inc., a Richardson-based company with 250 employees, 50 of them full-time. Under its owner and president, R.W. Raabe, and its gregarious, hard-working lead parker Diego Suassuna, Gold Crown has swooped in to capture a number of the city’s most sought-after social, charity, and business accounts. They include charity events for the Salvation Army, TACA, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Nasher Sculpture Center; special events for the Dallas Country Club; the opening party for the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge; and some Crystal Charity pre-ball parties.
Gold Crown also valet-parks for the Dallas Arboretum, Hickory Street Annex near Fair Park, the Plaza Condominiums, the Prestonwood Country Club, and eM thevenue, a special-events spot in the Dallas Design District.

“If a high-end charity event in Dallas has an event, it’s going to be them or us. And 30 years of knowing somebody is tough to compete with,” Raabe says, referring to Jack Boles. “On the other hand, they are not flexible on price, or on how things are done.

“I’m after Crystal Charity and Cattle Baron’s. I’d like to have both of them,” Raabe admits. “But, not everybody knows us yet.”

Sometimes that seems hard to believe. After Raabe worked his way through college parking cars for Jack Boles—“I loved it, and the tips were crazy,” he says—he founded Gold Crown Valet in 1994. But it didn’t take him long to realize that Boles had a lock on the “socialites’ ” business. So he hooked up with a prominent catering outfit, and later caught his first big break parking cars at private parties for Darwin Deason, the über-wealthy founder of Affiliated Computer Systems.

The Deason connection opened doors for Gold Crown, which quickly developed two unique calling cards. After its valets took the patrons’ keys and whisked their cars away to park, the valets would wash the windshields and later place a peppermint candy or two in the front seats. Although those practices would eventually be abandoned—too many customers started complaining about streaks left on their windows!—Raabe says Gold Crown continues to have a leg up on its competition.

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In addition to a sophisticated, $150,000 software system that it recently installed for scheduling purposes, he says, “We’re the only company left in Dallas whose parkers actually wear white shirts and neckties from October 1 to April 1. They’re solid black ties that give a formal appearance. The shirts also have pockets, where they can put their pens. Other companies wear polo shirts, so the parkers have to put their pens in their back pockets, which winds up leaving ink stains in the car seats.

“I also don’t allow any facial hair, except for a trimmed mustache,” Raabe continues. “And, I came up with idea of having each parker wear a white hand towel on their belt.”

Isn’t that sort of gimmicky? he’s asked. “It’s a look of servitude,” Raabe replies. “It says you’re there to help someone.”  

In part because of these touches, Gold Crown’s business has grown steadily over the years. After making $77,000 in its first full year and $177,000 the next, the company’s annual revenue reached $3 million at one point. Last year Gold Crown—whose parkers start at $8.50 an hour and can make $50,000 annually—saw $2.5 million in revenue. Besides the valet contract for Cattle Barons and Crystal Charity, Raabe adds, he’d like to “pick up two more country clubs”—Bent Tree and Brook Hollow.

The latter’s been with Jack Boles for decades.


Battling For Restaurants
Unlike PCA-Dallas, Gold Crown and Boles don’t typically compete in Dallas’s restaurant- and club-valet space. Those valet stands, which are so conspicuous, especially in the Uptown and downtown areas, are usually operated not by the establishments they serve but by independent valet companies. One of the most successful and respected of these is Lone Star Valet Services. Another is R.P. Valet Parking Inc., owned by R.P. Payervand.

Payervand says the Dallas company, which he founded in 1987, now has more than 100 employees. His restaurant clients include Abacus, Nick & Sam’s Steakhouse, Palomino, and The Capital Grille, Payervand says.

Besides PCA-Dallas, another aggressive player that companies like R.P. and Lone Star may soon notice is Irving-based FreedomPark Valet Services. Concentrating until recently on valet parking at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, 11-year-old FreedomPark has been moving lately into the restaurant and special-event markets.

Among its clients so far are Ruth’s Chris Steak House, off the Dallas Parkway, and two downtown Dallas event spaces, including The Venue at 400 North Ervay. FreedomPark has also parked for the Dallas Regional Chamber, the Colonial Country Club, the Junior League of Plano, and a couple of galleries in the Dallas Design District.

Going forward, “We want to focus on breaking into the local market,” says FreedomPark spokesman Ben Kundmueller, whose father, Ken, founded and still owns the company, and whose brother, John, serves as president. “We’re talking to several golf courses, shopping centers, and restaurants. We’re using our technology as a way to get in the door.”

Kundmueller is referring in part to a reservations and dispatch-software system that’s helped FreedomPark grab an estimated 40 to 45 percent of the airport’s valet-parking business. The brainchild of Ken Kundmueller, who previously owned Wingtip Couriers, the pioneering system allows travelers to make reservations online, and to receive emailed confirmations as well as receipts. FreedomPark meets departing D/FW passengers at the curb in front of their gates, then has their vehicles waiting for them when they return to the airport.

The company also tracks and displays the performance of its employees in real time on big screens at its Irving headquarters. In addition, FreedomPark is marketing a proprietary tool to other valet companies, as well as to its own potential valet clients, that it calls ValetNow. Upon arrival at an establishment, the system puts a key fob instead of a paper ticket in the valet customer’s hands. When he or she is about to leave, a button on the fob is clicked, signaling the valet podium so that the car will be pulled up and ready instantly, without a time-wasting delay.

With influential key clients like Laura Miller, the former Dallas mayor, and her husband, attorney Steve Wolens, FreedomPark now boasts 309 employees, including 110 full-timers, and 10 percent annual revenue growth. “We’re a customer-service company that just happens to do valet parking,” John Kundmueller says.

Asked about the competition that FreedomPark may face as it expands its horizons beyond D/FW, John, a Marine Corps veteran like Jack Boles, adds: “It’s easy for a guy to go get two of his buddies and put a valet stand up and valet a venue cheap. There are a lot of fly-by-night operations out there. That makes it tough for companies like us and Jack Boles that want to do it right, do it ethically, pay the taxes correctly. We’ve run into that, sure.”


“Social Boo-Boo”
For decades, Jack Boles has shunned “high technology” like real-time software and the ValetNow system in favor of a more personalized, traditional approach. Eager to show how busy the company was several days last December, for instance, David Hamilton opened what looked to be an old-fashioned accountant’s ledger, with the names of each client written in pen.  

At events and venues where Boles operates, valet patrons typically receive a paper ticket when they arrive. But the “A-listers,” and some others, don’t get these tickets. Instead, they are recognized by Boles’ lead parkers—Ferraro and Hatcher, say, or Kathy Weideman—who keep a keen eye peeled for these favored ones as the event draws to a close. Then, their vehicles are quickly retrieved.

This often leads to nice tips and to good feelings by these customers—many of whom also hire valet parkers for events or private parties themselves—because they have been treated as special customers. As high-end regulars; as members of the chosen few.

Technology would upend this system, Hamilton insists. “You can’t give a parking ticket to Sharon McCutchin,” he says, naming a prominent Dallas socialite. “It is a social boo-boo.”

But, in a fast-changing, more competitive valet-parking environment—one where companies like PCA-Dallas and FreedomPark and Gold Crown are touting newer and smarter ways of doing things—one wonders how long Jack Boles can maintain its stance, or its dominance. Says the 50ish businessman who asked to remain anonymous: “This [younger] generation looks at budgeting, as well as service.”

Already, for example, there’s talk that the Crystal Charity Ball is poring over a bid from Gold Crown, as well as one from Jack Boles, to handle valet parking at its annual December gala, the No. 1 philanthropical fundraiser in Dallas County. It’s the first time the charity has seriously considered a valet company other than Boles.


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