9/11, dot-com bubble, pandemic … Get Spiffy’s Scot Wingo talks how to stay alive in downturns

RALEIGH – Dealing with a crisis is not new for serial entrepreneur and investor Scot Wingo. Over a career dating back 30 years he and his companies – from ecommerce play ChannelAdvisor to on-demand car maintenance startup Get Spiffy – have faced the fallout fro 9/11, he “dotcom” boom and bust, the 2008-9 financial crisis and now COVID-19. But the pandemic and the ensuing economic crash has been … well, to say the least, a nightmare.

Get Spiffy where he is CEO and an investor, is one of the Triangle’s most recent success stories. Last year alone, the on-demand car care, technology and services company closed on $10 million in new venture capital, branched into the tire business, even secured the backing of Royal Dutch Shell.

Then almost overnight, in the wake of the coronavirus, revenue initially plummeted by 90 percent, its co-founder Scot Wingo says, forcing the company to furlough around 200 employees in April. (Revenue is back up to 60 percent of pre-coronavirus revenue, and 50 recalled furlough employees.)

Today, the startup unveiled a new “decontamination business” and a partnership with the San Francisco-based peer-to-peer car-sharing company, Turo. Turo’s network represents over 14 million people and their 450,000-plus vehicles across the US, Canada, and the UK.

WRAL TechWire’s Chantal Allam had the chance to catch up with Wingo on a Zoom chat this week. Here’s what he had to say about navigating this pandemic and more.

So tell us about this new partnership with Turo.

In the world of automotive technology, Turo is one of the big success stories. They’re unicorns; they have that kind of lofty billion-dollar valuation.

Get Spiffy now is in the decomtamination business.

What made the timing work well is the fact that we can provide this really high degree of disinfection, which helps everyone feel better. It’s all about giving their guests that peace of mind that they’re going to get in a vehicle that has been treated at the highest level possible for any COVID-19 viruses.

This wasn’t one of your main offerings before the pandemic, right?

So before the pandemic, we had an odor eliminator that had a disinfection in it, but people didn’t care about disinfection. So we really talked more about the odor elimination. But once the pandemic hit, very early on, in late February, one of our rental car partners had been contacted by the CDC that a COVID-positive person had been in one of their cars.

So they literally sealed it, put police tape around it and people couldn’t go within 50 feet of it because no one knew what you know what was going on.

So that they asked us what to do and we did a lot of research and that’s kind of where we started to get smarter. One of our chemical providers has a sister company that does hospital grade, disinfecting. So we took a bunch of those chemicals from that use and brought them over to cars.

So we were pretty early thanks to this one customer incident, and then we’ve rolled it out increasingly aggressively. We have to get pretty entrepreneurial in this downturn.

So how is your cash flow?

Initially, we were looking at kind of a 90 percent decrease. Our largest partners are office parks, car companies — so that was like, 90 percent our business. Since then, we’re down only about 60 percent. So we’ve been able to mitigate about 30 percent of that. But you know, we’re still impacted for sure.

So is this new kind of partnership pivot is that is that helping with the revenue? What do you expect it to bring in?

It’s hard to predict. There’s something like hundreds of thousands of vehicles on their system. Obviously, we won’t do all of those but if we can do 2000 or 3000 cars over the next couple months, that would be a good thing. We’re optimistic that it help us recover some of the lost demand that we’ve seen.

What about your workforce?

We had to decrease. We had about 300 technicians, we went down to 100. And we’re back up to 150 right now. So I feel like we’ve made a good comeback and are bouncing back pretty well.

What about government funding?

It’s a touchy subject. We don’t really want to talk about it.

What’s your outlook like?

We’ve hunkered down. The best way to recover is innovate and make new offerings and partnerships like this to replace the revenue that’s been lost. Eventually, rental car companies will come back and people will get back in the office, but we can’t control that. So what we can control is partnerships, like this Turo thing, working hard to go pitch to those guys and get them on board and then make their customers happy.

How long do you think you have the cash flow to kind of keep it going?

We managed real tightly through this. I think we’ll be fine through throughout. We’ve got investors that we can always call on if we need to. Obviously the worst time to ask investors for something is in the middle of the pandemic. So we’d rather that not be the timing. So kind of hunkering down and getting through and then hopefully, the clouds part and the sun comes out in the third or fourth quarter.

So how are you feeling about all this?

Tired, but optimistic. I guess as entrepreneurs, we have to be kind of almost foolishly optimistic. I’ve been at this for like 30 years. I’ve been through 9/11, dot.com bubble burst in 2008, and the recession. This has been the fastest and deepest kind of thing I’ve had to deal with before, so it’s been pretty scary. But it definitely feels like the bottom was kind of in April, and in May, we’re coming out of it and then hopefully, we can kind of crawl back to normalcy by the end of the year.

What does that new normal look like for your business?

Can we replace pretty quickly that revenue that declined? I don’t think air travel is going to come back and that that’s going to hit the rental agency.

I think commercial real estate will come back maybe 60-70 percent. And then could we replace those things that maybe are going to be kind of permanently gone with some of these new things like, like vehicle and facility disinfection?

What’s your view on the ground in the Triangle in terms of how startups are weathering the storm?

I’m on the board of ChannelAdvisor and we’re in the ecommerce space. So anyone that was kind of in that ecommerce space is actually having a surge time, oddly enough, which is kind of weird during a pandemic. Anyone involved in travel, restaurants [got hit hard]. And then generally, if you’re, you know, the most prevalent thing we have is B2B software to service companies, they’re seeing some softness, not to the degree we saw at Spiffy, because no one wants to be bought making a big purchase decision right now. So everyone is seeing their pipelines get kind of sparse and they know that it’s going to be a little bit of a slowdown.

But I would say we’re probably impacted one of the worst of anyone I’ve talked to you. Yeah, I can’t think of anyone impacted worse than us.

What new lessons have you learned this time around in a crisis?

I’ve actually been pleasantly surprised how fast we’ve been able to recover a bunch of the revenue. I think we were planning for kind of four or five months, kind of bopping around the bottom and then coming out. We’ve come out of it a little bit faster than I would have thought; and it’s because we got really lucky in listening to our customers and rolling out these services. If we hadn’t listened to customers, and been kind of crazy about that, then I don’t think we would have made it through.

So you see yourself already in recovering? No more layoffs planned?

There’s a big discussion: Are we going to have a V-shaped recovery, a U-shaped or a W, meaning we go up and we go back down. I can’t say never, it’s out of our control. But hopefully if it is a W-shaped recovery, we’ve built up this disinfection business that kind of acts as a shock absorber for that.

Do you see this disinfection business now becoming your new focus?

As things are opening up, we’re getting a lot of interesting calls, and it’s kind of is going in the phases.

We had an early set of churches that really wanted to on a regular treatment schedule. Now we’re starting to see retail folks coming in and gyms. On top of that, we’ve had a couple of what I would call acute situations, where central services had stayed open, people are working and they had a COVID positive situation where they had to shut down, and then they call us and we can come in and take care of that for them very quickly and get them back with confidence that there’s no lingering virus around in the work environment.

What do you think the potential is?

Again, I’m kind of an entrepreneurial optimist. I think the opportunity is really large here. We’re playing it by ear. This could be a whole other division of what we do down the road. We’ll see. Right now it’s the same folks and same team and everything, but I could see it becoming its own kind of focus area in a deeper way, if it maintains.

We’re not going to get all of it; some good cleaning companies are going to add this kind of stuff. But we’ve gone to this extra step that they’re not going to go to by — this hospital grade level of understanding.