Thursday, August 1, 2019
Interview with Rich Branning, Sweep
Rich Branning is the CEO and co-founder of Sweep (www.sweepcrew.com), a company that handles logistics, maintenance, and other heavy lifting required for on-demand scooter companies like Bird, Lime, and others. We caught up with Rich to better understand the business, and why he thinks it's critical that companies like his step in to handle the labor intensive, logistics challenge that on-demand scooter companies have created for themselves.
What is Sweep all about?
Rich Branning: We started Sweep in the Fall of 2017, when Travis first dropped scooters at the First Street Promenade. We've been in the last mile space since it's conception. Our company started with a few buddies of mine from Pepperdine and one of their brothers, and they're all local, Southern California guys who moved to Pepperdine and grew up locally here in Los Angeles. I'm originally from Palo Alto, but I graduated from Pepperdine in 2012. We all had a background in different spaces, primarily in the startup and technology space. I grew up in the Bay Area, in an interesting time, in the 200's, where there were lots of emerging technology and innovative companies growing. I was able to see first hand how quickly things can happen. Our aim and focus, is we feel fundamentally that the last mile is a lot less about software and sleek, aggressive scaling like Uber, where you're just adding software to a car, and is a much more, labor intensive business like UPS. It's more UPS than Uber, because you have so many assets to be managed. Looking at how companies were doing that, we though that the vendors could focus on the technology and the product, but they wouldn't be able to work on the most important operational and human elements of the space. That has been a vastly neglected talking point. Some of those companies are using a charger model, and other people are doing this internally, but they are both different logistical nightmares. With a business like Amazon, you can ask people to drive around a van and drop off 100 packages, and that's very black and white. They just drop off the package and walk away. However, when you're talking about scooters, when it comes to collecting those scooters, you have to jump fences, risk getting bitten by a dog, and you've got to grab those scooters and put them in a car. You've got to interface with public officials, with the police, and people on the street. You get yelled at again and again. For us, in the long term, we want to bring accountability to local governments in this space, but we're not there ate the moment. We're handling logistics, and run markets where we take on full operations, warehouses, and hire teams. We spent the first year on vendors, and since then, we've opened up in West LA, Long Beach, Denver, and Detroit, and we've spent time in Dallas and Charlotte. We want to provide accountability for cities when vendors come in and want to play ball.
What does this look like to cities?
Rich Branning: We sit on the regulation side. It changes from city-to-city what it looks like, but for the most part what we provide is a level playing field. We want everything to be safe, but at the same time we want those services to flourish, but we make sure their scooters are not in the middle of the road, the correct number of scooters they are licensed to have are being stuck to, and we're also releasing the ability now for the community to get involved. For example, people can let us know if there's an issue with a scooter in the middle of the street. What we have here is a classic millennial versus baby boomer kind of thing going on. Lots of the baby boomer don't necessarily jibe with these vehicles being all over, but there are a lot of millennials getting around on them. We want to create an environment where citizens feel like their voice is being heard. So, in the future, when someone sees a scooter in the middle of the street, they can use the app and it will let both a vendor, as well as us know about the issue. We have a relationship with those cities so that, after an hour, if the vendor hasn't picked up their scooter, we go in and we enforce the bylaws of that city.
Why don't these companies just go do this themselves?
Rich Branning: It's impossible for these venture backed companies. They're all about growth and revenues, and it's not about playing by the rules. That's never been Silicon Valley's fundamental avlue. Because it's not software, and they want to scale fast, they don't want to have to deal with all of this intense labor and heavy assets needed to manage their scooters properly. However, this isn't software, these are vehicles. This needs to be handled with more care than you might with a software company. It's not fair to ask vendors to keep themselves accountable, which is not necessarily a bad thing. They are rewarded and incentivized to grow and bush the boundaries, and we just need a place to meet in the middle.
You mentioned all of this logistics is hard to scale. How does your company succeed with those constraints?
Rich Branning: It's not a sexy business. It's a blue collar, gritty business. But, in kind of way, that's why we've been able to differentiate ourselves. Not many, college-age millennials want to be on the street late at night, grabbing scooters and jumping over fences. Instead, they'd rather be over at WeWork drinking their kombucha. However, we see what we're doing as a positive. Our saying is, we have a blue collar ethic, but a white collar business model, and that's the kind of culture we're trying to promote. When we're out getting scooters, we call it smashing, when we're out, we're all about smashing. It's a motiviational thing, like how a platoon would fight a war. In a way, we're fighting our own war, so we pump up our team and send them out and get to work. It's actually pretty fun. It's great to put some good tunes on in the van and with your co-workers, listen to music, and go grab scooters. A lot of this is an accountability game. You don't know what's missing and why it's missing sometimes. I guarantee you, we have touched more scooters than anyone else in the work in the past two years. We've done lots and lots of manual labor ourselves, have now scaled our operations nationwide, and now we have people in every geographic time zone working for us.
Are those folks employees or contractors?
Rich Branning: We do both W-2 and some temps, but we're primarily W-2.
How has the response of scooter companies been to what you're doing?
Rich Branning: It depends on who you ask. I think, in our sit downs with all of them, they very much understand the pain point we're trying to solve. I think that, in the long term, scooters are actually a commodity. The technology is all a commodity, they really have no differentiator. Personally, as a consumer of scooters, if there's a scooter 20 feet from me, and even if 40 feet away there's a five times better scooter, which has better wheels and goes faster, I'll still pick the one that is nearest to me. There just isn't that much of a differentiation. What vendors have neglected a bit, is service is how you differentiate yourself from a relationship standpoint. I think what this space is going to look like, is the vendors figuring out how to get their product into the hands of the customer. They are going to be very thankful that Sweep exists, down the road, because we're bringing a lot of the personal touch element to this, which is lacking in this space. That's one of the biggest complaints about this space, and that's very well known. The level of personal touch is not there.
I imagine, with that much contact with scooters, you've seen how well they do or don't hold together. Given the issues those scooter vendors are seeing with keeping that equipment on the street, what have you seen?
Rich Branning: I can't speak to vendor-to-vendor, because there are so many variables at play, however, it's really something that's been an ongoing project for everyone. I will say that you can see the improvements in scooters from when we started out. The first ones we saw were like what you'd put under your Christmas tree for your 8-year old. Now, they're much more robust, and they're heavier. I can tell you, above the board, I think you're see a far better rate of loss from attrition and thefts now.
What's next for you?
Rich Branning: We'd like to continue to grow domestically, if also not internationally, and we feel that if you look at this space it's the people component that is most important. Not to sound cheesy, but that matters so much. As the technology and products continue to adapt, they will become more and more commoditized. They will find that they need companies like Sweep, which has an industry knowledge the other just neglect, and we'll become more and more valuable for a myriad of different things. Cities have grown a lot of interest in this, and that's why they are our focus now.
Thanks!