Scot Wingo – Spiffy CEO
By Fleet Management Weekly Editorial Staff
Fleet Management Weekly recently had the opportunity to speak with Scot Wingo, CEO of Spiffy, the mobile auto service provider that offers a variety of hand car washing, advanced detailing, oil change, tire install and repair, brakes, and many other preventative maintenance services.
What is Spiffy, and how can it benefit fleets?
Spiffy is a modern automotive services company. We are applying the technology and convenience of e-commerce to car care. We come to you, so we’re mobile first. We’re digital, so we interact with our customers in a more digital way. Requests can be made through an app or a fleet portal. And we’re really focused on convenience and sustainability.
What our unique value proposition means for fleets is a new way of thinking. Instead of having your own maintenance staff or taking your vehicles to a brick-and-mortar location, the service comes to you. That’s more efficient because now an organization can keep its technicians, drivers, and other professionals, productive while we take care of the preventive maintenance.
It’s terribly inefficient for a vehicle to sit at brick-and-mortar location for days on end waiting for service, or to have employees sitting at a quick lube place waiting for service. Service should come to the vehicle when it is most convenient for the customer, who can focus on what matters — keeping vehicles rolling 100% of the time.
What are some of the services that Spiffy provides to fleets?
With the name Spiffy, you can guess that we got our origins in car cleaning. So, we’re really good at all things about cleaning a car, odor elimination, and those types of things. But what we realized in our early days talking to fleets is they wanted a holistic solution. We call that fleet management as a service. So, part of that is the life cycle of a fleet. So if you’re in-fleeting, doing preventative maintenance, de-fleeting or out-fleeting, we can work with any part of that life cycle.
We started with wash, and oil changes is a core competency of ours. Tires, we do a lot of tire business that went from zero to a very large part of our business very quickly. And then some customers want us to have an integrated fueling solution of some kind. We have a partnership with Shell TapUp where we can do things there and we can do a little bit ourselves.
Really, I encourage our fleet customers to ask us, and what they like is having one vendor that’s mobile and comes to them. Think about the old way of doing things, you would have to take a vehicle to a Quick Lube place and then to a place to have the brakes looked at, etc., and then run it through the carwash. We can do all that! And one vendor that’s digital means you don’t have a stack of invoices sitting there that you have to do data entry on. So, one vendor that has a holistic approach that’s digital and mobile is what we’re building here at Spiffy.
What sorts of fleets, sizes of fleets can gain the most from using Spiffy?
Spiffy works with a variety of fleets. We work with passenger vehicle fleets, rental car companies, delivery fleets, such as the Amazon DSP folks. We work with corporate fleets and municipal fleets.
We can work on anything from a scooter all the way up to the biggest 18-wheeler vehicles. And among those, we can handle a variety of services. We’re really well known for wash. We can do oil changes, preventative maintenance of all flavors. We have a tire capability.
As the vehicles get bigger, we even offer DOT inspections. Really, there’s no shortage to what we can do with fleets because we’ve built out the capabilities to do pretty much everything.
Can you share some stories about how you are working with your customers to bring added value to fleet customers?
In a relatively short time, we have already gained hundreds of fleet customers across the United States, and then in some territories. Let me share three case studies.
- With every organization operating a fleet, the key to success is the efficiency of the fleet. Given the lingering problem of a shortage of vehicles while travel is steadily increasing, whenever a vehicle is down for preventative maintenance, the fleet is losing revenue and the meter’s running very quickly.
- We come to wherever the vehicle is, change the oil, conduct detailing, including odor elimination, a particular issue for rental car fleets, and get that vehicle back on the road.
- Another example is one of my favorites. We work with a firm with a car sharing network and help them manage the vehicles throughout the vehicle lifecycle.
We help them stage the vehicles, fuel the vehicles, manage preventative maintenance, clean the vehicles, and more. Whenever you have lots of people in vehicles over a period of time, vehicle degradation — stains, trash, dirt – needs constant correction. We’re really good at that. - We also work with a large autonomous vehicle company, which wants to get as many miles as possible on the vehicles. Since they are plugged in and downloading terabytes of data overnight, we do an off-schedule type of a service – second or third shift.
How does Spiffy differentiate itself from the competition?
We have an inherent advantage over the traditional competitors that have been tied to legacy systems. We bring more innovative technology that truly changes the accepted processes and improves efficiency and results compared to the competition.
The vehicle maintenance world is what I would call analog or brick-and-mortar based. It’s kind of like how retail was 30 years ago before Amazon. You would have to go to six stores and spend a fair amount of your time doing pretty mundane tasks.
That’s how we’re innovating. We are applying e-commerce and a digital mindset to the car care industry. That starts with being mobile. So, we come to you.
Number two, we’re digital. Our customers have fleet portals. We can integrate with their systems and telematics so that we know where the vehicles are. We know when they need services. Many traditional competitors still cannot connect those dots.
Number three, we believe a company must be sustainable. So whenever possible, we use electric vans and have electric systems inside of those vans. We reclaim 100% of the water and chemicals. We recycle oil and recycle tires. It’s very important to us and our fleet partners to be sustainable.
Finally, I would point out that technology is contributing to a new level of convenience for fleet managers. If a customer wants us to come at 9:00 PM because they’re delivering packages all day, we will make that work. If they want us to come at 6:00 AM, we can make that work, too. Regardless of the size of your fleet, we will be the best, most convenient partner you can find: That’s the brand promise that we’re building at Spiffy.
