Fresh off of a fundraise, Get Spiffy CEO Scot Wingo has advice – useful for both a zombie apocalypse and a pandemic: Be scrappy and survive.
Wingo, speaking after the Durham on-demand car care startup disclosed a $22 million fundraise led by Tribeca Venture Partners, said the view on the other side of that apocalypse can be pretty great – you just have to get through the hordes.
Wingo, an admitted sci-fi fanatic, saw the fallout from the pandemic coming – at least a little.
“I watch a lot of zombie apocalypse movies,” he said. “In February of last year when they stopped the flights from China, the virus, it always makes it out in these movies, so I was like, that’s not going to work.”
So, like a true zombie warrior, he started prepping.
“We got as much disinfectant product as we could,” he said. And then Spiffy hunkered down.
“It was a rough 60 days,” Wingo said. “We got really good at disinfecting vehicles and deodorizing vehicles.
But as the months went by, Spiffy – like the ragtag heroes in the movies – survived, and even started to thrive. By May, car rentals were picking up – a big business line for Spiffy.
“We made it through by just grinding through it every day,” Wingo said.
As the fleet business surged amid an uptick in rental car demand, the other side of the business was building. By the first quarter, hordes of consumers, too, were signing on. As the vaccination rates tick up, business just keeps getting better, Wingo said.
Wingo has been through downturns before. He led Morrisville-based e-commerce firm ChannelAdvisor (NYSE: ECOM) through the Great Recession, a time Wingo calls “really hard.” ChannelAdvisor instituted layoffs, and he remembers what that felt like as CEO.
“When we came out of it … e-commerce was no longer a hobby for our customers,” he said. “It was a must have.”
That change in customer behavior drove the business – straight to its initial public offering.
The “perfect storm” Spiffy is seeing in terms of demand from both fleets and consumer vehicles is pushing Wingo's company in a similar way. His advice to entrepreneurs in the hard times? Just try to survive.
“A lot of times, the world looks a lot better when you get to the other side,” he said.
Spiffy customers, he said, have become addicted to “zero friction experiences” thanks to the pandemic – services like Instacart and Postmates. And Spiffy is riding that trend, he said.
When it comes to the fleet business, a car shortage means maintenance is a high priority. And a labor shortage means companies want their drivers to be driving – not going to garages to get vehicles serviced. It’s trends driven by the pandemic that are pushing Spiffy in the right direction. Spiffy has grown 77 percent in the past six months, “and if we hadn’t survived and made it through, we wouldn’t be doing this," Wingo said.
Sometimes the best entrepreneurial advice is “going into turtle mode,” he said, pulling in your arms and waiting for the zombies to pass by.
Spiffy has 50 employees at its Durham headquarters. And it employs 400 W2 technicians with a goal of adding another 200 in the next six months.
In addition to Tribeca Venture Partners, Goodyear Ventures, Private Access Network, Gaingels and Flucas Ventures all participated in the latest raise, as did a slew of existing backers, including local names such as Bull City Venture Partners and Idea Fund Partners.