The Pomp Podcast - #760 Hiring Physical Work Through The Digital World w/ Scot Wingo

Episode Date: December 20, 2021

Scot Wingo is the Co-Founder & CEO of Spiffy, an on-demand car cleaning and car servicing app. In this conversation, we discuss inflation, entrepreneurship, crypto, Web3 and NFTs ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments, commerce and financial applications worldwide. Circle is also a principal developer of USD Coin (USDC), the fastest growing, fully reserved and regulated dollar stablecoin in the world. The free Circle Account and suite of platform API services bridge the gap between traditional payments and crypto for trading, DeFi, and NFT marketplaces. Create seamless, user-friendly, mainstream customer experiences with crypto-native infrastructure under the hood with Circle. Learn more at circle.com.

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Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Scott, if you're there, what's going on, man?

What's up, Pomp Bros? How are you? I'm doing good. How are y'all? We're doing fantastic. Help us understand, like, what do you guys do on a day-to-day basis for customers? Yeah, I started Spiffy in 2014. And as you mentioned, I had an e-commerce company before, so software for e-commerce. So I come from the e-commerce world. And the idea from Spiffy came from a couple of things.

Number one, I had owned two car washes, so physical car washes. So bought one in 03 and built one in 05. Great businesses. We do not make crystal meth. That's the number one question I get. Breaking bad ruined car wash ownership. But I would like to sit on pallets of cash, but haven't done that yet. And then I had my first Uber experience around 2012.

And in my head, as a e-commerce person and a hobby economist like you guys, I was like, all right, we've seen consumer goods go digital in the form of e-commerce, and that's $5 trillion of GDP. $10 trillion of GDP is services for consumers. And I thought, once people have this, you can use your phone as the remote control for your life, they're going to want everything that way, HVAC company. And then I couldn't shake that people would want their car taken care of that way. So we did an experiment in 2014, which became Spiffy, to essentially say, what if we came out with a premium brand for car care that comes to you? And the premium brand thing is important because in the e-commerce world, you have this convenience-oriented consumer and a value-oriented consumer. And we really wanted to appeal to that convenience-oriented consumer. So we want to be the Starbucks of car care.

And if you think about it, there is no company that kind of lands there. So we launched Spiffy in 2014. And what's different about our model is because we want to be that premium brand, our technicians are our employees. So this kind of ties into the inflation discussion. We have a lot of employees. So they're W2. And then they use our own equipment, which are vans. So flash forward to today, we're in 25 markets that we own and operate. So our corporate markets, we do some franchising in smaller markets. We've got 10 of those. And then we have about 400 technicians and 250 vans across the United States doing services. And the service we offer, we started with wash detail. We now offer oil change.

And a big focus for us over the next year is tires and brakes. So that's Spiffy in a nutshell. All right. Now, I want to just say something very quickly that I think is very important for people to understand. There are two types of entrepreneurs. There's entrepreneurs who say, I got a van. I'm going to try to go make a thousand bucks this weekend. I got a little power washer on it, right? I can go ahead and do that. Then there's people who face problems like you did at one point, which was you guys were actually going to office buildings and there's a lot of cars

that are all there. You can go ahead and you can service a lot of those cars. The problem at the office buildings, from what I remember, is that they're very worried about, well, if you're washing the cars in the parking lot, there's runoff, there's all this cleaning supplies, et cetera. So talk about the mat. Cause this to me is like the epitome of entrepreneurship is you face the problem and then you came up with this solution around this mat. Yeah. Entrepreneurship is a rollercoaster as you guys know. And so we launched our app in 2014 and the exciting thing was we almost do no marketing because people love the experience, which is great. You know, it's always better to have a great experience that, that word of mouth

generates demand for versus having to create demand. Tesla is like one of the few companies that does this. They do no marketing because the product's so good. So that was exciting in the early days. But then it was really weird because as a traditional car wash operator, 80% of your business is on weekends. So we launched our app and everyone wanted their car washed on Thursday. And we're like, what the heck? And then they wanted it washed at work. So we're like, this is why you do MVPs, minimum viable products, is to find this stuff out. And I actually view that is a positive that that what consumers tell us with the click of the app is an experience that they're not getting today in the physical world so i viewed it as a digital person i was like this

is huge we're on to something because we can create a 10 times better experience but then the roller coaster that was the top of the roller coaster and then the bottom of the roller coaster is we started going to some of these office parks and they said you know security people would like literally walk up and threaten our technicians to you know literally to call the police and say we do not allow detailing at our office park. And then being my partner, being a good sales guy was like, well, why? And they said, traditional detailers are sketchy people and sketchy vans. They don't have insurance. And the worst is they create an environmental spill in our parking lot. And we're going to someday the EPA is going to come and fine us two hundred thousand dollars

because you put some kind of chemical in the water. So so again, every you know, that's the bottom, everyone wants their car washed at office parks, office parks won't let us do that. So but then being entrepreneurial, we said, Well, you know, these are employees, their background checked, our vans used to be white, and now they're really bright blue. So we got as far away from that traditional detailer look as possible. And we don't have windows punched out and covered in cardboard or anything like that. And then we went and got just like a massive insurance policy. So we could just take that off the table. And then the hardest one to solve was environmental. So where we landed was we wash every car on a mat. We invented a mat that is like a little bathtub

for your car. Uh, and it's got about a six inch lip to it. So, you know, we lay out the mat, we put the car on there. It has the lip that we do the service with water. The water goes into that mat and it pulls up and then we suck it up out of there, back up onto the van into a gray water, um, container. And then at the end of the day, we reclaim all that water. Once we did that, You know, we eliminated all the objections and the property managers were like, okay, we'll let you test this. And then they were blown away by how popular it is with the tenants inside of the building because the convenience-oriented consumer loves to multitask, right? Right now, you guys probably have 16 things going on that we don't know about. And, you know, that's what the multi, you know, today's consumer loves is they're at work, they're on a Zoom meeting or in a meeting, and their car is getting cleaned while they do that.

that frees up their time on the weekend to go hang out with the kids go to a concert and not have to worry about taking care of their car all right now the idea of entrepreneurship of like hey we face their obstacle we solve it by coming up with this invention uh some people be like oh the mat is a great business like let's just go sell the mat to everyone but the mat's not really that valuable unless you've got people who are going to wash in this specific scenario so it's kind of an invention within a larger business On top of that, you've done what I'll call like organic growth and also acquisition. So talk a little bit about how you've thought about when do you push into a market and go ahead and just say, hey, look, we're going to start from scratch.

We're going to bring some vans. We're going to hire people and we're going to go kind of dominate this market from scratch versus, oh, actually, there's somebody here that maybe we should just buy them and incorporate them into the business. Yeah. So I like this framework at Spiffy. We expand across three dimensions. So we have geographies, services and then different lines of business. So we've already talked about consumer residential, consumer office park. We always wanted to do fleets, and then we introduced oil change, which was our second service, and that opened up fleets.

So those are our lines of business. So as we grow, we're always thinking about acquisitions and organic growth across those three dimensions and how we can do it. So an early example is we introduced oil change, and we just started knocking down fleets like crazy, large rental car companies. And we just consumed as much of that as we could until we got to Florida. And we ran into this company that that had basically beat us to Florida unbeknownst to us because we were late to the game. So, you know, what we did is we just kind of focused on on just hammering them, first of all, and trying to compete with them and started we started to get some headway. And then finally, the the owner called and said, hey, I kind of see a couple of paths we can like punch each other in the face or we can join forces. And we were able to come to an agreement and that gave us a geographic expansion for oil change.

And, you know, we basically own Florida for that. They were already in, they started in Orlando, but they, I think you guys are in Florida. So we always, we go from, you know, all the way from, you know, top to bottom of Florida by doing that acquisition. Another one that was more recent. So that was, that was 2019. Another recent one this year was, you know, as you build a brand, hopefully you become kind of a friendly possible acquirer. So we got an inbound from these guys, a couple of University of Tennessee grads in obviously Nashville and Memphis area. And they had started a company called Pit Crew, which looked a lot like what we do.

And it fit our culture. So W2 technicians, they were working on fleets and consumers. And they said, hey, we realize we're at this point where we're going to have to either go raise a bunch of capital or join forces with someone like you. And once we met the guys, we're like, oh, we've got to bring these guys into the fold. Super entrepreneurial. they were already doing a bunch of stuff we hadn't even thought of yet and you know so it checked the box of good cultural fit and it gets us in a geography what we want to be in we weren't in that tennessee corridor until we acquired them got it before we move on to talk about other stuff

how can people figure out if spiffy's in their market and if it is how do they actually interface with the product yeah so uh so on our website you can enter your zip code or you can download the app. Just search for Spiffy in any app store and you'll see us there. So most of our consumers, it's kind of interesting. You guys will like this. So if anyone is under 35 to 40, they use the app. If they're 40 to 50, they use the website. And then if they're over 50, they call or they like to text. So it's kind of funny to see the demographics there, how that works. We decided to be, because we're capitalists, that we wanted you to work with us. However, A lot of the, a lot of the on-demand economy companies, you have to just use the app, but

we're, we're pretty flexible. So you can go to get spiffy.com. Um, that'll have our phone number. If you want to call, you can chat us, um, or you can download the app. All right. Now let's talk e-commerce, uh, which is, you know, you had this background on e-commerce and that helped, uh, with the creation of spiffy. How do you think about the holiday season now? It seems like e-commerce is just becoming bigger and bigger and bigger, uh, piece of that. And now, you know, people aren't going to the physical stores. Um, and it just feels like this is like an inevitability or do you see, uh, you know, anything that maybe isn't being discussed in the public, uh, around e-commerce and like some of the storylines there.

Yeah, it's really fascinating. Um, so one of my other favorite things to do, uh, is to create new words. Um, so I coined one, uh, called ship again, um, two years ago, you guys probably, uh, it was on the today show and stuff. So I created that one. That was a fun one. So I like to smash words together in interesting ways. So that was where there was right after the pandemic, it was pretty obvious to us in e-commerce that before the pandemic FedEx UPS were running at like 95% capacity. Now you have a pandemic bringing all these people into digital e-commerce. There's no way the shipping infrastructure will survive. So created the word ship again. Then we, this year we've had chip again. So, you know, we can't get chips in vehicles. So there is a delivery thing.

And then the last one is supply pain, which is a take on a supply chain. So so those are some topical things going on. And you guys have covered them a lot. I've watched your topics there. What always blows people's minds, old school people about consumer behavior is that people want stuff faster and cheaper. So there's a whole new generation of companies. You guys have probably seen GoPuff and there's like three or four other companies. And they're just like, you know, GoPuff just announced a one and a half billion dollar convert, I think.

Consumers love this stuff. And you ask anyone, you know, will people order stuff that will be there in 15 minutes? They'll say, I don't need anything in 15 minutes. But I was talking to a senior guy at Amazon. He said, what you don't understand about consumer behavior is, you know, once you offer it, then people suddenly come up with a reason to need it. And that's pretty – and use it. And then, you know, so that's pretty interesting. And what the GoPuff – the big trend in e-commerce is this 15-minute delivery window.

And so you have some of these startups that have started this, the GoPuffs of the world. And what's interesting, it's largely the stuff you would find in a 7-Eleven. So this could be bad for the convenience store. So it's like a digital convenience store. So it's kind of like candy bars, ice cream, personal products, that kind of stuff. But you can get it in 15 minutes, deliver it to you very fast. And it's really interesting because now Amazon is starting to turn its guns towards this And, you know, going into next year, they're going to have these ability to deliver a bunch of things to you.

It'll be a limited set of SKUs. It's not going to be the entire 300 million Amazon catalog, but you could probably, you know, I think next year by holiday, there's going to be five to 10,000 SKUs we can get in 15 minutes and we won't think twice about it. So here's what's fascinating is I know the founders of GoPuff. I've had one or two of them on the podcast before. I'm a very, very big fan of that business. but what i think most people don't realize that makes that business so uh interesting is they actually have uh tons of little warehouses right so they're uh to get something to you in 15 minutes you can't have the warehouse be an hour away and you know hey we're gonna do it overnight right

it's 15 minutes so they put them in a kind of local economy or the local uh areas of density and then they just have people go and deliver very quickly what i think ends up becoming interesting is like amazon isn't necessarily known for those types of products right like i don't think many people go on amazon to order beer right and be like hey i want it in 15 minutes but i think what you're saying is that like well if all of a sudden amazon starts to offer that people will start ordering beer from amazon in 15 minutes right you get in this like very weird world can anyone stop amazon like are they just at this point unstoppable it's so so uh you know so i've spent a lot of time at big companies, kind of like you have, right? So I've been at Facebook and Snapchat and Google

and eBay and everything. The thing that's really, as an entrepreneur that blows my mind about Amazon is they will, they will take someone like, let's say, you know, this go puff thing, let's call their internal effort, go puff killer. They'll put someone in charge of that. And that person can do whatever they want. It's like crazy. Like you never find another company that would operate that way. They would say, well, we're going to have this division over here. And, you know, we're going to pull in some people. We're going to do a SWAT team from marketing. So, so Amazon has been designed to create these little startup teams that call them two pizza teams because two pizzas have to feed them. And they give them the power to go do whatever they want. And the rest

of the organization has to support it. Every other company, even companies I've built, you end up with this corporate antibodies that slow down that stuff, legal teams, you know, HR, IR, all those types of things, even like the marketing team sometimes becomes like a drag on what you're trying to do at a big company. To me, that's what makes Amazon unstoppable. Not, not only their size and scale, but the way they have created the company internally to go spin out these things as their own little startups. Everyone says that, but Amazon is the only company I've ever seen that really does it. And like, you know, those, those folks are free to go do whatever they want and the rest of the organization supports them. It's, it's, it's pretty admirable how they do

that. Yeah. It is a breathtaking to watch. I think how successful they've been. You've done a bunch of stuff over your career uh and literally everything from what most people look at is like the most digital of businesses all the way down to uh literally vans washing cars right and uh it's technology enabled but but still definitely not just software um how do you look at the web three stuff the uh kind of crypto bitcoin just all of this stuff that i think people are very excited about right now uh given the experience that you have like what what are your takes on it I love it. So, you know, I've been through, you know, I'm 53. So I've been through kind of web one, two and three. And there's always people that lap that kind of don't understand. Right. So I remember, you know, I come from the my first company was in the client server software world. Right. Where you had a server and a client. And I remember cloud was coming out and Channelvisor was a cloud based company. And all these people from that old world were like, it'll never work. You know, I'm going to put my data in the cloud. Oh, what happens when it rains? You know, so there's always these naysayers and they're they're usually way, way more of them than than believers in the next technology wave.

So I guess I've conditioned myself to not believe that stuff. So, you know, the Web3 stuff is really fascinating to me because it kind of ties into that Amazon discussion where when you have these decentralized things that can happen, you know, that self form. And it's fascinating to me how the Constitution DAO, that was like a big eye-opener to me. The first wave of it, I was kind of like, there's something here, but I don't see it, right? So there's all these marketplaces that tried to build a marketplace, but on the blockchain. And it didn't really make any sense because it was worse than eBay and Amazon. And you're kind of like, okay, I see what you're trying to do there, but I don't see the benefit of this thing being out on the blockchain. And then like we had a lot of those, I'll call them craft coins and that kind of stuff.

And it's kind of like this feels a little Ponzi-ish. I'm not really sure about that. But, you know, NFTs are one of the first ones, first use cases. And I owe you a thanks on that. You and Jason, also known as Parabolic Guy, I guess, or whatever they call him, Parabolic Dude. You guys had sponsored that painting from Fuocious. And I was like, I really like this. And I, uh, got a little carried away on an auction and ended up buying it and, uh, thought

I'd stretched myself thin there. And then I sold it for like five X, 30 days later. So I owe you pump. I need to send you a beautiful baby gift of some kind. Uh, and, uh, I was like, you know, this is really onto something. I collect comic book art. I don't know. Uh, I'll get grab some there.

So, um, you guys know comic books. Well, there's actual art behind comic books. Um, so this is a page from a Spider-Man comic book. And, you know, so I've been kind of in the art world, not like Van Gogh's and stuff like that, but comic book art. And, you know, what's cool about this world is you get the physical art. But what stinks is I don't know who owned this before me. And, you know, it's hard to know the – I happen to know this is the actual real one. But sometimes, you know, in 10 years, like I'll sell this and someone's going to – maybe this changes hands 20 times.

Maybe someone creates a copy. So I love this idea of NFTs, of being able to know where it's been and look it up on the blockchain. And then I also like, what really stinks is this artist, he should get the benefit of this in my mind when I sell it. If I auction this off and it goes for twice what I sold, I would love for this artist to get part of that. But in the physical world, we don't have that. But the blockchain and NFTs, I really love that it solves some of these problems with physical art. and maybe we can even marry those things together so so nfts was like the gateway for me where i clicked and i was like all right this is better than the existing thing i can kind of finally see

it and then i've been you know uh then i've gone way way down the the rabbit hole all right so you've got the nft stuff and i think that uh what's so fascinating is uh you were maybe i'll say uh cautiously uh optimistic in the beginning right like you would see things you're like okay like i see what you're trying to do but like i don't think that's quite it and then obviously So when you saw the NFTs, that was where it kind of clicked for you. What do you think about like Bitcoin or some of the other like larger assets? So Ethereum, Solana, maybe like the top 10 on like a coin market cap. Do you pay attention at all to like protocols, layer ones?

Do you think Bitcoin and kind of the inflation conversation? How do you think about all that? I do. I love it. So the thing that's magical to me about Bitcoin is how it aligns incentives. Like you guys, I see you guys talk about some of the government policies. And the people that must create government policies must have never had an employee done a sales comp plan. They don't understand incentives.

They're like, oh, we're going to put all these people here and they're going to be happy and live together. And then they're shocked when it doesn't work out that way. So what I love about the Bitcoin and then the subsequent coins is how they really think through the incentives and what's going to happen as the scarcity kicks in and that kind of thing. because it also ties into my hobby of economics. Right. So, so that's interesting. Um, I will say Bitcoin didn't a hundred percent click for me until I read Jason's book. Um, you know, um, you know, the Bitcoin you can't screw with. Yeah. Yeah. Money, you know, hard money. You can't screw it. You can't bleep with. Um, and that one, you know, that one, that one kind of really resonated with me. So in my mind, I kind of think of that as a currency slash store value that

Bitcoin specifically. And, you know, right now I recommend people, you know, with inflation running kind of rampant, that's a really good hedge. So I kind of think of it as an asset allocation and I've never been a gold investor. So to me, and I've heard you guys talk about this, it replaces gold is that kind of a thing. And then Ethereum is where most of the NFTs live. So that's really been more of where, and I love this idea as a comp sci guy, that the contract is kind of baked in there. Right. And that's pretty fascinating that, that you can have now you can effectively have this, this currency in the way of buying things where a little contract is baked in there and that can do different things. Um, and even, even programmatically change the digital asset

as you go. Um, so that's pretty fascinating. Um, and then, you know, uh, so those are the two I spent the most time on and some of the salon and that stuff. So, so, you know, the proof of work in those things. I don't a hundred percent understand the environmental argument because to me, like if I order a product from Amazon, you know, there's no way to know, but I bet you burn more CO2 than if you did a Bitcoin transaction. Like if I ordered, you know, these AirPods or something. So, so I think that's just kind of like a false narrative. I don't a hundred percent buy into that, that whole thing about, you know, Bitcoin burns so much CO2. I just am not a huge believer in that because we use all this, you know, when I log an opportunity in Salesforce,

how much CO2 did I burn? I just can't, you know, as an e-commerce guy, I just kind of don't think that transaction can possibly be as hard as, as heavy as like buying a widget off eBay or something. But I, you know, I haven't done a ton of research on that. You guys know more about that and I, but, but I do like these new models where, you know, they have different approaches and in an open marketplace let the best one win there should be there should be a you know a wide variety of these things with features and functionality and and we see who wins last question i have for you and then uh my brother's got a couple questions for you is uh how do you think about bitcoin price do you think of it in terms of like oh i think bitcoin's price can be

x by the end of the year by the next year over 5 10 years like just how do you think about that specific uh data point yeah i leave the predictions on that one up to you guys and then i take kind of an old school approach where I just kind of dollar cost average in. Right. So I know. So I'm not an ape in guy or any of that kind of stuff, but I'll just kind of occasionally, you know, I just nibble away at it over time. And, you know, the then I watch the price fluctuations. I know in my head, you know, maybe my average price that I've bought it in is like, you know, forty five K. And if it gets kind of lower, I'm going to I'm going to increase what I do. And as it gets higher, I'll buy a little less so that over time I've dollar cost averaged in is how

I've taken the approach of it because it is really, really volatile. And, you know, my advice to most people is not to have it be, you know, this huge part of your portfolio. But, you know, I think Jason's not listening to my advice. What questions do you guys got, Joe and John? Scott, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. So you run a business that's service-based, obviously. You have a lot of, a fleet of cars. You have people that work for you that are doing oil changes washing the cars itself uh so there's there's a lot of kind of asset heavy you know base to it how do you apply some of this stuff when it comes to like blockchain crypto nfts and are you able to do this like because i think most people would wonder in a business that like this that is

kind of uh uh what nick huber calls is like sweaty right how do you apply some of this new age technology stuff to this yeah so so to be clear we don't do that today right so there's no no none of that web three stuff has come into spiffy but i'm keeping a really close eye on it where i think it's interesting is um in the e-commerce world there's a company called fanatics i'm sure you guys are uh consumers there because you're all sports guys and they're starting to do really cool things where you know um so like when the atlanta braves won the world series if you spent um you know over 150 you got a free nft um so so i'm kind of thinking my customer base i can't there's some you know it's not 100 of them it's not zero so it's probably five to ten percent

would kind of resonate with nfts so i've got to do something that doesn't blow you know the little old lady in iowa that just needs her car cleans mind where she's going to be paying with with bitcoin i can't i can't do that but what if we could start layering it in as a loyalty program and saying you know hey you know our top 10 customers get this cool you know spiffy penguin an nft uh or you know and then uh like what the lolly guys do um you know where where if you know maybe we have a loyalty program and you could get some cash back a free car wash or some kind of a crypto or uh you know a digital asset of some kind so that's i'm thinking about you know how could we layer it in that way and kind of ease people into it especially for the audience that's

hyper engaged with it i want to have something for them but you have to be careful that that You just don't, you know, you know, I don't want to have my customer support explaining how to, you know, what a wallet is and how to, you know, how to do MetaMask. That's that's not going to be good for, you know, the thousands of people that we're dealing with every day. Scott, what idea what advice do you have for entrepreneurs? A lot of people are young that watch this show. Excuse me. And they have an idea, but they don't know where to start. They don't know how to kind of start a formation of a company or market their product or anything like that. What advice would you give someone?

Yeah. It's not bad to go work for somebody, go work for a startup for a year or two. And that's great because you get a salary and benefits and all that kind of stuff. But then if you can go for a company that's 10 people and up to all the way up to pre-IPO type companies, you're going to learn more in those two or three years than you would taking any kind of class and probably doing it yourself and maybe failing. The exception is that's what I did. I actually worked for a startup out of out of college for a couple of years, and that gave me the confidence. It was really kind of more a lot of entrepreneurs have this confidence that can be perceived as arrogance. But it's really they did a lot of stupid stuff. And I was basically like, geez, if these guys can be successful, I can. So so, you know, I would I would recommend that. Now, if you have that killer idea and you're, you know, especially if you have kind of the if you're coming out of like an engineering program and you can code against some of this Web3 stuff where I see the highest failure rate is people have kind of an idea, but they have none of the skills on how to do it. That's really hard to then get higher people to do those skills that you don't have. That's where you need to kind of go work for a startup and build up your skill set. skill set being recruiting, understanding the technology, you know, business fundamentals of creation, fundraising, selling. I'm a, I have an engineering background. And the thing that always

surprises me is how much I have to sell. I spend like 99% of my time selling, right. And selling is obviously selling customers, but convincing employees to come work here, you know, convincing them to stay during the great recession. You know, even, even like this is essentially selling, You know, so, you know, those are the skills that you have to pick up and going to work for someone is kind of the cheapest, lowest risk way of doing that would be my recommendation. Appreciate that. Scott, the last thing I want to talk to you about is inflation. Official number 6.8 percent. First question is, is that accurate based on what you're seeing, both e-commerce and also within the business?

And then two is, do you think it's accelerating, decelerating? accelerating? Like, what are you seeing just kind of on the ground when it comes to, you know, wages, kind of cost of goods, etc? Yeah, I'm really worried about it, because we're, I don't know how we, so we have to raise interest rates. And they've already announced, I think, three, three coming up. But, you know, our debt is 130%. So our debt coverage is going to go up as we raise interest rates. So I worried where we've kind of worked ourselves into a real, real tough spot. I can't solve that. I just worry about it and keep an eye on it. You know, what we're hearing from our, you know, we have like four over 400 hourly employees.

And what we're hearing is we've given them pay increases because we're a premium brand. We can kind of, you know, do better than our competitors that in the labor market. But, you know, we've moved people from like, let's say, 12 to 18. And they're kind of saying, you know, that's not enough. My my food bills have doubled and, you know, the stuff for my kid and my health care. And so we're definitely feeling that we consume a lot of oil as we do oil changes. that price has been wonky and we drive a lot of vans around and, and, you know, fuel prices have gone, gone up. Um, so I think we'll be fine. Uh, but yeah, I think it's definitely higher than,

than, than what the government, that's why I showed you that meme. Um, you know, I think CPI is probably needs a dusting off and, and another, you know, smart people looking at that one. Cause I don't think it's capturing, you know, like I read one, uh, one article where the way they capture rent payments is they do a survey of like 50 people or some insanely small number of people. Uh, but then there's data in the world today when they invented CPI, this data didn't exist, but there's probably like six data sources we can go to now and see what rents are doing. So those 50 people say it's up 8%, but when you look at the data, it's up like 12 or 14%. So, so I, I wouldn't, you know, I think that it's not capturing a big chunk of what's going on.

Yeah. And, uh, you mentioned going from $12 an hour to $18 an hour. Is that on average, you would say that you uh did let's blend across our our markets and all our technicians yeah i mean that's a 50 you know i'm not a mathematician here but like that's really really high uh when you see something like that are you all increasing prices as well uh to kind of combat some of the increased gasoline uh kind of labor etc like how do you think about okay we have you know a nice margin because we're a premium brand so we can eat into a little bit of it but at what point do you say like no we have to pass some of this to the consumer and raise prices as well yeah we've already done taken several price increases yeah yeah and yeah the yeah and then you know the way

we fight it um you know so there's there's a couple ways is uh you know uh i can't go to my shareholders and say hey i know you i know i told you our margins were this and now we're gonna you know lower them you know that so so i gotta keep my margins right so the way we protect it is we uh we increase prices but then we're always relentlessly automating things we're touching 3 000 vehicles a day right now and when you do that you start to find these little little kind of things that will save five minutes, but you multiply that times 3000 vehicles and money comes out of that. Right. So, so that's where I forget which of your brothers said it. We are, we do have like a physical world, but a lot of our innovation is on the software side too, and

hardware side. So we've invented, we talked about the mat. We've got like 10 other inventions we've come up with that, you know, like another example is our, you know, we were looking at some data and our technicians spent a lot of time vacuuming Petfer. So now we have a vacuum that has a little agitator in it and some other technology that that that addresses pet fur um you know millions of little things like that you got to kind of kind of relentlessly focus on those so that you get more automation and then that plus raising prices should enable us to keep our margins where they are and what i love about it is you know we there's an there's old saying in software that there's these things that can only be done linearly and and uh you know fred brooks uh he wrote this

book, The Mythical Man-Month. He uses this example, nine women can't make a baby in a month. Gestating babies isn't something you can share. And a lot of these things we've learned, we couldn't have done unless we were doing 3,000 cars a day. And when we get to 4,000, we'll learn another set of things. That's our competitive moat, is those automations that we've baked in there that gives us pricing power and the ability to hit our margins at scale that we're at. And there's an analyst, Brad Slingerland, you may know him, he ran the Janus 20 technology fund for a while. He came out with a note and he called it digital companies that have an analog component. And he used Amazon, Tesla, and Carvana. I kind of, that's a good

set of companies to be with. So I kind of put us in that bucket, but there's this really interesting things when you match that digital innovation with the analog world that we're seeing and that are innovating. And that's a lot of fun. And I'm really enjoying that as well. Yeah, it's fascinating when you start to think about how many of these businesses just are becoming more tech-enabled, more digitized, and you can't digitize everything. I saw this morning Boeing somewhere, I don't know where they said it, said they're going to build their next airplane in the metaverse. And as soon as you hear that, you're like, does that mean they're going to build a virtual plane? Does that mean they're going to use it for design schema? Or should you not get on a Boeing plane because they've lost their mind?

Right. Like you get into this weird world of like sometimes it's just chasing buzzwords and you want to kind of keep your name in the press and seem innovative. But also, as you mentioned, you know, companies like Tesla, Carvana, Spiffy, et cetera, are actually getting a huge benefit from doing a lot of this stuff. And if you can figure out where the true value is, that's where ultimately there's equity value to capture, it seems like. Yeah. The Boeing thing is like I wouldn't you know, I wouldn't have someone riveting on it in the metaverse. But, you know, what if they could, you know, in the physical world, it takes forever to get feedback. Right. And that's what's frustrating. So. So imagine you're at Boeing and you're trying to create a new first class or something or a better coach class. You go and you probably build a prototype that takes six months. You put people in it. You get clipboards, get their feedback. It's all over the place because there's like 30 of them. Then you have to sort through that. It takes like two years to get feedback. Then you change it. And then another two years. What if you could put the interior of the plane on the metaverse, have people walk around it and give you feedback? and put it into, you know, fortnight and you get like a bazillion people running through the thing telling you what you could do, you could iterate very quickly. So that's what happens in digital. That's really fun is you can, you can get feedback in real time and then you can change things in

real time and, and iterate so much faster than you can in the physical world. Yeah. It makes complete sense. Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about Spiffy? Yeah. So on Twitter, I'm Scott Wingo, Scott with one T S C O T. I saw your banner was correct. I appreciate that whoever did that uh so um so i'm on twitter i'm on linkedin and then spiffy is get spiffy.com g-e-t-s-p-i-f-f-y it's on your screen right now look for the penguin and we're all on all the app stores as well awesome man i could talk to you forever what john i just your comment about under 40 use the app 40 to 50 you use the website 50 plus you call it it is yeah sometimes i'll go by our customer i sit next to our customer care group and

And, you know, we don't do a lot of customer care call centers are like you have to have like, you know, a call with the customer has to be under 20 seconds or something. We I don't believe in that. I come from the Zappos school of just just talk to the customer until you're satisfied. And we have this guy, Addison, and for some reason he really resonates with the older crowd and people will be telling him about their cats and this. And they'll ask all these questions like, you know, now explain to me how you're going to vacuum the seats and clean them. And it's really funny to, you know, the different customers that call in and they just want to, you know, it's a new thing and they just want to understand it before they take the risk of, you know, putting their credit card in and ordering. And we understand that. And it's just kind of funny to hear them on the phone there.

That's amazing. All right. Get Spiffy. Go check them out. No brainer, in my opinion. But, hey, what do I know? I'm a biased investor. So I appreciate everything you're doing, Scott.

And we'll definitely have to keep bringing you on because I think you've got a very unique perspective, both on the inflation stuff, but also Bitcoin, crypto, Web3, NFTs, et cetera. So I appreciate the time. Yes, sounds good. Good seeing you. Congrats on the new addition and nice to meet the brothers for the first time. Awesome. See you later. Bye, guys.