Why I Started fetch
Sitting in front of an Excel sheet everyday can make some people go crazy. Including me. But it did give me a lot of time to daydream and think about businesses to start. I earned a finance degree from the University of Minnesota and worked in corporate finance for a while in MN before I moved to Dallas, TX in late 2015. Although I moved to TX for another finance job, I was looking for something to start on my own. Something to pour my blood, sweat, and tears into, and something I would be proud to call my own.
What happened next I attribute to fate more than anything. I moved to one of the biggest Uptown Dallas apartment buildings and quickly had a few packages lost in the shuffle of the onsite package room. The wheels are turning…
I looked around and saw most buildings still handling packages themselves, allocating valuable real estate and staff time to handle hundreds or thousands of packages a week. Where does it end? E-commerce isn’t going anywhere, and in fact it’s growing at 20% every year. Do buildings really want to dedicate the required space and resources to continue doing this themselves for years to come? No. There’s no way.
What I came up with was to re-direct all resident packages to a local warehouse. This solves the problem for the property manager, getting them completely out of the package business. Then how do you solve the problem for their valued residents? You offer door-to-door delivery on their schedule, not around leasing office hours.
I got into a local tech accelerator program in Dallas with this idea, which gave me enough confidence to quit my job and dedicate all my time to figuring it out. Credit to my family for supporting my decision, I’m sure they thought I was certifiably crazy. I knew next to nothing about multifamily real estate (which would be one hell of a learning curve) and I had no experience in logistics. But here I was starting a company specializing in last-mile logistics for apartment buildings.
Fast forward almost 3 years, I’m most proud of the team we’ve assembled. We now have nearly 50 employees and many more drivers working to make our dream a reality. We have a group of incredibly hard workers but more importantly good people. At the risk of sounding cliché, we don’t hire assholes. It’s not a saying, it’s an actual requirement. I’m in awe of our team on a daily basis, and I’m eternally grateful for the opportunity we’ve been given. It’s certainly been a mix of good timing, luck and most of all perseverance.
We work every single day to make sure our property managers and residents are taken care of. From our warehouse staff to our software engineers, resident experience is at the forefront of everything we do. We know we’re handling precious cargo (sometimes toilet paper, but hey that’s precious too) and we take every single delivery seriously with the intent of making it the best experience possible. We’ve come so far but we’re only getting started…
