Last year, Phoenix-based startup Qwick was on its deathbed, according to co-founder and CEO Jamie Baxter.
“It was a dark time for us. We were running out of cash, and we just laid off all of their friends,” he said, referencing his employees while describing pandemic downsizing. “We asked everybody to take a huge pay cut, the people that stayed. We didn't have enough cash to pay even the 19 people that stayed.”
Qwick operates a tech platform that connects bartenders, servers and wait staff to jobs on demand, but this work dried up during the pandemic. The Qwick team had 54 employees at the start of the pandemic.
Baxter said the remaining staff opted into an equity compensation program and the team braced for a possible collapse.
The pandemic forced Qwick to reevaluate its operations and try new things in order to survive. It partnered with the military, grocery stores and hospitals to get Qwick professionals working again until the food service jobs came back later in the year. The company also got a $534,000 Paycheck Protection Program loan, according to records from the Small Business Administration.
Baxter said that despite all the problems, the company still eked out 5% revenue growth from 2019 to 2020. That would be a welcome gain for most companies, but it was much smaller than the growth Qwick had seen in years past.
He said the company is on the mend after making changes during the pandemic. The team improved its processes and technology, so it's now poised to seize on the vaccinated public’s willingness to go out.
“It's like the Roaring '20s 2.0, everybody wants to go out and do stuff again,” he said.
Baxter said the company, which is back up to a headcount of about 40, is seeing revenue three times greater than prepandemic levels and it is looking to reach 100 employees by the end of the year, the majority of whom will be in Phoenix. Qwick currently operates in eight markets, but it's aiming to open in six new ones this year.
High-profile investor
Baxter said weathering the pandemic was possible thanks to the hard work of his team and those outside the company that supported them.
One of those supporters is Washington, D.C.-based Revolution Ventures and the Rise of the Rest tour, run by AOL co-founder Steve Case. The ROTR movement aims to disburse entrepreneurial resources and capital across the country.
Case and the ROTR team visited Phoenix in 2016 on one of their roadshows and the fund has also invested in Valley startups Chassi, NeoLight and Qwick.
Last week ROTR hosted a virtual career fair for startups nationwide looking to staff up, including Qwick. In conjunction with the career fair, ROTR hosted virtual talks on the Clubhouse app to spotlight startup communities in 16 regions around the country, including Phoenix.
On June 23, Valley leaders talked about the startup ecosystem, with a special focus on the generosity and openness that has come to define the community.
“This is a defining moment, in terms of dispersing talent and capital and jobs and opportunity and hope, frankly, all across the country,” Case said last week. “Even if you've been working hard to build a stronger startup community in Phoenix over the past several years, that the next several years may be the real breakout kind of tipping point years just given the dynamics that are happening.”
'Recovering Californian'
During the discussion, many of the Arizona speakers noted that they were born elsewhere and came here later; Several used the phrase “recovering Californian” to describe their exit from Arizona's neighbor to the West.
“When a majority of your adult population is from somewhere else, it's truly like a melting pot. And the ease of being new or the ease of meeting new people is very customary here,” Greater Phoenix Economic Council President and CEO Chris Camacho said.
Ji Mi Choi, vice president at Arizona State University’s Knowledge Enterprise, said that since Phoenix’s tech scene is less established than cities like San Francisco or New York, there is an opportunity to build a legacy here.
“We're not resting on our laurels, we're not sitting back and just kind of enjoying the benefit of being a long established legacy to defend," she said. "We're constantly building that legacy on a daily basis."
For Baxter, who moved from San Diego to start Qwick in 2017, he said the startup community in the Valley has been essential.
“When I got here, I got introduced into the ecosystem and the willingness for people to help each other is something that I just wasn't used to in California,” Baxter said last Wednesday. “It’s really just to help each other and help Phoenix succeed. It actually ends up being good for all of us.”
