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

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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Scott Wingo is the co-founder and CEO of Spiffy. He's also the former co-founder of Channel Advisor as well. In this conversation, we talk about everything from inflation to entrepreneurship, innovation, crypto, Web 3, NFTs, and much, much more. I really enjoyed this conversation with Scott, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is BlockFi. BlockFi provides financial products for crypto investors. Those products include a high-yield interest account, a US dollar loan product against your crypto

• 0:44Anthony Pompliano?

  collateral, and a no-fee cryptocurrency trading product. BlockFi also just released a brand-new Bitcoin Rewards credit card. It's a normal credit card that when you swipe it, you get Bitcoin back, rather than cash back or airline miles. I'm an investor in the business, and I'm a very happy user. The BlockFi Bitcoin Rewards credit card is absolutely amazing. To start earning today, go visit blockfi.com/pomp. Again, blockfi.com/pomp. I've got the credit card, I love it, I think you will too. Blockfi.com/pomp. Next up is Choice. It's time to stop paying capital gains taxes on your Bitcoin, and Choice is here to help. Choice is rebuilding the way Bitcoiners approach retirement by making it possible to invest in Bitcoin and 19 other digital assets inside your IRA. Right now, every time you make

• 1:28Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Last but not least are my friends over at Circle. If you manage corporate or institutional funds, you're probably looking for ways to access opportunities in crypto. You see the growth and momentum and you want exposure. But a lot of institutions don't know how or aren't comfortable with the risks of Bitcoin or DeFi. Now there's a new investment that's built specifically to help institutions get into digital assets. It's called Circle Yield. It's a blockchain-based investment built with USDC, the leading dollar digital currency. Circle Yield is overcollateralized and fully secured with Bitcoin collateral to protect your funds. This also makes it a great fit for crypto institutions who want to diversify their treasuries and reduce risks while staying all on chain. You get your choice of terms from one to 12 months in a fixed rate that's higher than

• 3:01Anthony Pompliano?

  what you'll get at a bank or in many fixed income markets. Visit circle.com/pomp to book a meeting with one of their experts. Again, circle.com/pomp and book a meeting with one of their experts. Big fan of Circle and I think you will be as well. All right, let's get in this episode. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Scott, if you're there, what's going on, man?

• 3:43Speaker 02

  What's up, Pomp bros?

• 3:45Anthony Pompliano?

  How are you?

• 3:46Speaker 02

  I'm doing good. How are y'all?

• 3:47Anthony Pompliano?

  We're doing fantastic. Help us understand, like, what do you guys do on a day-to-day basis for customers?

• 3:52Speaker 02

  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, so, then I had My first Uber experience around 2012 and in my head as a ecommerce person and a hobby economist like you guys.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  I was like, all right, we've seen consumer goods go digital in the form of ecommerce and that's five trillion of GDP. 10 trillion of GDP is services for consumers. And I thought, once people have this, you know, 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 and 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 commerce world, you have this convenience oriented consumer and a value oriented consumer. And we really wanted to appeal to that convenience oriented consumer.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  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, so this, this kind of ties in the inflation discussion. We have, we have a lot of employees, so they're W2 and then they use our own equipment, which are vans. So you know, 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.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  And a big focus for us over the next year is tires and brakes. So that's, that's Spiffy in a nutshell.

• 6:06Anthony Pompliano?

  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. 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, etc. So talk about the mat, because 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.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, entrepreneurship is a roller coaster, 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 having to create demand. Tesla is like one of the few companies that does this, they do no marketing because the products are 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.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  And I actually view that as 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 were 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 to 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, get 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.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  And we're gonna, you know, someday the EPA is going to come and find us $200,000 because you put, you know, 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. 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.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  We invented a mat that is like a little bathtub for your car 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, 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 container. And then at the end of the day, we reclaim all that water. Once we did that, um, you know, we eliminated all the objections and the property manager is like, "Okay, we'll, 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.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  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, um, and not have to worry about taking care of their car.

• 9:51Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Now, the idea of entrepreneurship of like, hey, we faced an obstacle, we solve it by coming up with this invention. Uh, some people would 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. Uh, 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?

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, 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, 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, um, that, that had basically beat us to Florida, um, unbeknownst to us because we were late to the game.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  So, you know, what we did is we just kind of focused on, on just hammering them first of all, and, and, you know, 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, and we were able to come to an agreement. And that gave us a geographic expansion for oil change. And, you know, we basically owned Florida for that. They were already in, they started in Orlando, but they, I think you guys are in, 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

• 11:52Speaker 02

  one this year was, um, 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, uh, in, in obviously Nashville and Memphis area. And they had started a, a company called Pit Crew, which looked a lot like what we do. And it felt fit our culture. So W2 technicians, they were working on fleets and consumers. And they said, hey, we, we realized we're at this point where we're gonna 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

• 12:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:41Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 12:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, uh, so on our website, you can enter your zip code, um, or you can download the app, uh, just search for Spiffy in any app store and you'll see us there. So most of our consumers, um, it's kind of interesting. You guys will like this. So if anyone is under 35 to 40, they use the app. Um, if they're 40 to 50, they use the, the website. And then if they're over 50, they call, or, or they like to text. So it's kind of funny to see the demographics there, um, how that works. But we're, we, we decided to be, uh, because we're capitalists, that we wanted you to work with us. However, A lot of the on-demand economy companies, you have to just use the app, but we're pretty flexible. So you can go to getspiffy.com. That'll have our phone number if you want to call. You can chat us or you can download the app.

• 13:35Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Now let's talk e-commerce, which is, you know, you had this background on e-commerce and that helped 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 piece of that. And now, you know, people aren't going to the physical stores and it just feels like this is like an inevitability? Or do you see, you know, anything that maybe isn't being discussed in the public around e-commerce, like some of the storylines there?

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's really fascinating. So one of my other favorite things to do is to create new words. So I coined one called ship again, two years ago, you guys probably, 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 the supply chain.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  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, that's and use it.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  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, it's like a digital convenience store. So it's, it's, it's kind of like, you know, candy bars, ice cream, personal products, that kind of stuff. But you can get it 15 minutes, delivered to you very fast. And it's really interesting because now Amazon is starting to, to turn its guns towards this and, 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.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  But you could probably, you know, I think next year by holiday, there's going to be 5,000 to 10,000 SKUs we can get in 15 minutes, and we won't think twice about it.

• 16:26Anthony Pompliano?

  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 interesting is they actually have tons of little warehouses. Right? So they're, to get something to you in 15 minutes, you can't have the warehouse be an hour away and, you know, hey, we're going to do it overnight. Right? It's 15 minutes. So they put them in a kind of local economy or the local 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,

• 17:10Anthony Pompliano?

  people will start ordering beer from Amazon in 15 minutes, right? And you get in this like very weird world. Can anyone stop Amazon? Like, are they just at this point unstoppable?

• 17:19Speaker 02

  It's, so, 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 GoPuff thing. Let's call their internal effort GoPuff Killer. They'll put someone in charge of that and that person can do whatever they want. It's like crazy. Like you never Ever find another company that would operate that way? They would say, well, we're gonna have this division over here and you know, we're gonna pull in some people. We're gonna do a SWAT team from marketing. So, so Amazon has been designed to create these little startup teams. They call them two pizza teams, um, because two pizzas have to feed them.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  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, that slow down that stuff. Legal teams, um, you know, HR, IR, all, 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's 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.

• 18:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it, it is, uh, 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 as 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. 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? Given the experience that you have, like, what, what are your takes on it?

• 19:14Speaker 02

  I, I love it. So, you know, I've been through, um, you know, I'm, I'm 53. So I've been through kind of web one, two and three, and there's always people that laugh, that kind of don't understand, right? So I remember, you know, I come from the, my first company was in the, 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 gonna 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, so I guess I've conditioned myself to not believe that stuff. Um, so. You know, the Web 3 stuff is really fascinating to me because it kind of ties into

• 19:58Speaker 02

  that Amazon discussion where when you have these decentralized things that can happen, you know, that self-form, it's fascinating to me how that, you know, the Constitution Dow, 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 like, 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 I was 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

• 20:43Speaker 02

  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, that painting from Phoocius. And I was like, I really like this. And I got a little carried away on an auction and ended up buying it and thought I'd stretched myself thin there. And then I sold it for like 5X 30 days later. So I owe you a pump. I need to send you a beautiful baby gift of some kind. And I was like, you know, this is really on to something. I collect comic book art. I don't know. I'll get, grab some there. So you guys know comic books? Well, there's actual art behind comic books. 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, not like Van Gogh's

• 21:28Speaker 02

  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's, what, what stinks is I don't know who owned this before me. And I, 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, and someone's gonna, maybe this changes hands 20 times. Maybe someone creates a copy. So I love this idea of NFTs of, you know, being able to know where it's been and look it up on the blockchain. And then I also like, you know, what really stinks is this artist... You know, he should get the benefit of this in my mind when I sell it. You know, if I auction this off and it goes for twice what I sold, I would love for this artist to get part of that.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  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, then I've gone way, way down the rabbit hole.

• 22:37Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So you've got the NFT stuff and I think that what's so fascinating is you were, maybe I'll say cautiously 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 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 the, 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?

• 23:10Speaker 02

  I do, I love it. So the thing that's magical to me about Bitcoin is how it aligns incentives. You know, 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, you know, 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, you know, the Bitcoin and then the subsequent coins is how they really think through the incentives and, you know, and, you know, what's going to happen as the scarcity kicks in and, and that kind of thing. Because it also ties into my hobby of economics, right? So, so that's interesting.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  I will say Bitcoin didn't a hundred percent click for me until I read Jason's book, you know.

• 24:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Bitcoin you can't screw with?

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, money, you know, hard money you can't screw, you can't bleep with. 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.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Now you can effectively have this, this currency and the way of buying things where a little contract is baked in there. And that can do different things and even, even programmatically change the digital asset as you go. So that's pretty fascinating. And then, you know.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  So those are the two I've spent the most time on and some of the salon in that stuff. So, so, you know, the proof of work and those things. I don't 100% understand the environmental argument because to me, like if I order a product from Amazon.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  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 100% 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.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  But, you know, I haven't done a ton of research on that. You guys know more about that than I do. 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.

• 26:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Last question I have for you, and then my brother's got a couple of questions for you is, how do you think about Bitcoin price? Do you think of it in terms of like, oh, I think Bitcoin's price is going to be X by the end of the year, by the next year, over five, 10 years? Like, just how do you think about that specific data point?

• 26:21Speaker 02

  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, 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, 45K. And if it gets kind of lower, I'm gonna, I'm gonna 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 very, 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.

• 27:07Anthony Pompliano?

  What questions you guys got, Joe, John?

• 27:09Speaker 03

  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. 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, what Nick Huber calls is like sweaty, right? How do you apply some of this newer age technology stuff to this?

• 27:40Speaker 02

  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, in the commerce world, there's a company called Fanatics. I'm sure you guys are consumers there, because you're all sports guys. And they're starting to do really cool things where, you know, so like when the Atlanta Braves won the World Series, if you spent, you know, over $150, you got a free NFT. 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 10 10% would kind of resonate with NFTs. So I've got to do something that doesn't blow,

• 28:21Speaker 02

  you know, the little old lady in Iowa that just needs her car cleaned's 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 NFT or, you know, and then like what the Lolly guys do, 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, 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? It kind of eased people into it, especially for the audience that's hyper engaged with it. I want to have something for them.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  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.

• 29:15Speaker 04

  Scott, um, 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?

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, it, it's not bad to go work for somebody, you know, go work for a startup for a year or two. And that's great because you get, you get, you know, you get a salary and benefits and all that kind of stuff. But then if you can go and go for a company that's 10 people and up, um, you know, to, to all the way up to, you know, 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, 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,

• 30:13Speaker 02

  they did a lot of stupid stuff and I was basically like, geez, if these guys can be successful, I can. So, uh, 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 web three 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 hire 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, your skill set being recruiting, understanding the technology, you know, business fundamentals, creation, fundraising, selling. I'm a I have

• 30:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 31:25Speaker 04

  Appreciate that.

• 31:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Scott, the last thing I want to talk to you about is inflation, official number 6.8%. 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? Like, what are you seeing just kind of on the ground when it comes to, you know, wages, kind of cost of goods, etc.?

• 31:49Speaker 02

  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

• 32:32Speaker 02

  know, the stuff for my kid and my healthcare. 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. So I think we'll be fine. But yeah, I think it's definitely higher than, than, than what the government, that's why I showed you that meme. You know, I think CPI is probably needs a dusting off and, and another, you know, smart people looking at that one because I don't think it's capturing. You know, like I read one, 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.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  But then there's data in the world today, when they invented CPI, this data didn't exist, but there's probably 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, when, you know, I think that it's not capturing a big chunk of what's going on.

• 33:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And you mentioned going from $12 an hour to $18 an hour. Is that on average, you would say that you did?

• 33:37Speaker 02

  This blend across our, our markets and all our technicians.

• 33:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I mean, that's a 50% increase. You know, I'm not a mathematician here, but like, that's really, really high. When you see something like that, are you all increasing prices as well to kind of combat some of the increased gasoline, kind of labor, et cetera? 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?

• 34:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've already done, taken several price increases.

• 34:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  The, yeah. And then, you know, the way we fight it, you know, so there's, there's a couple of ways is, you know, 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 going to lower them, you know that. So, so I gotta keep my margins, right? So the way we protect it is we, 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 3,000 vehicles and money comes out of that, right? So, so that's where, you know, I forget which of your brother said it, we are, we do have like a physical world. But a lot of our innovation is on the software side to and hardware side. So we've invented,

• 34:52Speaker 02

  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 spend a lot of time vacuuming pet fur. So now we have a vacuum that has a little agitator in it and some other technology that that addresses pet fur. You know, millions of little things like that, you got to 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. What I love about it is, you know, we, there's an, there's an old saying in software that there's these things that can only be done linearly. And, and, you know, Fred Brooks, he wrote this book, The Mythical Man Month. He uses this example, nine women can't make a baby in a month. Like, you

• 35:36Speaker 02

  know, making, you know, gestating babies isn't something you can, 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, 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, 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

• 36:20Speaker 02

  that we're seeing and that are innovating. And that's a lot of fun. And I'm really enjoying that as well.

• 36:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's, it's fascinating. We 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 like, 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 like, should you not get on a Boeing plane? Because like, 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 Name in the press and seem innovative, but also, as you mentioned, you know, companies like Tesla, Carvana, Spiffy, etc. are actually getting a huge benefit from doing a lot of this stuff.

• 37:07Anthony Pompliano?

  And if you can figure out where the true value is, that's where ultimately there's equity value to capture, it seems like.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, the bung things are 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, the, 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 and iterate. 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, Fortnite, and you got 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

• 37:57Speaker 02

  fun is you can, you can get feedback in real time and then you can change things in real time and iterate so much faster than you can in the physical world.

• 38:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it makes complete sense. Where can we send people to find you on the internet? Or find out more about Spiffy?

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so on Twitter, I'm Scot Wingo, Scott with one T, S C O T. I saw your banner was correct. I appreciate that whoever did that. So, so I'm on Twitter, I'm on LinkedIn, and then Spiffy is getspiffy.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.

• 38:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, man. I could talk to you forever. What, John?

• 38:32Speaker 04

  I just, your comment about under 40, use the app. 40 to 50, use the website. 50 plus, you call in.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  It is, yeah. Sometimes I'll go by our customer, I sit next to our customer care group 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 gonna vacuum the seats and clean them. And it's really funny to, you know, the different customers that call in and they just wanna, you know, they, 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.

• 39:25Anthony Pompliano?

  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, Web 3, NFTs, etc. So I appreciate the time.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, sounds good. Good seeing you. Congrats on the new addition and nice to meet the brothers for their first time.

• 39:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, buddy. See you later.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Bye, guys.