We chose the name Citrin nearly 20 years ago as a tribute to Herb Citrin, one of the pioneers of the modern valet parking industry. Herb began parking cars before World War II and formalized his valet business after returning from military service in 1946, helping bring uniforms, service standards and professional management to a job that had largely been informal.
Our company began in that same world of parking and hospitality. What I did not appreciate at the time was how relevant Herb’s story would become as Citrin moved deeper into automotive. Hotels and restaurants learned that valet was too important to the guest experience to manage casually; it required trained people, dedicated leadership, operating standards and accountability. I believe dealership service drives are confronting a very similar management question today.
Valet Looks Like a Simple Business
At a glance, valet sounds easy: the customer gives you the keys, someone parks the car and someone brings it back. The moment you try to operate that process at scale, you discover what Herb Citrin and hospitality operators discovered decades ago.
You’re actually managing recruiting, scheduling, call-offs, training, traffic flow, customer service, vehicle damage, claims, key control, uniform standards, peak-volume staffing and frontline supervisors.
Parking the vehicle is the easy part. Managing the operation is the business.
Why Would a Luxury Hotel Outsource the First and Last Customer Interaction?
This is the question I’ve always found interesting: hotels and high-end restaurants are obsessive about guest experience, and the valet may create both the guest’s first impression and their last. So why would they outsource something that important? Because outsourcing does not necessarily mean caring less about the function.
In many cases, it means recognizing that the function requires its own expertise, operating infrastructure and leadership.
A hotel general manager could recruit valets, write training programs, manage schedules, handle call-offs and build claims processes, or the hotel could establish the standard and hold a specialist accountable for delivering it. That is the model hospitality operators have relied on for generations.
Specialization Can Increase Control
I think there’s an important misconception about outsourcing customer-facing operations.
People often assume that keeping a function internal automatically creates more control, but I’ve seen internally managed operations with very little control because nobody has the time or infrastructure to manage them well. There may be no documented training, no clear KPIs, no dedicated supervisor and no real call-off solution. The work is technically in-house, but accountability is still diffuse.
A specialized operating model can actually increase control if roles, expectations and outcomes become clearer.
Dealerships Are Facing a Similar Question
Walk through a large service department today and you may find greeters, porters, valets, wash attendants, shuttle drivers, loaner support, pickup and delivery drivers and lot attendants. Collectively, those jobs require significant recruiting, training, scheduling and supervision, yet they are often placed underneath a service manager who is also responsible for advisors, technicians, customers and a multimillion-dollar P&L. That structure feels very familiar to me from the hospitality world.
Hotels eventually concluded that they did not necessarily need to build an internal organization around valet operations, and dealerships are now asking many of the same questions about their service-drive operations.
Why This Feels Like a Return to Citrin’s Roots
When I started this company, choosing the Citrin name was our way of paying homage to Herb and the industry he helped build.
At the time, our connection to his story was obvious. We were operating valet and parking services ourselves.
What I didn’t anticipate was how relevant that history would become nearly 20 years later as our business moved deeper into automotive.
Herb helped professionalize a hospitality function that was easy to underestimate from the outside. Parking a car was simple. Building an organization capable of recruiting, training, scheduling, supervising and consistently delivering a hospitality experience was much harder.
I see the same dynamic in dealership service drives today.
A porter position looks simple on a job description. A greeter position looks simple. Moving vehicles looks simple.
But managing dozens of frontline hospitality professionals across a high-volume service department requires recruiting, training, leadership, standards, scheduling, performance management and constant operational attention.
The questions we’re helping dealerships answer today are not all that different from the ones hospitality operators faced generations ago: how these team members should be trained, who should manage them, what good execution looks like, how to create consistency across every shift, how to protect the customer experience and how to keep the dealership’s core leaders focused on the work where they create the most value.
We chose the Citrin name nearly 20 years ago to honor Herb’s legacy, and I don’t think I fully understood then how closely our own path would eventually parallel it.