RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Grime remains at the very roots of Get Spiffy as the Triangle startup goes national.

Rick Smith, WRAL TechWire’s editor and a cofounder and author of The Skinny blog.

In an exclusive Q&A with The Skinny, veteran entrepreneur and investor Scot Wingo talks about the latest – and largest-to-date – funding round for Get Spiffy which will drive a national expansion program, adding a host of new large cities to its fleet maintenance offerings, and new services including fleet management which he says is awfully similar to software as a service.

But he’s not leaving behind Spiffy’s manual get-rid-of-the-grime roots of the on-demand vehicle maintenance startup even as Wingo & Company add more to the menu of offerings.

In fact, he plans for Spiffy to keep focusing on dirt as other competitors dry up. The spic-and-span part of the business is doing very well, thank you very much, he says.

They’re still changing a lot of oil, too.

So no pivot, he says. There’s still lots of money to be made in the get-dirty side of the business.

  • You continue to roll out new software, services – are you going to shift away from the actual scrub and clean at some point or do you see that market demand continuing and one in which you can continue to grow?

Good question – a lot of times when you announce things like new services or areas of expansion like fleet, people assume you are abandoning the original things, or ‘pivoting’.  That’s not the case, we’re still doing a ton of wash/detail and that business is growing rapidly as well, even in markets you would think would be mature like the Triangle.  All of this is natural for a really big opportunity, we can go wide (more services and software) or deep (more cities) and part of the fun challenge is figuring out the right mix because there is no roadmap, we have to explore our way through that.

Get Spiffy raises more than $10M, plans to go national, adds fleet management service

  • Why did you seek more funding?

Our goal is to build a national brand and disrupt the existing car care user experience. We’re trying to do that as efficiently as possible, but it is going to take some capital to get there.  The good news is based on the success of our existing cities, we’re able to attract new investors that can help us achieve the goal.

  • Was the round oversubscribed and if so by how much

Yes, the dust is still settling, but we initially were looking at $8-10 and exceeded that range substantially.

  • How do you plan to invest the proceeds

We are at a point where we know the formula that works for opening and scaling a city, now we are ready to add cities as quickly as possible. The 6 new cities we announced today are already open for business.  Going forward we want to use the funding to dramatically increase our footprint.

  • That’s an impressive list of new cities – why select these?

What we’ve learned is there is huge demand for our capabilities with fleet partners  (rental car companies, auto auctions, ridesharing companies, etc.) and that is how we chose these cities – we start with an ‘anchor tenant’ – a large fleet partner that is helping us launch in the city by giving us a large chunk of their fleet to help maintain, and then we expand out from there.

So if FleetX says, “Hey if you were to come to CityX, I can give you ~50 services a day.” That helps us determine the sequencing of cities.  This of course has to be within the set of ~50 cities we know are long-term target cities.

  • Fleet management as a service – is that a software suite or do you get directly involved in management of fleets with your personnel?

It’s both, kind of a yin-yang thing.  On one side, fleets are frustrated they have to have a vendor for everything – some of these fleets are managing 10-15 vendors in one city!  A lot can go wrong there and often does.  So on the service side, we’re helping them with wash/detail, oil change, inspections, etc.

Because we have digital DNA, the other side is we give them a comprehensive fleet app and/or can integrate seamlessly with their existing systems.  This way they can have a single vendor and total transparency into every service being performed on every vehicle with digital artifacts like before and after pictures, detailed notes, and an authorization trail.

So FMaaS borrows from SaaS and suites in software to say – hey we can handle this entire lifecycle for you so you can get back to doing what you do best – managing YOUR customers and making them happy and getting your vehicles back out in-service in like-new condition.

Finally, fleets are really waking up to the importance of being environmentally friendly and while that part of our DNA resonated first with consumers at home and work, we’re excited that fleets are really focusing on it too.

  • Why head in this direction?

I have a pretty simple startup playbook and page one is ‘Get customers, make them happy and listen to what else they want.”  We’re finding these fleet customers have a lot of dissatisfaction with how things are operating today and looking for a multi-service vendor, that is tech savvy and available in more than 1-2 locations.

This is a huge opportunity for us and allows us to get into a city with a small ‘toe in the door’ with fleet and then expand with office park and residential down the road.

  • Are you facing increased competition from other on-demand providers and if so how are you differentiating yourself? Are you winning?

Within the wash/detail segment, the number of players is decreasing as folks realize that it’s a pretty tough business that requires software, marketing and operational excellence.  As you expand into fuel, tires, oil change, mechanic services, etc. there are a lot of us out there trying to solve the problems from different angles.

We all think we have the best angle, so it will be interesting to see who wins.  It probably doesn’t matter because car-care is a massive $3 billion industry, so there’s room for many players.

  • How is revenue growing – it must be if you can raise that amount of funding. are you profitable or cash-flow positive at this point?

The majority of our cities are cash-flow positive and we’re excited that we continue to see strong growth as our scale increases.  We’re at [more than] 100 vans across the country and over 150 technicians.  It was hard work getting here, but we feel this gives us a huge advantage against future competitors- what VCs like to call a competitive moat.  From my e-commerce experience, everyone thought Amazon was crazy for building [plus] 100 fulfillment centers in the US, but now that they are moving to one day prime delivery, the laughter has stopped.