Like many great start-up ideas, GoFor started as a napkin sketch. Having spent 10 years in the construction industry after a career in technology, co-founder Brad Rollo recognized a common problem faced by people like him while out for drinks one night. “I was out with a couple of construction buddies, and we were all complaining about the same issue — having expensive tradespeople leaving the job site and being ‘gophers’ picking up building materials — which caused costly disruptions in our productivity” says Rollo. “One of them was like, you have a tech background, why don’t you solve it?’ And that’s how GoFor (Gopher) started.
FROM ‘GOPHER’ TO LAST-MILE DELIVERY AND LOGISTICS-TECH DISRUPTOR
GoFor launched in 2016 with a service that offered on-demand site delivery of construction materials. Through this innovation, they saw a huge opportunity for truck-free companies to be able to leverage their delivery fleet and for companies with truck assets to supplement their fleet to give them the ability to expand into new markets and offer same-day delivery. Disrupting the industry, one mile at a time, GoFor has experienced exponential demand and growth in the home improvement and retail industries.
Today they specialize in trucks of all sizes that can deliver small to big and bulky items within two hours of purchase. With consumers buying online more and more, the delivery moment is quickly becoming the only touchpoint a consumer has with a brand. A great customer experience that is predictable with delivery in hours instead of days, is the new standard, so access to last-mile delivery has never been more critical to a business’s survival.
“84% of customers have said they won’t buy from a company after just one bad delivery experience. We have made it our sole business focus to solve efficiency in the delivery stretch from retailer or warehouse to the end-user, also known as the last-mile. Merchants are continually moving the needle on customer experience — but the last-mile delivery experience has most often been ignored.”
WWW.GOFORDELIVERS.COM
The company has made hundreds of thousands of deliveries and continues to experience exponential revenue growth. Delivering across all of North America, the company’s hundreds of customers include some of the biggest names in retail such as The Home Depot, Canadian Tire, Dulux/PPG, Sherwin Williams, Fastenal, and Ceratex as well as the biggest names in delivery services such as FedEx and Purolator.
As GoFor becomes embedded in its partners’ ecosystems they are helping them scale and drive efficiencies so they can exceed their customer’s expectations on the frontend. This has allowed GoFor to scale to the next stage of its evolution — an Enterprise SaaS suite that includes dispatch, fleet management, and logistics reporting.
GoFor’s dedication to innovation has helped it secure funding from some of the best VC’s in the world focused on construction tech including Builder’s VC, MetaProp, GroundBreak Ventures, Panache Ventures, Plug & Play, CEMEX Ventures, Force1 Investments, I2BF Global Ventures, and Mucker Capital. The company also has an impressive leadership team composed of three co-founders with extensive experience building successful businesses across logistics, supply chain, construction, and technology verticals. This expertise combined with the company’s iterative approach to innovation has allowed it to expand quickly.
“We solve a set of basic problems for merchants, then we build on our relationships and provide additional solutions to more complex challenges by asking, ‘what opportunities are here? How can we help?’” says Rollo. “The expertise level on our team expedites this process — and we’re able to get innovations to market quickly.”
As on-demand same-day delivery becomes the new normal, GoFor is disrupting the delivery industry and developing a new delivery standard that is revolutionizing the customer experience for the retail and e-commerce industries.
