How Spiffy CEO Karl Murphy grew Spiffy to $87.7M revenue and 410 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is scott wingo he's a four-time entrepreneur number three his channel advisor which was a public sas company greater than 550 million bucks in ar he's now building get spiffy.com which is on demand car care with an interesting sas plus marketplace angle scott you're ready to take it to the top i am all right so really enjoyed having you on last time and and and you really are sort of a blended model i would say between almost marketplace fintech and sas help people understand what you do yeah so i have an e-commerce background and had my first uber experience around 2013 and the aha moment for me was could we apply all those interesting things we learned in e-commerce sas to car care and you know so the way it should work is you should have people come to you to take care of your car versus you going to them so ecommerce and sas mindset applied to car care and there's three dimensions we grow in spiffy which is kind of fun having done a large sas business you get to the one dimension is just pulling the lever on on qbsr's and marketing spend i know you talk a lot about that and so we we have that as well but we also have different geographies so there's a geography component to this and then different types of services we provide and then different types of customers so i'm sure we'll get into that but that's that's what's fun if we can turn all three of those dials we can grow you know really really quickly yeah let's start with the customer so when you were on back in uh august of 20 around august of 2020 you said you had about 900 customers but for those that are just listening now what is a customer for you can you can you name one or two of them yeah so we have um we have a b2b component of our business and a consumer um we're 85 b2b which is fleet in my world of car care and then uh 15 consumer consumers would be like you and austin you need your car your oil change or something like that um and then on the fleet that's uh so the consumer department of business is very ecommercy um not super recurring etc but then our fleet business is more sas so these fleets have x number of vehicles they need services at a certain pace the vehicles are driven driven at a certain mileage so like a sas business it has a predictable recurring you know not committed so there is some commitment there but but a a very miserable predictable kind of component to it within that bucket the our largest customers are rental car company companies so we have all the large rental car companies are our customers enterprise hertz avis budget sixth etc then we have a bunch of vehicle 2.0 companies so these are next generation car sharing networks autonomous networks ev car sharing companies and then the third bucket is logistics so we work a lot with amazon dsps so it's kind of fun to get back to my e-commerce routes on that and then we we have four other buckets of fleets but those those give you an idea of some of the customers that we have if i'm hertz right in raleigh at the airport i've got 100 cars at that location and i need you to clean them or oil change or whatever vacuum them once every week what am i going to pay you yeah we'd like to bundle it we call it uh you know like this fleet management as a service so fmaas so so what we want to do is really enter into one of our and again this is kind of like taking our sas knowledge and applying it to this so so it's land and expand so you know that really well so we go in usually our customer has an acute need like an oil change problem and we go in with that and then we want to take care of not only oil change but wash tires windshields we want to take over the whole vehicle and then we typically start with preventive maintenance and there's another wedge which is in in fleeting and then removing vehicles from the whole cycle so so what we try to do is get in there and do everything but you know of that fleet business about a third is oil change a third as wash and a third as other which includes tires brakes light repair windshield odor elimination we're doing a lot of that um shout out to the cannabis industry they're uh we're they have free economics that's that's hugely benefiting us because as people smoke cannabis and cars um it creates a lot of odors which is good for me oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations and what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderprep.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview and so what what would that charge be like if i'm having to do oil changes on 100 cars per week yeah so it scales with volume so a consumer oil change is about a hundred dollars and then with some of our fleet partners you know just the oil change we can get into the 40 50 zone um per car you'll like this yeah per vehicle um but but there'll be a commitment of volume there so yeah and what is that commitment usually i'm going to take 100 cards or a thousand cars it's thousands yeah if i remember this correctly you you actually invented or you have your own sort of like mini little oil change trucks which you bought they sit on your balance sheet right and that's how you do these quickly and effect efficiently yeah we we lease them so they're not on our balance sheet technically um but yeah so we we you know we want to be a premium offering and because of that we have our own technicians they are w-2 and our own vans that we lease and they have a lot of equipment to go out there and deliver the service um so so there is a delivery component to this which is really interesting um and and kind of uniquely there's pros and cons to it we like it because we can control the customer experience at the end of the day what i learned from 20 years of e-commerce is the companies that do best control the customer experience from soup to nuts like tesla versus like a traditional auto manufacturer if you can control that whole customer experience that's the place to be so we've built it that way how many of those leased vehicles right that you use to service all your customer contracts are do you have today uh nathan are you sitting down i thought i would never say this but we have about 280 vans zipping around the united states uh every day so how do you from a resource allocation perspective what do you do you look at like head count per per capita and make sure you've got one car with an x amount above million or how do you measure that that's an excellent question because once you have these assets it becomes a optimization problem and the way we think about it is that the simplest metric is average to average daily revenue per truck adrt is a metric we've come up with and we're constantly optimizing that and you know so so what you want to do is have the most number of it's kind of like a tetra scheme it's kind of a fun simplification of it so so the...