No brakes on Spiffy: Fast-growing vehicle services company expands toolkit – here’s why

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Get Spiffy apparently is en route to full customer service of vehicles from the bumper to drive train, engine to cleanup, and somedays bumpers. That’s the breathtaking scope of CEO Scot Wingo’s vision with news today that the Triangle company is offering another new line of services.

The latest addition being announced today is: Spiffy Brakes.

Scot Wingo

The Skinny chatted with Wingo – one of the region’s top entrepreneurs and also investors about his thinking about growing the company even in these times of inflation and recession.

In fact, those two economic factors – bad as they may be – created this new opportunity, says Wingo.

What’s the rationale behind the decision?

Our North Star is customers – we constantly survey and ask customers what they want next – in Q4 of 2021 we saw a huge surge in demand for brake services. It’s one of those services that hits when you are typically out of warranty and with the ‘chip shortage’ [and] vehicle shortage, consumers are keeping their cars longer and hitting this service need.

Why do this in time of economic insecurity/inflation/possible recession?

While brakes can be a pricey $350-700 service, it’s cheaper than buying a new car. In a way, it’s a perfect service to launch in this timeframe. As I was writing this I saw Ford increased the price on F150’s $5,000 to $7,000 -ouch!

[In a separate email, Wingo made what he believes are the salient points behind the expansion decision:

Due to the macro economics and shortage of vehicles, folks are keeping their cars longer so we are adding more services at their request
We are launching Spiffy Brakes in 17 markets nationwide
Mobile brake services round out light repair and preventative maintenance solutions for the 3,000+ vehicles we service daily
Issues like squealing or grinding noises, or even a vibrating steering wheel can indicate it’s time to change your brakes]

Will this mean more jobs and if so where?

Yes, we’ve hired 10-20 technicians specifically for their brake experience, but they have been busy training our other technicians on the service. We’re finding our technicians love that Spiffy invests in expanding their skillset that can be either auto-service oriented (e.g. wash/oil/brakes/tires) and/or management. One thing we’re really proud of is over 30% of our market leaders were promoted through the ranks starting at the technician level.

What’s next? Transmissions? EV batteries? Soon you’ll be rear bumper to front bumper and all points in between!

Bumper-to-bumper, anywhere is our vision, but it’s taking us a while to get there and we have to keep taking smaller steps. Right now we’re focused on going deep with wash/oil/tires/brakes and I don’t think we’ll be rolling out a new service in 2022-2023, but never say never!