Hartford Business Journal

14 HARTFORD BUSINESS JOURNAL | 2026 BUSINESS PROFILES ADDRESS: ONE FINANCIAL PLAZA, 14TH FLOOR, HARTFORD, CT 06103 PHONE: 860-522-7641 WEBSITE: WWW.LAZPARKING.COM TOP EXECUTIVE: ALAN LAZOWSKI PRODUCT OR SERVICE: PARKING, TRANSPORTATION, AND MOBILITY INFRASTRUCTURE NO. OF EMPLOYEES: 21,000 YEAR FOUNDED: 1981 T he story of LAZ begins in the summer of 1981 when a University of Connecticut student named Alan Lazowski was looking for a way to earn money before his senior year. He and two childhood friends — Jeffrey Karp and Michael Harth — started parking cars. What they built from that modest beginning is now the largest privately owned parking company in North America. Parking, it turns out, was just the beginning. Headquartered in Hartford, LAZ Parking today operates more than 2.1 million parking spaces across more than 5,300 locations in 44 states, eight Canadian provinces and 639 cities, moving 2 million vehicles every single day. Its clients span virtually every sector: hospitals and healthcare systems, hotels and hospitality groups, airports, universities, municipalities, commercial office buildings, retail centers, and major event venues. While the company operates on a national scale, its roots are firmly in Connecticut. LAZ has been a fixture of the Hartford business community for more than four decades, and the company's culture has remained focused on MORE THAN PARKING. BUILT ON PEOPLE. creating opportunities for employees and value for clients. Managers who started as teenage valets have grown into executives overseeing hundreds of employees. Turnover for salaried staff runs well below industry averages, a point of pride in a sector not known for retention. LAZ's people-first philosophy has proven to be good for business, as well. e company has grown steadily through acquisitions and organic expansion while maintaining the feel of a family operation, a balance its founders credit for the company's staying power in a competitive industry. Today, LAZ manages $3 billion in client revenues — an operation that demands the financial discipline and in- stitutional trust that only comes from 45 years of showing up, every day, at every location. LAZ has done what good operators do: invested in the technology that improves the customer experience. at means a proprietary tech stack built specifically for this industry — not adapted from something else. JustGo, LAZ's AI-powered license plate recognition technology, gives customers fast, automatic entry, exit and payment with nothing but their license plate — no app, no stopping and no paper tickets. Alongside it, e-commerce tools, business in- telligence dashboards and remote monitoring systems have turned what most people think of as a collection of lots and garages into exactly what it is: technology-enabled infrastructure, operating at real-world scale across 639 cities. e most significant strategic bet, however, is on electric vehicles. LAZ has already deployed 10,000+ EV charge points across its national portfolio — through major partnerships with bp pulse and Epic Charging — and is now ac- celerating that buildout with a goal of electri- fying 50,000 parking spaces over the next five years. Ultra-fast Level 3 chargers, capable of delivering a full charge in 30 to 45 minutes, will be deployed at high-traffic locations including hotels, universities and urban parking facilities. Hartford is among the first 20 cities targeted for the rollout. e investment reflects a calculated bet on where transportation is heading. It is also a recognition that the parking spaces of today are, in many cases, the charging infrastruc- ture of tomorrow. And as autonomous vehicle fleets begin operating at scale, LAZ's 5,300+ locations across 639 cities are already the kind of distributed, real-world infrastructure those fleets will need to stage, charge and cycle — wherever they operate. For a company born from three friends parking cars in Connecticut, it is a long way to travel. LAZ Parking, it turns out, has always been in the business of getting people where they need to go.

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