A Tech Company Realized it Was Being Charged $1.5M/yr for Empty Parking Spaces—at a Single Office

Until recently, commuting costs were an afterthought for most companies—if they considered them at all. But that’s changing fast, as enterprises realize how much uncontrolled spend stems from commuting.

This newfound attention to commuting has led to the rise of Commute Capital Management™ (CCM), an approach that reclassifies workforce commuting as a strategic capital domain, placing centralized oversight under the control of the Finance department. CCM treats commute-related spending as an asset class: one with tangible returns when optimized and real risks when ignored.

Starting local

Before attempting to standardize everything globally, it’s smart to think local, going site by site to find opportunities for overspending that can be solved right away. By prioritizing relatively simple, single-location opportunities, you can take back significant expenditure from the start, and establish best practices for future global policies.

Costs hiding in plain sight

Opportunities for savings sometimes appear where you’d least expect them.

A global technology company Commutifi works with would have been justified in assuming the biggest opportunities existed at its HQs. However, a baseline analysis of each of its worksites proved that this wasn’t the case. Surprisingly, it soon became clear that a minor downtown office was a major source of waste—and the biggest opportunity for a quick win.

This office, though small, leased a collection of parking spots for employees to use. Many of them, it turned out, sat empty day after day. Despite the relatively low number of spaces in question, this misalignment was costing an enormous sum—more than a million dollars for entirely unused space.

Commutifi consultants immediately dove into the site’s parking lease to understand what could be done. In parsing the site’s details of the lease, they identified an opportunity to offload these unused parking spaces and stop spending funds on something the company didn’t need.

Without any change to employee amenities, the company saves $1.5 million USD every year, just by ceasing payment for empty spots at a single small office building that would normally been entirely overlooked.

Bring CCM to your organization

Curious about the ways Commute Capital Management can slash your hidden commute spending? Read the definitive guide, or get in touch with one of our experts.