Thursday, December 19, 2019
Interview with Joel Milne, RepairSmith, Daimler's Mobile Auto Repair Venture
Our interview this morning is with Joel Milne, the CEO of Los Angeles-based RepairSmith (www.repairsmith.com), a startup offering up mobile automobile repair. We spoke with Joel about how the company is trying to reinvent the car repair experience. Milne is a serial entrepreneur, and last had been running ScoreBig. RepairSmith is backed by Daimler AG.
What is RepairSmith?
Joel Milne: We are delivering car repair, and we are trying to reinvent the car repair experience to make it super convenient.
How does that work?
Joel Milne: The way this works, is a consumer can go to our website, get an online estimate or quote on a job they want done, and we try to provide real price transparency upfront. They schedule an appointment, and finally, we come out to a consumer’s location at home or work. We can do about 85 percent of all repairs on the driveway, on site. If we diagnose something major, where a vehicle has to be taken off site, we will take that vehicle and then bring it back when it’s done. The consumer never has to go to the shop and shuttle back and forth. We are rebuilding car repair from the ground up, in a modern an convenient way.Is this a marketplace, or do you hire your own technicians?
Joel Milne: We are not a marketplace, for a variety of reasons. One, is car repair is a highly skilled profession. In a marketplace scenario, it’s up to the marketplace to provide the quality of what you get. When you look at delivering food, or driving somebody around, that’s not a very highly skilled profession. For car repair, you need a skilled technical to work on this, not just a random person who signs up to fix someone’s car under the brand. There’s a quality of experience, equipment, and tools necessary. We don’t believe the marketplace experience works here. You can’t just hire someone who show up with a bag of tools in their trunk, because you have a hard time doing a lot of the repairs needed on modern cars. All of our mechanics are employees of RepairSmith, and are trained, provided with a brand new Mercedes Benz van, with all the latest tools, scanners, and equipment.How do you scale that, given how are it is to find a good mechanic?
Joel Milne: It is hard to find a good mechanic, that’s totally true. A good mechanic is very valuable. What our business does, is provide really the best work experience environment out there for mechanics. They get all modern equipment and tools, and get to interact directly with customers, and be part of a tech company reinventing car repair. Yes, it’s hard to find a mechanic, but it’s a big industry. This is probably one of the best, and most exciting positions available for mechanics in the industry, so we are attracting the top guys for the industry to come work for us. I think we’re doing things differently, by given them all the things they need to do the job. We have had great success recruiting the best.
What’s your background, and how did you get started on this?
Joel Milne: I spent the last twenty years building tech companies, as a technical founder and co-founder. I did four startups prior to this, and that’s all I’ve done my entire career. A couple were successful, and a couple were not. I spent the last seven years running a company called ScoreBig, a LA-based tech startup in the live entertainment space. Before that, I was involved in other tech ventures. My background is building consumer technology companies.
How did you end up creating a startup in the car repair area?
Joel Milne: For me, I’m only interested in doing consumer technology, because of the opportunity to impact people’s lives. I wasn’t an expert in sports ticketing before I got into ScoreBig, and I wasn’t an expert in car repair before here. My background is on the consumer technology side. This idea actually was initially incubated at Daimler AG, the parent company of Mercedes Benz, and the idea came up in an incubation lab as something that would really disrupt the industry. They wanted to start it, before someone else did. Because of Daimler, there’s a number of people involved from the automotive industry, it’s not just a bunch of tech guys with ideas. There are master mechanics from Germany who are overseeing our technician. Daimler brings the automotive experience, and I bring the consumer technology experience.
How has your experience working with Daimler been, compared to your prior startup experience?
Joel Milne: It definitely helps in having a Fortune 100 company backing you. I connected with them, because they were working with BCG Digital Ventures and I had connections to that group. They were looking for a CEO to build the company for them, and I was in the network of BCG.
What do you think biggest challenge for you in this business?
Joel Milne: In any consumer business, it’s providing an experience that customers love, and getting the message out to consumers on how to get it. It’s differentiating and positioning yourself. We’ve spent a lot of time, probably almost a year before we launched, figuring out what consumers wanted and what matters to them. We were creating our vehicles and experience in a stealth alpha in San Diego, to make sure we could delight consumers, and to make sure we could create something new and different, not just something which is a slight improvement on the current car repair experience. Creating a consumer product is always hard, and reaching them so they believe you have something interesting and different is harder, so we have been super focused on that this first year.
So, what’s next for you?
Joel Milne: Right now, we are in all of Southern California, plus the Bay Area in Northern California. We have Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County, and San Francisco launched. We’ll be focused on the southwest for the foreseeable future, and when the timing is right, we’ll continue our national expansion. We’re really focused on scaling our experience, getting the process right in these markets, and building out a loyal customer base.
Thanks, and good luck!