Hanover
Russ Walker and Ed Warren thought it was time to change that.
Walker and Warren, two second-year students at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, have launched a company — Zippity — that brings auto care to the customer’s workplace. Oil changes and other light maintenance are done in the parking lot of the customer’s employer, preventing drivers from having to take time out of their work day to go to a service center.
Wall Street, Silicon Valley and corporate consulting are typically the siren calls for ambitious Tuck students. But the dirt-under-the-fingernails — literally — aspect of addressing an everyday need is precisely what drew Walker and Warren to their outlier venture.
“You can’t solve the car mechanic industry with a cool idea and software. There is a tangible problem here,” Walker said. “We take pride this is not just another app.”
Zippity was born out of Walker’s and Warren’s “First Year Project,” in which Tuck students undertake either a consulting or entrepreneurial project during the spring term. The two classmates leaned toward the entrepreneurial track and, through a mutual friend, learned they both were playing with the same idea: The hassle that accompanies basic car service and what could be done to make the experience easier.
“The angst around car care is something we both had been stuck on,” Walker said. “Both of us had been three hours waiting to have our tires rotated, how nothing is transparent. I can do anything on my phone, but I enter the car mechanic world and I go back 50 years.”
Zippity’s concept is simple: Customers log onto Zippity’s website — typically from their phone — and make an appointment for routine maintenance, such as having the engine oil changed, windshield wipers replaced or interior cleaned.
The appointment is scheduled to coincide with the day of the week when Zippity’s mobile service trailer shows up at the parking lot at the customer’s employer.
When the employee arrives at work he or she parks their car wherever they want in the lot and let Zippity know where the vehicle is located via a screen pin map on their phone. The employee then drops the keys in a locker box located at a centralized location. A Zippity technician retrieves the keys, drives the car to the mobile service trailer in the lot, where it’s serviced, and returns the car back to its parking spot (which has been marked with a place holder so as not to have been occupied by another driver).
The technician returns the keys to the locker for the customer to pick up by the time designated. Start to finish time: 45 to 60 minutes per car.
Throughout the process the customer receives text notices to remind him or her of the appointment, where the locker box — which Zippity calls a “key-osk” — is located and when the car is ready. The the car is ready for the customer when he or she returns from work at the spot where they parked it.
In the seven weeks since Zippity has launched — including an test run in the fall — Zippity has serviced more than 200 cars, according to Walker.
Still in a startup stage, Walker and Warren have rolled out Zippity — with its 24-foot-long custom service trailer — to the employee parking lots on the Dartmouth campus as well as the employee lots at health and fitness center River Valley Club, business incubator Dartmouth Regional Technology Center and biotech firm Adimab in Lebanon and Hypertherm’s Heater Road plant. Walker is hopeful the service will soon be available to employees at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.
And Zippity already has fans.
Jen Poljacik, chief executive officer at the River Valley Club, so far has had her Chevy Traverse SUV — “a total mom car,” she called it — serviced four times by Zippity: twice for oil changes and twice for interior cleanings.
“I live in Grantham and the only time I could go (for an oil change and service) was on a Saturday. I’d have to drop off my car because I refuse to sit in a waiting room of the mechanic or do the whole husband-wife drop-off thing. Such a hassle. The fact that I can go to work, drop the keys in the ‘key-osk’ is really an efficiency. … It’s so nice not to have to deal with garages,” Poljacik explained.
Poljacik was so impressed with the convenience of Zippity’s workplace-based car service that she even bought gift cards for River Valley Club employees.
At present, Zippity charges for six services: $39 for an oil change ($55 using synthetic oil); “basic” car cleaning for $40 and “premium” for $85 and windshield wiper blade replacement for $25 ($45 for higher-quality blades). Each service is discounted by $10 if a customer buys more than one.
By contrast, a conventional oil change at Jiffy Lube on Route 12A in West Lebanon starts at $41.99 and with synthetic oil goes up to $89.99.
In coming months, Warren and Walker, hope to add tire rotation, brake jobs, head and brake light replacement, battery installations, air filter changes, detailing, car washing and possibly even licensed state car inspections to the roster of services Zippity offers.
Not on the horizon are more involved mechanical jobs such as muffler, transmission and shock absorber replacements that require more access to the vehicle than can be accommodated in the modified 24-foot service trailer.
Neither Warren or Walker will divulge how much they’ve invested so far to get Zippity up and running, although a $5,000 Founders Grant awarded by the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network for promising ventures provided seed money for the pilot test early in 2016.
The teal-and-red service trailer, emblazoned with the Zippity logo and motto (“Car care at work, while you work”) and with reinforced steel ramps inside so technicians can slide under the car to drain the engine oil, cost “less than a brand-new car,” Warren said.
Before they launched, Warren and Walker undertook a three-phase research study to evaluate consumers’ attitude toward car service to find out their biggest beefs. Through in-person interviews, online surveys and test advertising on Facebook the themes that came up most frequently were inconvenience, uncertainty over price and trust in the service provider.
Identifying a need by what people say is one thing, Warren and Walker knew, but how potential customers actually followed through would be even more significant.
In an eye-opening exercise, Warren and Walker sent a communitywide email query to Tuck students to gauge interest in having their car cleaned and engine oil changed while they would be in classes. Within 24 hours they received 125 positive responses and 25 actual requests from Tuck students for the service.
So Walker and Warren got to work over the next several days cleaning cars for $25 a pop. While the sight of a couple of Tuck students vacuuming out dirty cars might not look like a promising career path, Walker and Warren gained knowledge into what could become a valuable market insight.
“We came away knowing there’s something here,” Walker said. “Getting (servicing) done while you work really resonates with people.”
Ann Thompson, for example. Thompson, a senior marketing operations specialist at Hypertherm’s Heater Road facility, recalled how she looked out her office window one day and saw Zippity’s trailer in the parking lot.
Curious, she looked up the company’s website and was pleased to discover she could get her oil changed and the interior of her Volkswagen Jetta cleaned, which “was a mess from the winter weather.”
“They cleaned my interior while I was working,” Thompson said via email. “I parked my car in the same spot that I do every morning; dropped off my key on the way to my desk; and when I left at the end of the day, my car was parked back in the spot that I had parked it in that morning.”
She said the car was “spotless inside and they even cleaned the trunk interior.” Thompson pronounced herself entirely satisfied with the results, noting “they left me an air-freshener and mints.”
Walker and Russ designed the trailer themselves on their laptops with computer-aided design software. The website was built and coded by Dan Swanton, a longtime friend of Warren’s with a computer science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has become a third partner in the business.
Operating a business, especially one involving physical labor and equipment, on another business’s property, can be tricky because of liability issues. But Zippity carries standard “garage liability insurance,” Walker pointed out, which covers such accidents as a customer slipping on an oily rag at the work site.
In addition, the 11-page, 7,436-word “terms and conditions” agreement that customers must accept states that the service is provided by Zippity, not the customer’s employer, and customers must “hold your employer harmless against any and all liability, damage or expense, including any damage that your vehicle may cause, as a result of services provided by Zippity.”
To realize their expansion goal, Walker and Warren will, of course, need capital, but they so far are encouraged about their prospects.
By the time they were ready for launch last month, Warren and Walker had lined up an “angel investor from the local area,” Walker said, and they received additional capital from “friends and family” that is enough to keep Zippity running through the summer. They plan to do a second round of funding through debt that will convert into equity to finance expansion at additional sites outside the Upper Valley in New England.
Walker said there are “strategic partners” who have signaled their interest in backing Zippity’s expansion, in addition to “a large company in the automotive oil space,” that he declined to identify.
Zippity has two technicians so far, but Walker said they need to hire more (technicians need to be certified by the National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence, the body that approves professionals and shops in the car repair and service industry).
Regardless, Warren and Walker said, the goal is not to own an empire of Zippity trailers but rather to franchise the business to local operators the way Jiffy Lube, Midas and refuse hauler Got Junk are franchised to local owner-operators. Walker estimates a single-trailer Zippity franchise would end up costing an operator about $100,000 to get started.
“We’ve developed a plug-and-play system that we want to scale aggressively,” Walker said.
Ironically, neither Walker, an Idaho native who went to Brigham Young University before Tuck, nor Warren, a Lebanon native who attended Tufts and whose father, Dr. Edward Warren, owns Mascoma Eyecare in Lebanon, are all that much into cars. Walker drives a 2007 Mazda 6 and Warren drives a 2012 Toyota Matrix, neither of which is likely to impress gearheads.
“Neither of us are guy guys,” Walker said. “But we just hated the problem.”
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
