Founder Spotlight #6: Ed Petersen
The Fortson VC Founder Spotlight series highlighting exceptional startup founders and entrepreneurs is back! This time, we have the pleasure of featuring Ed Petersen, CEO and founder of an innovative company dedicated to removing the hassle of vehicle ownership. Wrench achieves this through a user-friendly automotive care marketplace, offering services like mobile mechanics, comprehensive used vehicle inspections, and flexible pre-paid maintenance programs. These services bring unprecedented convenience and transparency to the realm of auto care. Keep reading for an update from Ed on what he’s looking forward to the most as 2023 comes to a close.
Q: Can you talk about a little bit about Wrench and what makes the company unique?
A: To put it simply, Wrench is an online marketplace that exists to remove the hassle of vehicle ownership. We connect vehicle owners with experts who can help with maintenance, repairs and other issues. While there are a lot of technological advancements in the automotive space overall with autonomous driving, safety enhancements, electric vehicles, etc., how consumers deal with the daily upkeep of their vehicles hasn’t changed in a long time. This is where Wrench comes in. We appeal to the consumer experience and culture of convenience by going directly to our customers to solve their problems. At the press of a button, our customers have an expert on the way who is ready to troubleshoot. This is what has differentiated us and allowed us to grow rapidly.
Q: As the CEO and founder of Wrench, what type of company culture are you building?
A: When I think about the culture at Wrench, the words transparent, authentic and inclusive come to mind. We have an open floor plan – there’s no closed offices and I talk to everyone. When you work at a startup, you have the ability to see more of what is going on in the company as opposed to larger organizations where you can’t always see the full picture. We embrace this at Wrench.
Q: How would you describe your leadership style?
A: I lead by example. I still dig into our Google campaigns and am not above building spreadsheets. I’ve always believed that complex problems are not solved well in isolation – you need multiple perspectives to brainstorm, iterate and commit to next steps. A key part of leadership is the ability to bring the team together to talk about the challenge, put structure around it and move forward. It goes back to transparency – I don’t sit behind a closed door. Accessibility and involvement are critical.
Q: The market has been challenging over the last year and a half. How has Wrench had to pivot?
A: We have had to pivot, but if you pull out our original deck, you’d see our mission is mostly the same. What has pivoted is our timing and execution. When the market was good, valuations were high and we were raising money in favorable terms, we’d say, “Alright, we can spend more on customer acquisition.” Now, we’ve tightened our focus on driving profitability. As a tech startup it’s easy to focus on growing, but we’ve had to pull back on some of that growth to drive profitability. This has been critical to our continued success.
Q: Given where Wrench is today, what are you most excited for in the remainder of Q4?
A: There are several neat partnerships we’ve developed that we look forward to announcing soon. From a business perspective, we’ve spent years building out a marketplace platform that, in addition to these integrated partnerships, will enable us to create a better customer experience. These will launch in Q4 2023 and Q1 2024 and should accelerate our business growth in a pretty rapid way. We are also evolving our product which is exciting. It’s more on the backend – a faster, better and more efficient user experience.
Our industry is growing and changing and has reached an interesting inflection point on a number of levels. We’re seeing a shift in favor of vehicle owners and consumers, and Wrench is in a favorable position to take advantage of that.