Brody Stewart, Parkable’s Financial Controller and Loes St.Ather, People & Culture Lead, spoke to us about their goal to make parking easy and stress-free, and chooses Orchestra to streamline their equity management.
Parkable is a platform for people and companies to manage their parking. A good use case is where companies have a limited number of parks compared to staff and when the carparks aren’t being used they want to be able to share these around the company. For example they might have 500 staff and 200 parks, but by using Parkable they can cover parking requirements across everyone. Perfect to make the most of valuable car spaces in these times of flexible working- like hot-desking for parking!
Companies can also offer parking to the public and Parkable now also offers a way for companies to monetise their EV charging stations.
Parkable was founded in 2015 by Toby Littin, Warwick Beauchamp, and Brody Nelson- they saw that parking was broken, so started Parkable to create an alternative for local communities to make the best use of their parking spaces. Since then Parkable has become one of New Zealand’s fastest-growing tech startups, connecting the spare space held by businesses, individuals and organisations with those looking for easy parking. We have grown the team and expanded internationally into Australia and the UK, and are validating in other territories also, particularly as other countries come out of their Covid-19 lockdowns and return to their offices and the wider community.
Originally to manage all of our shareholder details we used a big spreadsheet with lots of tabs! This was very manual so caused us issues. We then used a US-based equity management platform. However, it was expensive and because it was built for massive companies and had a US-law focus, it was hard to manage and we could only use the bare minimum while having to play around with it a lot to make it work for us.
Through the Parkable CEO we were introduced to Orchestra and our reaction was “brilliant, let’s do it!”. We signed up within a week.
"In terms of migrating the share registry it was simple as – an absolute breeze"
It’s much better value and straightforward to use compared to the other systems.
The Orchestra ESOP module has taken something really complicated and made it very easy. Adding staff as shareholders has become a lot faster- easy as!
Having our ESOP on Orchestra makes it available to those who aren't necessarily familiar with shares, and by giving everyone access to their information it is more reassuring for staff. We get fewer requests from shareholders- for example, how many shares do I have, can I get a share certificate- as all their details are visible and can be accessed on their own terms.
It’s been helpful to give our legal and accounting partners log-ins to Orchestra, so they have been able to check share registry details and documents more efficiently. And for any audit work it will be useful for our accountants to be able to access the platform for information when they need it.
“Having an ESOP in place means being able to recognise our staff with an equity stake in the company. The Orchestra ESOP module has taken something really complicated and made it very easy.”
Our guide explains all about Employee Share Ownership Plans.
We are looking forward to continuing our growth, particularly overseas. We are really excited about the growth in Electric Vehicles and what this means for the future of workplace mobility and parking for us.
“In any capital raising process, having Orchestra to process transactions will make that easy and give new investors the visibility they need.”
In any capital raising process, having Orchestra to process transactions will make that easy and give new investors the visibility they need.
In the next 12-18 months we will keep liquidity going with secondary trading events.
It will give the option for shareholders- some who have been involved in the business since the beginning- to realise some liquidity. We recently did some secondary trading manually, but this was lots of admin work and emails, so having a central platform where everything is documented in Orchestra will be really handy.
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ESOPs: a comprehensive guide to Employee Share Ownership Plans updated for 2021
Sharesies uses Orchestra to increase employee engagement
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