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We interview sustainability leaders across industries to learn what they are working on and how they are steering their companies toward a climate-friendly world.
Alex - 00:00:12:
Welcome to Open Source Sustainability. I'm Alex Lassiter, CEO of GreenPlaces. On this show, I talk with sustainability leaders to learn how companies are adapting their business models to be in line with sustainability goals. We believe sustainability has to be open source to be successful. And these leaders have offered us a glimpse inside their strategies in the hopes that we can all move forward together. We're fascinated by some of the unique challenges these sustainability leaders face and are excited to dive deeper. In this episode, I'm talking with Scot Wingo, co-founder and CEO of Spiffy. Scot Wingo is a name synonymous with innovation, disruption, and success. As the co-founder and former CEO of ChannelAdvisor, he has revolutionized the way brands and retailers navigate the complex e-commerce landscape. Scot's knowledge and experience led him to embark on new ventures, seeking to reshape the industry once again with Spiffy, an on-demand mobile car wash and detailing company. In this episode, we'll be talking about the earth-conscious decisions that he's made on his path to create a cleaner car cleaning business. From reclaiming water to containing oil contaminants, Spiffy's goal is to make getting your car washed more convenient and carbon-friendly. Scot, welcome to Open Source Sustainability. Very, very excited to have you today on the podcast. We appreciate you taking the time. Maybe we could start off with a quick, tell us a little bit about Spiffy.
Scot - 00:01:34:
Yeah. Thanks for having me, Alex. So Spiffy, I started, I'm a serial entrepreneur, this is my fourth company. So started this in 2014. I come from the e-commerce world, and I previously had invested in a car wash, a physical car wash, and I had my first Uber experience around 2012. So the idea was, I was thinking, I think services are gonna go digital. And by that, I mean, just like e-commerce, retail went digital in the form of e-commerce. I felt like services had an opportunity to be a lot better. And once you have like that first Uber style experience, it's app-based, now you have control of the situation versus the service provider, and it's mobile and very modern, and you pay digitally all those things, that that was gonna be an exciting wave of innovation as an entrepreneur, I wanted to ride that wave. And so started Spiffy to really explore that in 2014. And what we do is Mobile Car Care. So first of all, we come to you, so it's built around convenience because everyone lives very busy lives. And we wanna take this kind of old school way of car care where you go and leave your car for a long period of time, and it's very painful, or you wait in the lobby, also painful. We wanna eliminate that. So we come to you is the first part of it, but then we layer on a digital experience. So there's an app-based, we can text you, however you wanna interact with us, we will interact that way. Yeah, so that's the gist of what we do at Spiffy. So we started in 2014 with car wash and detail. Then we've added in oil change, tires, and brakes. So those are our four core consumer services. We do a lot of other services for fleets, but that's on the consumer side. And we started in one market, now we're in 30, and another 20 with franchise partners. So call it 50 markets. And then the other way we think about how Spiffy operates is the type of customers. So about 20% of our business is consumer and 80% is fleet. And we deal with six types of fleets, rental car companies, government fleets, owned and operated fleets, delivery fleets like Amazon, et cetera. So yeah, and just to give folks an idea of scale, we have about 600 technicians across the country. We're only in the US. The 50 locations I mentioned. And we're at about a 60 million run rate, just to give folks an idea of the scale we are as it relates to kind of different startup. You know, we're kind of in this middle adolescence as a startup, working our way to adulthood.
Alex - 00:04:12:
That's great. And the Car Wash Business and obviously in car care, tell us a little bit about what is the intersection of that and sustainability. Like I know there's a Spiffy Green Program and we can get deeper into that, but just where do those two things intersect and why even have that as a part of what you do?
Scot - 00:04:31:
Yeah, so personally, I haven't done anything in sustainability till Spiffy. And two things kind of happened simultaneously. Number one, I had a company ChannelAdvisor, and that company went public. So I was on this board of that even while starting Spiffy. So the two things that happened simultaneously was there started to be a lot of information coming out around ESG, DEI, and these types of things as it relates to public companies. So there's rumblings that the SEC was going to start to put out some guidelines. Also being in e-commerce, we know the Allbirds guys really well. There's a set of companies, Toms, to go even kind of further back, that really took sustainability very seriously, and they found a customer for it. So that's one thing we can talk about. At the same time at Spiffy, we were just really in, you know, you know, startups really well, but for those that don't, we were, you know, in 2014, we were just kind of like, we just had an idea. So we were in that like product market fit MVP kind of Minimum Viable Product world. So we had just put an app out and had two vans and we're operating it out of, initially out of our car wash. and what we discovered very quickly was that in the physical car wash world consumers are mostly on weekends but we put an app out there everyone wanted their car washed on thursday and then wednesday then tuesday then friday then monday and then the weekend the weekend was actually lowest on their party whereas in the physical world is the highest and they wanted it done at office parks. So we started servicing customers at office parks and just like pick on Thursday was our spike day. And then we found that traditional office parks would not allow traditional detailers to be there. And we asked why, and they said, you know, they had concerns around the technicians being background checked and whatnot. The traditional mobile detail vans look like they've, you know, they've been really beat up and they don't look great at a class A office park. And then the third thing was insurance. But the fourth one is actually the most important. You know, they said we will not allow mobile detailing due to environmental concerns. And that was a shock. We had never even thought about that. And as we dug into it, what we found is traditional detailers, because time is money in this business, they use very, very caustic chemicals, even hydrochloric acid. Modern German cars, modern brake systems, get a lot of brake dust on the wheels. A way to save a lot of time on that is throw a little, when you start the car service, throw a little bit of hydrochloric acid. This isn't like pure acid that's going to eat the wheel. But a solution that includes hydrochloric acid, and you come back in 30 minutes, and it's taken the brake dust off for you. You don't have to really deal with all the little inner workings of that car. So to solve that, we had to get innovative. And that's where we said sustainability is going to be important here. And because to me, I felt like it could be a double win for us. At the time, I was like, let's invest in this, because we have to. But it probably will also, again, the knowledge that these e-commerce brands were seeing a lot, a customer that was really attuned to this. I was thinking, well, it can't hurt. People aren't going to say, I won't use this because it's got sustainability. There'll be an audience that says, I really love it because it's sustainable. So it felt like a double win. So that's what led us into this world.
Alex - 00:07:55:
Really interesting, because what I'm hearing is typically in these, sometimes you hear somebody say, this is very important to me, therefore I did it. It's something we all should do. It's part of our responsibility. But the other piece of this that I'm hearing is this is very much aligned with your business objectives. Like being able to service your customers from the very beginning in this new fashion, it involved aligning sustainability with your actual business outcomes that you wanted. I'm curious, as you've grown and we're now in 2023, a business a lot bigger. some of this corporate pressure that we've seen around reporting requirements and, you know, bigger Fortune 500s like Amazon and places like that. Have you seen this move out of the office park? Are you seeing this with corporate customers in terms of sustainability and working with them as a vendor?
Scot - 00:08:49:
Yeah. It's pretty funny so uh. Just continue story so to solve this problem we we iterated on this many times where we landed is we use very little water we still need use water because that's the best thing for the vehicle there's this waterless uh, technology But you end up, as you know here, it works really well if your car's dusty, but if your car has bugs, tar, anything on it that every car has, then you have to either leave that on the car or work so hard at it that it damages the car. Neither of those are good for the customer. And then there's also a steam solution. The steam one looks good, it's got this steam wand. It's a little dangerous because it can burn the technician, so there's a safety issue there. But once you follow the hose back to the vehicle, they're all diesel powered. So you've got these giant brown clouds of smoke coming out and acute steam on the front end. So it's green washing-ish, I guess you would say. So we're like, well, let's stick to water. So we stuck to water. And then we use very little water. So we get the water we use way down. We use very green chemicals. So we've done tons of iterations on this and landed on the opposite of what traditional detailers use. And then another thing is our customer is this convenience for any consumer. So we're constantly thinking of how do we take friction out of this? So we already had committed to bringing water with us. So we don't go somewhere and say, how do we connect? hey Alex i'm at your house can i come in and get some water that would be weird or connect to your hose or something like that we bring the water with us both in every situation So we already had solved that. So then we figured, and it took a couple iterations on this, but where we landed is in physical car washes, there's all these EPA and local regulations around reclaiming the water. So when you go through a tunnel car wash, there's all this plumbing that takes that runoff. gathers it together in a tank and then runs it through this thing called a Reclamation System. I'm a software guy. I can't tell you what happens inside of there, but some magic happens. And then you put 99% clean water back into the sewage system, which the cities like. They like net pullers. They don't like net detractors of water. So we put back almost all the water we use. In the sewage system, they like a lot of clean water because that helps with whatever processing they do. So we did the same thing, and we do it in the mobile context. So what happens is we wash every car on a mat. It's a blue tarp-looking thing, and it's got a lip to it. And that catches all the runoff. It's like a little bathtub for your car. Then we suck the water out of there, back up onto the van into a second vessel that we've added, which is the gray water vessel. And then at the end of the day, we run that through a Reclamation System. Every city we're in has a warehouse that has a Reclamation System, just like a physical car wash would have. And so we basically took the physical world solution and made it work in a mobile context. OK, so we did that early days to be able to do office parks. And then to answer your question, what we found is our technicians are great, but you don't want to have a lot of complexity out in the field. The job is hard enough. And so we started adding these fleet clients. So then the technician said, well, if I use the Reclamation System at Mrs. Smith's house, should I use it at Rental Car Company A's location? Our answer is, early on, we're like, no, don't worry about it. And then they stopped using it at Mrs. Smith's house or office park. And we're like, well, that doesn't work. So our rule is always use this. You can get fired for not using our Reclamation System. It's that important to us. OK, so some of our customers would say, why are you guys doing this? We don't really need this. And so it was interesting. So this is 2016, 2017. Then 2018, 2019, every one of our big fleet customers hired a Chief Sustainability Officer. So this is like U-Haul, Hertz, Enterprise, Amazon, obviously, all these big customers. And a funny case study is one of them said immediately, within a week of the CSO being hired, they sent out a note that said, cease all mobile operations. And we were wrapped up in that. And we knew we could guess why. It really just didn't say why. But we're like, OK, Chief Sustainability Officer, they obviously see what we saw with traditional detailers. And also, we do oil and mobile oil. And we do that in a sustainable way, too. So we went and met with them and we said, we understand what you're doing here, but this is part of our DNA, let us show you what we do. So we did a demo and they said, you're approved. So it actually worked for us, we're the only approved mobile vendor at this one customer because they are leaning into this so much. So it's one of those things where we got a win when we didn't really anticipate it. And we kind of were early on this trend and it's helped us in many, many situations.
Alex - 00:13:47:
Yeah, I mean, that's that's pretty fortuitous timing for that as well. I was going to see as, as, as you talk about these fleet businesses, 1 of the things that. I'm sure you're running into is electrification to fleet as well. So, as the. I guess we could probably talk about a lot of changes in fleets in terms of cars on the lot and how they're managing their business going forward. But how do you think about electrification? Is it things that they've asked? Have they asked you for things like that as they're trying to figure out as Hertz and Avis and all these types of folks are trying to figure out how to maximize their transition to an electrified fleet? How does that involve Spiffy? And have they had conversations with you about it and sought for solutions?
Scot - 00:14:32:
So we're, because this is part of our DNA now, the way I think about it is our carbon footprint is what it is. And then we're working to minimize it, but then we offset it. So hopefully the offsets can become zero over time. But we still have to go do our business. So right now, unfortunately, in the EV land, the cargo van that we use as our delivery mechanism is not there yet. You can't get them. The ones that are available. So our default is that we use this platform called a Transit, it's a Ford product. That's our internal combustion engine that we use. Once we hit Chipageddon and the shortage of vehicles, we had to, we now have lots of different vehicles on the road just from necessity. But we wanted to be like Southwest, where we just had one platform. But the world fought against us on that. But anyway, so that's our platform. We do have one Transit on order. We're concerned, though, because it has like a 120-mile range without any load. And we put a fair amount of load on. We put a fair amount of stuff in the back. So we think it's going to get sub 100, which is not enough for us. But we'll get there. I've had a Tesla since 2012. And the range has crept in that last decade. The whole thing has gotten 10 times better already. So we'll get there. So we're always investing and testing in that. One thing we've done, for example, is one step is in our early... So we put a lot of equipment in the van because we want to have everything that makes your car look perfect, that does oil changes and all this type of thing, and even Tires. So early on, we would have little generators back there and gas-powered things. So we now have gotten rid of all that. So we now have developed our own. This is where we had to go build our own. So we built our own. We call it a Penguin Power Pack. And Penguin is our logo. And so we put these P3s in there. And that is a Lithium-Ion System we've developed specifically for Spiffy that powers all the things that we need to power, to have electricity on the van. And EVs, we'll probably still need that because even as these come out, I don't think they have enough juice for us to run our stuff. So we're still going to augment it with our P3. So that was step one, is get rid of all the little ICE engines. So we've done that. And then we have not received a lot of pressure from our clients to get carbon neutral, but our aspiration is to be a public company. And there's a lot of controversy out there. And I think one of the things we believe strongly, and so it's nice because we believe it, we want to do it. It gives us a win with our customers. And this is an area that people don't push against, is let's get sustainable and kind of continue to do this. So we're really focused on the E of ESG. And so I think it'll be a win if and when we do go public.
Alex - 00:17:43:
Well, one of the nice things about it too, again, as I keep hearing this is all of these things are very much in line with providing a better service for your customers. So these aren't necessarily trade-offs in many cases. It's not the austerity measures that does this. This is about providing a better level of service that you had, a service that's more compliant with what the customer needs, a service that's better for the vehicle, better for the customer. And all of these things are very much aligned with the business outcomes that you're looking for. And which is unique, because I think a lot of folks sometimes, I think... I think a lot of people sometimes have this feeling that being more sustainable means providing less quality, but it's actually been sort of the opposite in your case. These are ways for you to be able to serve better and make your customers happier.
Scot - 00:18:33:
Yeah, and then one thing, you know, there's, there's always some positive, unintended consequences. One of the unintended consequences of the mat we put out. is it's kind of like a P.T. Barnum thing. It's almost like a, you know, I don't know, like a circus freak kind of a thing. So people see it and they're like, what's going on over there? And it builds curiosity. It's like part of the show. Another thing we learned early on is we foam the vehicles pretty aggressively. You could argue car wash, a purist would say we over foam the car. It doesn't hurt the car or anything, but we spend a little bit too much on foam. But again, there's something about seeing a soapy car and then we have the matte. And so it generates this whole part of our brand is this, you know. what is going on there? Let me go. I've never seen anything quite like this. Let me go explore it. So that's another unintended consequence of making choices like this. Another one is when we wanted to, so, you know, in a lot of these things, they check three boxes. So getting rid of the gas powered stuff in the back of the van, that stuff fails all the time. And I don't know about you, but I hate your artwork. And one of the things I hate is those stupid gas engines. I can never get it to start. And then just when you give up and you're like, sweaty mess, then it like, it cranks up and then.
Alex - 00:19:52:
It's my biggest failure of being an adult man is not being able to start a lawnmower. I just, I can't figure it out. It doesn't work. I pull my back out. I've ripped two of those cords in half before I'm trying to pull it so hard.
Scot - 00:20:02:
Yeah. Yeah, and so it's a high failure thing, and then customers complain about the noise, right? So it's got the angry mosquito kind of sound to it while we run these power washers and then the generators. So now you see these things and they're just totally silent. So the customer, so it wins, it's cheaper cost of ownership and more reliable. So that's better customer service. You don't end up at the appointment and something doesn't work, which is a terrible experience. It's quieter and it's cheaper for us. So it checks three boxes, so, you know, and it's sustainable. So it checks four boxes.
Alex - 00:20:41:
What I love about this too is this is just all really fascinating. I know you can get a Spiffy Green and take a look at the website and kind of read through it, but I would imagine especially for some of your corporate customers and for probably a lot of your residential customers learning why you made these decisions. is part of the fun, I think of using the service, like being able to understand why you do that, seeing somebody with a mat and we've I've used Spiffy at my house a number of times, but being able to see that out there, you do get to engage with the person say, why are you doing that? What does that mean? Why are you making these decisions? How does all this stuff sort of play into it? And I think that storytelling with your customers is, I have to imagine a an engaging experience that most of your competitors don't get to have when they're just firing up an old detailing truck.
Scot - 00:21:27:
Yeah, another one we haven't talked about is oil change. We decided early on to go in through the dipstick. So we suck the oil out of the dipstick. So we vacuum it out. So that's unusual because traditionally with an oil change, you lift the car and then you drain it, use gravity to drain it through this thing called the plug. The reason we don't like to do that is the plug is very finicky. We do like 3,000 oil changes a day. And it's very hard to get that plug in. The threads are very finicky. You can misthread it. You can overturn it, under turn it, and it's cataclysmic. So by doing it this way, it eliminates that failure cycle. But it also really diminishes. In gravity situations, you can imagine there's a lot of situations where oil could get on the ground and run into runoff water. So because we're vacuuming it, it's a great demo. I've seen these old school folks that don't believe we can do this. And it's literally a clear straw that's about six feet long that goes from the vehicle to ours. And you know, and you, you know, we turn a button and then the oil goes zoop and just gets sucked right into our van. And everyone's like, well, that was crazy. And then, you know, the so then a lot. And again, a lot of these old school car care people then say, well, you haven't gotten the sludge out of there. But what you'll what you'll see is the drain pan has like these ridges and concavity to it. We can actually move the straw around in there and get into those little concave things where gravity, if the if the drain plugs over here and there's a there's a area here, there's going to be oil there. We can actually vacuum that out, whereas gravity is not going to get it. So it's kind of fun to go watch this, you know, kind of dispel all this stuff as part of demos that we do. And that's an example where we do it with oil change. And then we recycle all the oil. So this oil goes, there's people that recycle oil. And then most of the oil our larger fleets use is recycled oil.
Alex - 00:23:23:
Y'all operate all over the country. Is it a challenge to open up new markets because you have to? I mean, the infrastructure around this from sourcing the materials to, like you said, reclamation facilities and oil recycling. It does feel P.T. Barnum-ish, like it is a traveling roadshow, like for you to get into a market, you've got to make sure. Are you fine? I guess my question is, are you finding that every does every market have these things like, or do you have to depend and work with? I don't know with cities and other folks to make sure that those things are there. Like, how do you how do you guarantee in each market that all this stuff is available?
Scot - 00:24:00:
We've built all our own. I'm a big believer in vertically integrating all this. So we're recording this. We're both in North Carolina. We're not together, but in Apex, North Carolina, we have a 20,000 square foot facility and it's 80% our van factory. So we build 30 vans a month. Never thought I would have a van factory, but I do. And then 20% of it is, let's say we're gonna open up a new area. We put everything we need on pallets and then we have it shipped out there. The Water Reclamation System, The Oil Containment Systems, all these things that we're on version 10 of and are at this point relatively proprietary, we put it all basically in a box and send it out there. So we don't really rely on the warehouse we're renting in Vegas or SFO or wherever we are to have these things. It's all part of the, even for our franchises, if someone signed up a franchise for, I don't know, livermore or something, when they say, all right, we're ready, then a truck shows up with our stuff and it's all very clear, it's kind of Lego blocks. Put this here, do this, do that, even signage, everything's like in a box.
Alex - 00:25:12:
Um, what do you think of of all of these is. Obviously, I think all these are very, very interesting, but is there was there 1 sustainable challenge that you felt like. just kind of took the cake. Was there one thing that you said we were looking at this and saying there's absolutely no way we can figure this out? Like what is the what's the biggest challenge that either you have solved or you've yet to solve that's that's that surprises you.
Scot - 00:25:35:
Yeah, so early on, so around... 2018, 2019, so it was before COVID. So we had done all this 50 green stuff. And then we had a Duke intern who's now our head of strategy. And the first project I tasked him with was figure out how we could do carbon offsets. So we wanted to go ahead and get 100% carbon neutral, if you will. And I had done a little exploring on this and got frustrated within an hour because there's this phrase in gaming, turtles all the way down. So you think you've got an answer and then you find the opposite answer and then you just ping pong back and forth. Today, most of our information is like this. It's hard to know what's true or not. So we found this whole topic was squarely in that world. So first of all, to go figure out what our footprint was, we ran through several of these online calculators and we came out with deltas of 10 to 20X. So one calculator, and I forget what it was, it would say, all right, you're like five megatons or whatever. And then the other one would say 50 or 200. I was kind of like, well, that's... Sometimes if, you know, a pattern you see is if you get some things and they're within 20%, you like pick a middle and be like, feel like you're okay. This was like, I can't feel good picking a middle because there's like such a disparity here. So that, so then we're kind of like, all right, well, we can't figure that out. Well, let's go figure out if we could figure that out, what offsets would we buy? And then, you know, we would go find something, you know, so I know Shopify and they're doing this Canadian tree project. And I was like, oh, let's do that too. And then someone be like, that's the devil. You don't do that. That's the worst thing for their environment. You know, the, they're killing spotted owls or something. I don't know. Or, you know, trees are terrible and the worst things. And then you would go try something else. And then everyone would say like, no, that's even worse. And, you know, all, and then, so it was very exacerbating. So I was very excited when you called with an idea and had solved this. So that was, I knew you beforehand, but then you're like, hey, I've got this idea. I was like, oh my God, we would use this tomorrow. I think you were surprised when I said that.
Alex - 00:27:41:
I was really surprised when you said that. But as we've gone on, I was actually having a conversation with somebody about this this morning. It reminds me a lot of like, I think why people struggle with weight loss sometimes, because understanding that there's a million different diets. And it's like understanding what contributes to weight gain or whatever could be everything from. good cholesterol, bad cholesterol, trans fats, non trans fats. And every week it's like eggs are good for you, then it's eggs are bad for you. And then every time you eat something, it's, it's this dizzying thing of like, I want something easy to measure so that I can actually make improvements. But the inputs are so vast, like in y'all's case, you've got You've got power, you've got water, you've got wastewater, you've got recycling streams, you've got physical products, you have vans, you have all these different things that sort of contribute to it. And so it can be dizzying for any business that wants to actually start doing these things. And I think a lot of us look at some of these examples like a you know, Nike or Patagonia and Allbirds is these companies that have done such a great job of figuring out how to really understand where they are and make improvements. But when you peel that back, I mean, it is just an insane number of data collection points. It's very difficult. And as you mentioned, the actual way that you calculate this stuff is really hard. And I think that... Probably did. probably one of the most interesting things that I've found in this journey and talking to folks like you is despite what I think a lot of people may believe, a lot of us really do want to make our businesses more sustainable. A lot of us do want to do these things. It's not a lack of interest or a lack of desire. It's actually, it's just hard. And somebody can only go through enough times to say, okay, every direction that I turn, there's something good here. And this used to look good. And now it isn't. That exhaustion eventually just moves things to the back burner. It's like I have a pile of laundry that if I just keep walking by it, it's easier for me just to walk by it sometimes than it is to like actually sit down and begin doing it. And I think when you can unlock that and help it help make it easier for someone to make better decisions and be able to help improve these things, then I think that actually starts to happen. So, uh, I'm glad that we can help you on that, but I was surprised. I think, uh, I knew y'all done some stuff on Spiffy Green, but didn't realize that that piece was such a challenge for y'all. So glad we were, we were able to help and excited to.
Scot - 00:30:10:
Yeah. Yeah, and then a full disclosure, I was like, let me invest, which you kindly did. And then I started this little fund and we're an investor. So we're, we're happy to be investors along the ride with you.
Alex - 00:30:22:
Being able to have people convert from customer to investor to me is like the greatest blessing of being able to actually do this stuff. And you know, when you get somebody who's able to see the problem, feel the problem and say, okay, I can participate in on both sides is amazing. So we're excited to have you and the Tweener fun join as well. Talk to me a little bit about some of the trends that you're seeing in the, maybe the greater automotive industry. Like, when you're thinking about sustainability, you know, again, maybe it's starting from the products and the chemicals you use and the water reclamation. you're obviously connected to this much larger space in the automotive space. Like what are people talking about? Like how real is this? Is this something that five years from now is still gonna be here, you know, in 20 years from now, is this gonna be a core part of what's required? Or is this more of a flash in the pan type thing? Like, like.
Scot - 00:31:18:
Yeah, so a couple ways to answer that. So we're kind of in this car care part, right? And I wouldn't say it's like a core topic that comes up. We just think of it as part of our DNA. So we don't, you know, we're not out there issuing press releases every day about how sustainable we are or anything like that. It's just kind of part of who we are. And we think that's just how it should be. And, you know, we're out there fighting a lot of battles to disrupt this 500 billion kind of industry. And it's just part of that. And so we spend a lot more energy on new products, new markets, and those kinds of things. But it's still important to us. And I would say where I do see a lot of it is in the bigger automotive world. And it's usually wrapped up in the EV discussion. So, you know, there's, you know, EVs have been a hot topic for 10 years, and they're starting to get real. And, you know, it gets wrapped up inside of there. And so that's where I see a lot of it. There's a, you know, so I was at a conference and, you know, there was someone from Toyota. And they were refuting that EVs help. They had a much more nuanced way of starting about this. But they talked about, if you look at where carbon comes from and not much is coming from vehicles, their agenda was they like plug-in hybrids. So they would much rather see, they think plug-in hybrids are the solution. So they had a whole rationale behind that. But it's just good to see the conversation. Right. And then it's been in the news a lot lately, because number one, there was that package, that infrastructure package that had a lot of EV chargers. Nothing's happened with that in typical government fashion. uh... uh... i dislike government no matter who's doing what's uh... uh... i'd i'd stay away from politics and government for this reason uh... it just goes way too crazy and slow and relies on so i can't i can't take it uh... and uh... but then now you know as a as a Tesla and uh... Elon fanboy uh... you know this one built it right so there's like all this blah blah blah blah blah blah and they're just like let's go build this and they made rational decisions like whenever we can let's put it at a shopping center or near Starbucks and you're like as a test owner like wow this is great i can you know it was like oh my god what do you do when you're charging like like go to Starbucks for five minutes and come back in my car's done and it's better than the gas experience where i don't i don't i'm not a huge uh... Circle K uh... coffee drinker And, you know, so now it's been funny to watch all that capitulate in the last two weeks. So Ford just announced they're using the charging infrastructure of Tesla. And now just yesterday, GM did as well. And I think everyone thought they were going to build it out. I think they thought they would. And they realized Tesla, by being early, has locked up a lot of those great locations. And it's not easy. And, you know, they're Tesla is very good at executing on this stuff and has a really great supercharging network. So that's the kind of stuff that's going on in the mobility world around this topic. It kind of comes along with EVs.
Alex - 00:34:28:
We're seeing actually a little bit of these, a little bit of a disruption of the traditional like convenience store. So typically, obviously you stop at a Shell or you stop at a VP or whatever it is, you're. you know what you're going to get. Now you start to see. non-traditional convenience store type places, putting a charger out front. And it changes the way you get off the highway. You know, you could get out, like you said, you get off the highway and you can go hang out in a, in a Shell gas station, you know, or maybe, maybe in the future you get off and you go to a Target or you get off or you go to a nicer restaurant or whatever it might be. I've seen a lot in the news around a QSRs and other big chain restaurants starting at the end chain retailers thinking about, can we use these essentially as like marketing? If we put one of these out front, obviously we can, we can make a little bit of money off of it, but in general, it's to get the eyeballs while you're there, come on inside and let us show you what we have to do.
Scot - 00:35:23:
Yeah. One thing i learned from the commerce was that thing that was previously convenient can quickly becoming convenient in a good examples malls so so you know back uh... i'm a generation older maybe two than you are uh... you know the eighties were like malls are so convenient i go there all day and everything i need is available to me uh... and now you know you you go to the mall you're like oh my god i have to go to the mall and in it it's typically very surgical most people go to malls for Apple Stores thank goodness there's still Apple Stores and malls where they'd all be out of and it's very transactional you're there to pick up a an AirPod or something like that you you really don't kind of say i'm gonna take two hours and browse around uh... we've just changed in that way and you know i think that's gonna happen to convenience stores i think you know they there's gonna be so much better if you're going there for a snack or food or coffee there's there's better situations and as a so i get this question from investors a lot with Spiffy where they'll say all if we end up in a day where there's at least half of the cars new cars are EVs is that bad for Spiffy and it's a fair question because you look at a pie chart of our services 25% is oil changes, right? So we know those are gonna go away or diminish over time. And, but the answer is that when we look at EVs as a cohort, and this includes Tesla, Leafs, the whole Enchilada, even plug-in hybrids, we get a lot more washes from them. And I see it in my behavior because I don't go to gas stations anymore. You just don't really, I mean, you can, but you're not like, ooh, I'm going to a gas station. Like you don't have that. You don't pick up that serendipitous run through the tunnel thing. So, and then also you have to be careful with these kinds of cars. I actually took my Tesla through the tunnel the other day and they changed how the car goes in neutral and it was a whole calamity. I'm not gonna do that again. And so then you have to worry about the cameras can get scratched by the, you know, increasingly they're kind of saying don't go through the car washes with these cars that have all this fancy stuff. So you really just kind of wash your car less. So then you have, and then because you're not outlaying 50 bucks every week or so on gas, you have more money to spend on your car. So we see, we pick up two washes. So we're already neutral. So what we lose in oil change per EV, we make up in washes. But then the dirty secret of EVs as tires, and we're just starting to see people in the industry talk about this, the tire people know it and they're kind of, you know, game theory is when you have a golden goose, you don't really yell, hey, look, I've got a golden goose, but the tire people are very excited about EVs. So the dirty secret as a EV owner for 10 years is you go through Tires at least twice as fast. So your internal combustion engine is 30 to 40,000 miles on Tires. EVs get 20-ish. And the reason why is they're torquey and they're very, very heavy because of the batteries. So your EV is much, much heavier than an internal combustion engine at the weight of the vehicle, apples to apples.
Alex - 00:38:23:
But do you think that normalizes out with lighter batteries or do you think batteries continue to?
Scot - 00:38:29:
I think if we have lighter batteries, we'll just put more of them in there to get range, not be as heavy.
Alex - 00:38:34:
Fair point.
Scot - 00:38:36:
If they went half as heavy, we'd use twice as many. So it'd stay as heavy.
Alex - 00:38:40:
I never knew that. That is really interesting. And yeah, I mean that the whole car care industry is gonna obviously change pretty dramatically over the next like 20 to 50 years. And I mean, the way that I thought you were gonna answer that question is. you're more nimble, you're able to respond, add and remove services. Obviously within seven years you've discussed, I think. five to 10 different pretty significant changes and seeing something and being able to respond to it and change it in a nimble and fast way, which as you know, the landscape of what cars and how cars are maintained in the future goes. I feel like puts you in a great place to be able to do that stuff.
Scot - 00:39:21:
You know, one of my favorite business books and it's kind of a dry read actually just gave copies out here it's busy is uh... innovators. So pitch, it's kind of a dry read. It's a Harvard professor. So it's very academic. So I read this, someone recommended it like literally, you know, 20 years ago, and I read it and I was like, I get it, but it doesn't make sense. Like certainly companies don't really act this way. And then I saw Walmart for 20 years watch Amazon just destroy them. And they were like, we're going to catch them. Yes, we know. We're on it. We got this. And then they're like doing nothing. So I learned from e-commerce that these big companies cannot innovate and they're not nimble. And a good example in our world is Jiffy Lube. They tried to do mobile. They did some experiments with mobile. And the system rejected it because it's a franchise system. So there may be in your town, you may have six Jiffy Lubes. They're probably owned by different people in their franchises. Maybe two people own three of them or something like that, but there's no system there that is cohesive. So let's say you have six Jiffy Lubes in your town and there's three different operators that own two each. Well, if one of those can be mobile now, it upsets the whole thing breaks because now they can come into each other's territory. And the whole system's designed to be very geographically encoded by fractional zip codes. So they literally can't do mobile because the system is designed 100% never to do mobile. So how do they undo that? So one of the things they've done recently is they've thrown some EV chargers in there. So it's kind of funny because as an EV operator, you're never going to even think of going to Jiffy Loob to charge your vehicle. And you don't think, what's the best place to charge my vehicle? Oh, I'm gonna go to Jiffy Lube because I love that lobby experience so much.
Alex - 00:41:21:
The Keurig there. It's fantastic. Best coffee, best coffee in the game.
Scot - 00:41:26:
Yeah, you may go to a fancy one. I usually get a pot that's been like smoldering all day and it looks like sludge.
Alex - 00:41:32:
It's the home of the powder.
Scot - 00:41:33:
Some sludge.
Alex - 00:41:33:
It's the powdered. You get the powdered creamer. Spritz, best place to get powder, powder creamer. Yeah. And a little styrofoam cup.
Scot - 00:41:42:
Yeah. Yeah, that's where I want to hang out for the next 30 minutes. But it's just kind of funny. They're like, they're flailing. And so to your point, I think we'll be able to adapt faster. One thing we are looking at, and we've had some prototypes on this, is how could we do mobile EV charging? So we are finding a lot of our fleet customers are adding EVs rapidly. And they have this problem where they'll invest. So this happened in the Bay Area. So we have a customer, SIXT. They're kind of a higher end rental car company. And they put a bunch of Model S's for their customers in SFO. Well, then they had all the chargers put in. But then they leaked. So some of them went to San Diego, Seattle, and then Vegas. And they didn't know what to do with them. So they just let them sit there for a week. And then they went to zero. And so people don't realize these things lose a little bit of charge every day as they run the internal systems. And then they will go to zero. And then they're basically a $60,000 brick. So then they were towing them $200 away to charging stations, to superchargers, and then bringing them back and letting them go to zero again and then charging. So we have prototypes. We've got small models of this where we can do top off. But we have prototypes where we could go do mobile charging. So there's a bunch of things we can do there that the customer is going to want.
Alex - 00:43:06:
When they can, I mean, the convenience of the convenience of getting your car washed while you're at work and also have it charged would actually be, would be great, you know?
Scot - 00:43:18:
Yeah, you're also having a lot of conversations right now with charging companies around offering services at the charging stations. So that's an area we'll explore. Also we're finding outside the Tesla network. We're also having conversations. There's all this data now that the non-Tesla chargers are, there's like only 20% of them operational at any one time. So what's the worst customer experience is you get off at one of these quick serve restaurants that has a charger, a type, a level three charger, and you're a Ford Mach-E owner and it's broken. And unfortunately that happens like 80% of the time. So we're having conversations because we have smart technicians on the road across America. What if we ran routes and checked in on those? The ironic thing is they're all connected to the cloud, but they say they're good, but then you go to charge them and they are not good. So I don't understand why there's that disconnect and they'll solve that. But we're having conversations with people that want us to go kind of like, run through that network, make sure it's working. Because we have feet on the ground, we can do that. and then we can do light repairs on them. A lot of times they need a reboot.
Alex - 00:44:27:
Well, that's what I was saying is I think if you could help to provide that service while they're waiting, then it gives people more. I guess like efficiency in their life and they can continue to do what they need to do and not have to. I guess where we started take a Saturday trip out to the car wash or if you live in wait for 2 hours. Well, Scot, this has been great. Um, I appreciate you taking the time today. Um, the one final question I would have is, is there anything that, that you wish people knew about Spiffy that they didn't? Like, is there something that you're doing maybe particularly related to Spiffy Green? that you wish more people did know about what's kind of under the hood there.
Scot - 00:45:10:
I think we've covered most of it. I would say we think about it a lot. And another thing you and I have had conversations with is, and this springs from, I was in the e-commerce world. I did a lot of speaking, and I ended up in the green room with Al Gore one day. And it was interesting because I was telling him what I was doing at my previous company, and he said, oh, you should talk to my investing arm. So he had set up this whole, I forget the name of it, but he has a whole VC that invests in e-commerce. It does sustainable investing, but it loved e-commerce. And his whole thing was they had done this robust analysis that showed if you follow a product, its e-commerce is way more sustainable than traditional retail because the product gets shipped like 12 times in traditional retail and in e-commerce twice if it's an optimized network like Amazon. So they had done all this analysis. And, you know, one of the things that we don't... know how to calculate so we don't take credit for, but we know we're having an impact on the universe is what we're frequently displacing is the movement of the vehicle to the service. Now it's probably a one for one. So like consumers will run our routes and we'll do four consumers and we save them four trips to the car care, right? So I kind of view that as probably neutral. So we're adding, but then we're also subtracting about what we add. But when we do fleets, we're going in, we're doing hundreds of services. And typically what we're displacing is those cars being valet somewhere far away and then moved back. So I feel like there we're creating, we're way more offsetting our one trip by a factor of however many vehicles we're dealing with. So that's kind of an interesting thing. It's a fun thought experiment to think through. And how can we, if we think about this trip mindset and it's kind of like the product is moving, in this case, the product is the vehicle. How do we eliminate those unnecessary miles that are not getting you from point A to point B? So they're not sustainable. They're really unnecessary in my mind. And then they create a lot of friction in your life because you'd rather be doing other things that are more fun going to your kid's soccer game or whatever. So that's something we think about. We don't know how to calculate that, but we feel like it's just kind of like, the icing on the cake of the sustainability measure that we're squarely in the green here. So we've done what we can measure, we've offsetted it, and then we're getting this unquantifiable benefit that we know we're doing.
Alex - 00:47:40:
Well, to me, we have this thought that sustainability is efficiency. It's producing the same product with less resources. And if you thought about your product as a clean car, when I get in the past, if I would go on a Saturday to drive to a tunnel and go and drive to a shop to go get it done versus I'm already driving to work and you've come to me and you've serviced me there, you've eliminated that waste mile, whatever it is. So there's like a waste mileage that's almost implicit with every transaction that happens at Spiffy. So every car that you service, if you assume that all those cars, if you assume there's no net gain in number of washes or number of services, every time you're going to somebody to take care of that, what you're, if it's at their place of work, for example, they're no longer taking that trip to go do it somewhere else. And if it's fleet, you have the waste mileage from all of those cars going off a lot to a Jiffy Lube or to whatever to go get serviced every month. That, to me, that's the way that I would think about it. Because, again, the same service is happening. I'm still getting my car washed. I'm still getting the maintenance. I'm still getting the preventative work I need to. but it's happening in flight of where I already am and it's limiting that waste mileage from wherever it is. So my guess is there's a pretty easy way to back into what that is, but you just have to assume that all of these services would happen anyway. it's just where they happen versus if they've happened, you know, wherever you're headed to.
Scot - 00:49:06:
Will uh... have some beers one day and calculate that out of the fun.
Alex - 00:49:11:
Sounds great. Well, Scot, really, really appreciate it. This has been a great conversation. Thank you for taking the time to join us on Open Source Sustainability and hope you have a great rest of your day.
Scot - 00:49:22:
Thanks. Thanks for having me. It was fun conversation.
Alex - 00:49:24:
Thank you to Scot for joining us and thank you for listening. If you liked this show, please be sure to leave us a review and follow this podcast wherever you like to listen so you don't miss an episode. This podcast is powered by GreenPlaces. If you're looking to reduce your company's environmental impact and reach your sustainability goals, visit greenplaces.com to learn more. I'm Alex Lassiter and I'll talk with you next time on Open Source Sustainability.