Bill Hale

Bill Hale runs FetchGoat, which puts one technology over the thousands of local delivery companies that carry America's parcels.

Hale and Brad met through business, and then Brad drove past his office, saw a goat sticker on the door and took it as a sign. Hale turned up to the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast in a FetchGoat shirt in the summer of 2023, days after the UPS contract was settled, to talk about the Navy, logistics and what happens to the country when a carrier that size stops moving.

Hale has been in logistics for thirty years. The pattern he kept seeing was always the same. He would sit in a conference room with a large customer, then walk out and meet the team, people on phones and email all day chasing delivery status across hundreds of different dispatch systems. Smart people, capable organizations, broken industry. FedEx and UPS do not run their own trucks into every zip code, so in rural areas and low density routes they hand off to regional partners, and a large shipper can end up managing forty, fifty or sixty of them with nothing but staff. FetchGoat lays a single technology over all of them and pulls the data into one dashboard. His partner Chris Mallon architected it.

He grew up poor in Oklahoma with three older sisters and their hand me downs. In third or fourth grade a girl told him he was wearing a girl's shirt because it buttoned from the other side, and he argued until he could not. College in Kansas did not take, and after several requests that he leave the university, he finally did. He joined the Navy to pay for school and picked it so he would not end up stationed back in Kansas. He ran search and rescue from a ship at the tip of the spear in the Gulf through Desert Shield, Desert Storm and Southern Watch, two tours and twenty one rescues, and calls it the best time of his life. Building FetchGoat, he and Chris and a couple of others paid the bill themselves, and only went looking for an investor when the money was running dry.

The thing he has not solved is how to get in a business what the military gets out of putting every background on one ship and turning them into brothers and sisters. What he likes about the regional carriers is smaller and easier to name. The person who brings a customer their box lives and works in that customer's community, and a regional player will tailor a service that FedEx and UPS simply will not. He also remembers walking out onto a platform over a dock in Denver, watching trucks and forklifts going everywhere, and thinking he was home.