PIXY; More Dead-end than Next wave of Gig workforce evolution

30 thg 9, 2021

DISCLAIMER
This is in no way, shape or form, fluid and function, an analytical, qualitative or intelligent compte rendu. There is absolutely no financial advice here because the only financial advice I can give is to research, research, and research. The purpose of this analysis is to serve as an example of an investigation into a company's background, fundamentals, and assets through various lenses to determine what is a good potential investment. The function of this write up is to serve as an educational resource for investors looking to understand how to find good investments. So read and learn some things about a company that puts the whack in SPAC, and misses an opportunity to transform how America works.

Thesis
A handshake is between two. Perhaps the simplest end to the labor squeeze is to create a system beneficial to employer and employ, where work is democratized, and the worker has an equal say in their time and task. Ultimately, ShiftPixy shouldn't be considered a staffing agency, but a communications company. Handshakes are always between two. By opening the door for the company to easily hire from a large pool to fit their empty shifts, they offer the same to the other side; choice. ShiftPixy fills a forlorn gap between archaic hiring methods and an evolvingly mobile workforce. Bridging the divide, this company poses a novel solution to the work shortage, and the next phase of gig employment. In forming a decidedly bearish view of ShiftPixy, it's hard to tell which drives it: possible financial crime, or the absolute failure to launch.

The idea is completely necessary, and if nothing more, ShiftPixy could well serve as the skeleton to take on a growing divide between the gig workers looking for the right job for them, while the job looks for the right gig worker. If employment search 1.0 was the newspaper, 2.0 was online via craigslist/indeed/monster, 3.0 seems fitting to be as mobile as the worker pool. While the time may come for philosophical debates on keeping the population fulfilled without work, no matter how the shift in working demands change, a gig work app that job to jobber will find success. By shining a light on an aging ethos that the worker cannot choose their work, the gig economy has ripped the threads from corporate identification. Instead of targeting companies that would benefit the most from such a change, such as Fast food or chain restaurants, ShiftPixy.com should be full of brand names of partnerships, but no.

Nothing is preventing ShiftPixy from being successful, save for themselves. First, ShiftPixy initiated itself in Irvine, California. What is otherwise a college town ripe with gig work opportunities, and a pervasive culture of change, ShiftPixy found nothing. Their move to Miami hits 1 year, and what was supposedly a planned move, is turning out to be a waste of time. While ShiftPixy has yet to form lungs and walk, COVID may still have killed it despite what should be an amazing time for a company focused on piecemealing gig shifts for an industry starving for employees to fill gaps. Alas, the company moved in a different direction with the Genesis One Laser. It would be unfair to call it a pure distraction and attempted pump, but it is hard to see it as anything else. Aside from clearly breaking countless patent laws promising the same utopia of microbial defense for a cool lightbulb, UV is extremely mutagenic and dangerous to be exposed to for long periods of time for bare skin.

ShiftPixy is a technology company, as it has no product, no market, no consumer, no profitability. As a technology company, it's value is driven entirely by intrinsic worth as dictated by their ability to create a functioning product given appropriate time, capital, and expertise. This company has no personnel worth note save for their CEO, Scott Absher. A professional CEO, Wall Street artisan, and possible con-artist. Scott Absher paints the picture perfectly; an expert entrepreneur and valuable member of the business community, taking prominent host roles in localized shark tanks, hard balls and every other mock Picasso of CNBC's greatest business hits. What Absher truly specializes in, is drawing large amounts of investor's dollars in failed Micro-cap public equities. With a strong history in publicly-traded companies, CEO of at least 4 new SPACs within the last 1.5 years, Absher has a well-established history of abusing the primary functions of the stock market for personal gain. Struxurety, what can only be identified as a ghost-company that focused on staffing, or business legal applications, or advising on any number of affairs, all depending on which iteration and source any sleuth might pull up; Struxurety is a fraud. What was once traded on the OTC market, it can be best summarized by it's several rounds of shareholder dilution based on commercial announcements of faux-success, only for the CEO and friends, to force a squeeze on the stock via forced-CUSIP change via cross-exchange transfer, just for the company to then pull itself off and disappear with untold fortune.

Where ShiftPixy fails as a legitimate bastion of investor value, it fails as a target for judicial short selling. The public float is low, settling just over 20 million shares. However, the company has had 2 private offerings perfectly structured such that should an entity need it, they can pull 25 million shares from private debt. It is unlikely any movement in ShiftPixys price happens aside from ones specifically created. Any attempts at an artificially-timed squeeze can be choked off by a near-limitless ability to sell phantom shares, and to be able to supply privately-bought shares should they be demanded. What's worse, any momentum in ShiftPixy can be quickly canceled by offloading as many of these shares should any amount of buying pressure exist. No matter the possible gains of ShiftPixy, the fundamentals of the company are an App that is poorly reviewed, downloaded, and barren of gig opportunities and gig workers. Any institutional investor would be better served by identifying a privately listed gig shift app, or by developing the technology and team in-house. The single best word to describe ShiftPixy is fragile. No real technology or proprietary engineer, no market-base, no functional director, no success over the last 6 years, weakening books, and impossibly small should a young Arthur come to pull the sword. Gig work gets a solid yes, and a framework for a foundational switch in how America work's is clearly coming, but ShiftPixy and Scott Absher are not bringing it.


CEO Scott Absher
For a much more detailed inquiry, Mr. Irwin Stein wrote a wonderful analysis piece on ShiftPixy and Scott, where he comes to much the same conclusion;
Scott Absher has a history of utilizing equities in publicly listed companies to work around the system and extract millions, to hundreds of millions of dollars from public investors. His article can be found here laweconomicscapital.com/2017/06/shiftpixy-a-reg-a-question-mark/. A brief excerpt:
"There is no prohibition against selling unregistered securities in Alabama (or anywhere else) as long as you file a form with the state, pay the filing fee and make the proper disclosures. Given that the state of Alabama says that some of that did not happen, it seems difficult for me to imagine that Mr. Absher is well suited for the difficult world of employment law compliance."

This analyst believes that Scott Absher has a significant history of fraudulent securities offerings, criminal management of previously listed OTC companies, and a clear mismanagement of ShiftPixy, it's own SPAC just being $150 million that has dwindled to a shell. Furthermore, Scott Absher is taking full advantage of the poor rules and judicial review that SPACs are currently under to start 4 more worth a total of $1.25 billion dollars. Under a more prominent leadership history, this move might be bold but warranted in a time of unprecedented growth, but under the rule of a criminal, this stinks. Knowing full well the SEC's inability to weed the garden, Absher's excessive run on Wall Street leads to just one question: Why are Alliance Global Partners (and friends) not doing their own due diligence in preventing this instead of pushing for more?

For those still hesitant in calling a crook a crook, investigations into Stuxurety will seal the deal.

bloomberg.com/profile/person/20029585
ir.shiftpixy.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/106/shiftpixy-announces-sponsorship-of-four-spac-offerings
renaissancecapital.com/Profile/FMGU/Firemark-Global-Capital/IPO
konaequity.com/company/struxurety-corporation-4398053759/ -2020 Q3
bizapedia.com/nv/struxurety-corporation.html
opencorporates.com/companies/us_nv/E0560662009-8
opencorporates.com/companies/us_wy/2013-000652212
corporationwiki.com/p/2dtawq/struxurety-corporation
sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/755328/000135239207000172/entremetrixdef14c.htm

• Industrial Human Capital, Inc -$250 million
  
• Vital Human Capital, Inc. -$250 million
  
• TechStackery, Inc. -$250 million
  
• Insurity Capital, Inc. -$500 million
  
• Firemark Global Capital - $150 million - Became ShiftPixy - Scott Absher started the company, started the SPAC, and managed the whole ordeal
  

Genesis One Laser
This is a minor point that drives home the situation, personal note below:

businesswire.com/news/home/20210927005266/en/
UV "LASER" technology
First off, this is pure patent infringement from countless other UV products.
Second, the "heat" is not safe. Ultraviolet light is incredibly mutagenic and very, very, very bad to be under for extensive (or even brief) periods. That fact that they joke about the heat is surreal. Scott's composure and attitude during the video were the final indicator for the style of person this guy is. He is an old school salesmen, something lost to modern technology. Aside from the absurdity of the product, and selling a product that is going to give employees cancer, ShiftPixy stretching out is one thing. However, they haven't shown any ability to stretch out within their specific business field. Instead of spending capital, and focusing time and efforts on breaking through chains, or developing an organic chain of ShiftPixy-requisite employers, the company is selling a UV light.

25 Million Private Shares
Press releases below, but please note that quite little of the actual agreement is settled, most of them are warrants to buy. This is the kind of institutional hedge that retail investors will never get. If any investigative body were curious about which entity might be specifically phantom shorting PPIXY, they should probably start by looking at who the shares were privately settled with, starting with Alliance Global Partners who did the book keeping for this offering.

ir.shiftpixy.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/107/shiftpixy-inc-announces-pricing-of-12-million-private ~10 million shares
ir.shiftpixy.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/112/shiftpixy-inc-announces-pricing-of-12-million-private -~15 million shares

Financials - 10-K/Q
ir.shiftpixy.com/sec-filings/all-sec-filings/content/0001104659-21-092623/tm2114170d1_10q.htm
If Warren Buffett is considered the Oracle because he reads 10-Q's, then everyone should spend sometime looking over them. Accountants will be better geared towards adding the numbers up and making sure the math works, but an investor needs to be able to look between the lines, through what adds up mathematically but not logically. In the case of ShiftPixy, it is one simple table, right at the beginning of the form at Item 1. ShiftPixy has had a fundamental decline in accounts receivable, increase in unbilled accounts receivable (which is the made up number to match the difference between whats real and whats listed), and a completely stagnant workers' compensation. All of this being completely unaudited, which means the true numbers are likely even worse. From August 31st, 2020 to May 31, 2021 (in the time period of starting off in Miami where they have supposedly had serious commercial success and ran "work-fests"), Deposits for workers' compensation has gone from 736k to 490k dollars. That is hundreds of thousands of dollars as well, so the entire worker-base ShiftPixy claims could be as little as 30 individuals, or 1 restaurant.

And continued reading of the 10-Q just gets worse. For a company with very little in physical assets, very little in technological assets, very little in serious costs, they seem to burn through cash quick. For having raised a theoretical $24 million in private equities listing, they are only up net-4.5 million dollars (again un-audited) within the same 3Q period. This 10-Q is guaranteed to run through 2 pens, thus a simple reconsideration for the reader to view this filing as a 10-K, a simple media release designed to attract investor attention, and of that it fails in every regard.


Bull Theory
Any upwards price movement worthy of investor notice needs to be founded upon real business moves in the defined business space. ShiftPixy needs to breakthrough, and for that, they need a breakthrough. Genuine instruments to bring investors, and positive movement, should be focused on removing the current management for a team better suited to deal with the technology, the customers (business and worker), and large scale brands. The company should be working on tagging into the fast food chains that have had issues filling shifts; by getting a chain of different fast food restaurants on-board, ShiftPixy creates a large group of possible shifts with highly complimentary task-sets.

The second focus should be on securing employment benefits, health insurance, genuine employment law. There is a difference between keeping things hidden to protect proprietary information, and keeping things hidden because there is nothing there. The black box could be full of magic, or it could be full of poison. As Mr. Stein's analysis from 2017 so perfectly pointed out, and that which has not yet been corrected, ShiftPixy has made no strategic hires that would be indicative of going after mainstream commercial success. If they have something brewing, it is small and weak. This pushes back to the point on fragility. ShiftPixy gets limited attempts in limited time. Even if they have the best idea or product ever, and it just came too early and didn't catch on, the name will grow old and the hottest challenger will gain traction. Classic business sense dictates that ShiftPixy has maybe a year longer of runway time in Miami before they need to find somewhere completely new to try again, all while failing to realize the target of corporate headquarters.

Big media attention. If there was any way to spend the millions in capital they have available, given they have the product and app working perfectly (which they don't), it is to get everyone talking about ShiftPixy and gig-work. Everyone should be talking about the Uber of Taco Bell shifts. Instead, we have a labor shortage and no technical solutions.

Bear Theory
As much of this analysis is bear theory, this section will remain brief with a serious warning; just because the company doesn't look like it will or should win, doesn't mean it won't. While Scott Absher looks like a professional bullshit artist, every dog may have their day. It really only takes one major turn and ShiftPixy could have hundreds of thousands of gig workers within months. Were the team competent-apparent, this analysis would go much in the opposite where this space might be blank because the possible success was too great for the possible failures.

Disclaimer
Thank you for your time, I truly value it and hope that this brings value to it. This analysis is not to serve as primary financial advice, rhyme or reason. This work is to serve as an editorialized overview of the parts and pieces of the investment, as well as the different ways this author analyzes them. As of the date of publication, 9/30/2021, this author has no investment in ShiftPixy PPIXY in any form.

As the primary purpose of this article is to be informative of the company, the stock market, and relevant market mechanics, please feel free to ask any questions.

Thank you.