All right, we are going to start in three, two, and one. All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of coffee with the freight Coach. My name is Chris Jolly. I am your host and I am the freight coach. Before we jump into the episode, as always, thank you guys so much for coming out and listening to this podcast. If this is your first time tuning in, welcome. This is the real side of freight, ladies and gentlemen. And I say that before every single show. And what I mean by that is I only speak to transportation professionals because at the end of the day, I want to talk to the right individuals who have done what you're looking to do or who are currently doing what you're trying to achieve.
So you can take this information, apply it, utilize it, and see a meaningful difference in your business and your life. I do have one small favor to ask. I know you will, but if you get value and you're not subscribed, subscribe to the show. You guys share it out there to your network. Because if you see value, your network's going to see value as well. All right, I got a very special guest for you guys here today. They were like, literally one of my first advertisers back in the day. And I, you know, I've gotten to know him here over the years. The standup guy is the first thing that comes to my mind every single time I think about him and what he's building over there, with his company. And they've experienced some great growth.
And we're here to talk about all of that today. So I got Mister Brad pearling here today, the founder of Bit Freighter. So, Brad, thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me. Excited to be on the show today. Looking forward to a good conversation here.
No, man, I like, it was funny because when we logged on, you had the backwards hat on and I didn't, you were like, upset, like, where's your hat? And I'm, I hadn't even put it on you. Normally when I log in early to make sure everything's done, and very rarely are people ready to go like that, man. So you were locked and loaded. I love it.
Yeah, our vp of sales, Dave, he was like, dude, you gotta make sure you got your backwards hat. Like. And I was like, oh, man, I gotta go dig it out. So I got the bit freighter. Got the bit freighter hat on. The trucker hat had to show up dressed appropriately for this conversation.
Oh, man, I love it. So, dude, let's, let's, let's take it back to the beginning, man. What, what happened that you were just like, I want to go out on my own. I want to start bit freighter. Like, talk us through that, man. Where's the origin of this?
Well, first of all, bit freighter is nothing. A one person idea. It was, you know, a lot of people have had their hands in building this thing, so I can't take credit for it. There's a lot of people behind bit freighter, including my co founder, Brandon Joyce. But, you know, I spent ten years in the trenches booking freight. I was an early employee at a company called Calvary logistics. There were times where it was just me and another guy booking loads. We used to book 60, 70 truckloads a week manually back in 2010, right out of college. And I loved brokerage. I just couldn't get enough of it and had an opportunity to grow with that company early on to 300 plus people. And then went out on my own and started another brokerage with a buddy of mine.
And I wore the tech hat over there, always looking for efficiencies. And I really enjoyed the tech side of things and felt like what I had learned over the years, I could go and potentially help a ton of brokerages that were being taken advantage of. And so really, the heart of bit freighter is just trying to help logistics companies, like try to help them, whether they're gonna sign up for our platform or just us being an advocate for integrations with shippers, but really just being an advocate for helping logistics companies solve these tech problems, because there's a lot of tech people that don't have our background, don't have freight brokerage background, don't have the heart of what's right, trying to do what's right for people. So that's really the motivation behind bit freighter is just trying to help people.
And hopefully we're the, you know, solving a problem as well.
So, yeah, that's, I think, like you, if people apply what you just said there, Brad, at the end of your. The whole purpose of Bitfriter is to help people. You will save so many early stage entrepreneurs so much headache over the years of shifting their focus to how do we create value to our users? Not how do we make money, how do we do any. It's how do we create value for our customers, our users, and even people who might come and demo your stuff. And you know what? They just choose not to be, you know, for whatever reason, they go in a different direction. How do they always look back and say bit freighter did the right thing. And that's one of those missions, man, that I want for all the businesses that I'm involved in, Brad.
I just want people to look back and be like, hey, they did the right thing. Like, that's honestly my number one core value in business, in my business, in my life is do the right thing. Like it's on my wall in my office is do the right thing. The right thing isn't easy, you know, in more times than not. But I think at the end of the day, if you try your best to apply that time and time again, success will find you. It's inevitable.
Hundred percent. That's one of our core values at dip freighter is actually do the right thing. So it's, you know, a foundation of who we are. It's one of the things that actually why we founded the company of. So at the end of the day, you know, we want to do the right by, do right by our customers and buy people that just simply need help. And, you know, if you're trying to start a company, you need to understand what problem you're solving. Yeah. Like if you're starting a logistics company, yeah, you're moving freight, but what problem are you actually solving for your customers and how do you find that niche? Because we're, that's really what bitfreighter is. We're a freight tech niche and our niche is helping logistics companies connect with their shippers. That is it. That's all we do.
We help integrate systems from TMS to TMS and, you know, solve those four points, which is quoting, tendering updates and invoicing for logistics companies. And if you can find your niche and really solve that problem, well, that's really where you'll see the growth and that's why people will pay you. It's not, like you said, solve the problem first and then the money will come.
Trey, so how have you, this is more of an entrepreneur question than anything, man. How have you reinvested in yourself to become a better entrepreneur? Is it through reading? Is it through, you know, are you, do you get coaching? What, what does that look like? Because you're, and I'm saying that because like, man, you're saying a lot of like very high level stuff that I feel like a lot of people overlook.
Yeah, I mean, I am super lucky because the company I started out at had a book list and you, and to be honest, I kind of rolled my eyes at it in the beginning when I, right out of college, I didn't need that book list.
Right.
I knew everything. But, no, but seriously, to be in a leadership role at that company, you had to read 20 books, and that list had different categories. Leadership, sales, bunch of different categories on that list. And I. About seven months in, I started drinking the Kool Aid, and I read the list, and then I got to 30 books, and then I got to 35 books. And now I'm constantly adding books to my audible, to listen to them, and listening to podcasts, listening guys like you, listening to, you know, different freight tech podcasts and different. Different podcasts out there trying to learn from smart people that seem to have good advice. So I would say reading and following the right people and surrounding yourself with the right people. You know, I.
One of the things about Bitfrater is that I am lucky to be surrounded by a lot of really smart people. And so that's another big thing that I really appreciate about Bitfrader is that I. I get to work with some of the smartest people I've ever been around and just trying to. When you're an entrepreneur. I was thinking about this the other day. In the beginning, you have to do everything yourself. You have to figure out everything yourself. But you want to hire people that are better than you and hire people that are better at every job than you, that are specialized in better jobs, and let them own those jobs and trust them. And I think that's one of the things about bit trader, is that we.
One of our, like, philosophies and businesses about, because we're 100% remote, is the idea of freedom and responsibility, and that we really give that to our employees and our leadership is that they have freedom to really make decisions. But those decisions come with responsibilities and to lead with context. So. Yeah, good question.
No, dude, I. Because, like, I, you know, man, in full transparency, like, I always struggled with reading growing up. I struggled with comprehension. And it was one of those things where. But ironically, the best way to kind of fight your. Your struggle is to read more. And I really got involved in, reading more books when I started, really taking back control of my health. Like, I've done 75 hard a couple of times, and reading ten pages a day is a requirement in there. And it was, to me, it wasn't that I struggled with reading. It was the books that I struggled the books themselves. Cause, like, the books that I read now about self development and, you know, improving your brain and understanding why your brain worked.
Like, that stuff interests me, and that's been the one of the biggest things that I think that has helped me through the early stages in business is there's so much information that's out there, whether it's in an audiobook or a traditional book or on a podcast. And it's free, right? Because, like, dude, I couldn't afford coaching when I first started my business. Like, man, I was delivering pizzas to make sure my rent was paid, you know, and stuff like that. But if you listen to some of these individuals that are out there who've built real businesses, right, I'm not talking wannabe influencers who are trying to sell you a course. I'm talking people who have built real companies. They give away so much free information that puts you in the right direction and prepares you for.
For growing and scaling your company, because it's, it's so much. And really, you know, all the, like, one of the best books that I've read, and this has, like, fundamentally changed me in business, is made in America by Sam Walton. That has led to my core, changed how I am going to build and scale my business when it comes down to, like, compensating employees and other things like that. Like, it's changed a lot of stuff. And all that took was $15, you know? How many of you are spending $15 in a day at Starbucks? You know.
For sure. I. I mean, reading is, it's something that didn't come natural to me either. I know, to be honest, I was a c student growing up. And, you know, I definitely struggled with that and struggling to find motivation to read. And, of course, like that when I started at that first company, it wasn't something that I was super excited about, but I'm glad that I, you know, found a. Found the motivation to pick up those books and to go read them and to learn from them and actually take it seriously, because honestly, I think it changed the course of my life.
Yo, dude, I'm right there with you, man. I think, like, for me, made in America and then think and grow rich by Napoleon Hill. Those two books are like, if anybody out there who's listening to this wants a recommendation, literally, those two books are the first ones that I would pick up and read. I think that they're, you know, for me because, you know, like, dude, manifestation and visualization and everything, it's a very real thing, man. It really is. And it's wild, and I didn't believe it when I first started doing it. And, like, but, dude, I, like, I accidentally manifested the house that we bought, it was wild because, like, when I first read Napoleon Hill thinking girl, Richie was talking about that. And I, like, I just envisioned the house that I wanted.
I'm like, I live in Arizona, so I'm like, I want a house with a pool. And, like, legitimately, man, the. Literally, the last house that were touring, it didn't hit me until we did the second walkthrough. But I'm like, this is the one for my visions. I'm like, holy shit, this is wild, you know? So again, it's like that whole connection, it's all like. And it sounds kooky as shit for people who've never actually, like, done it, but it's a very real thing to me.
I believe it. Yeah. You know, when you decide what you want, a lot of times those things come true. I would say the book that I like to tell a lot of people about that we actually bought for all the employees at our company meet up last year is the go giver. It's a mentality that, you know, the go giver is a phenomenal book because it's about giving more than you receive. And so, you know, the idea of give, give, then get, and you're constantly looking to provide the universe with, you know, better in the universe, and then from there, that's. Things will come to you. So the go giver is a phenomenal book. I'm also a big believer in the Patrick Lenciani, a lot of the fables by him.
So a lot of business fables that I enjoy listening to those because there's a good story and then a good outline there. So those are a couple good ones, nuggets that for the listeners they can go check out.
Dude, I love it, man. So what's been, where are we at with bit freighter? Because I think freight tech is, it's grown a lot. There's definitely seen some new brands that have shuffled them out of the market and they're coming back in. But you guys have, at least from my perspective as an outsider looking in, you guys are like, you're there for the long haul, man. You guys are constantly out there and you're growing at a very respectable rate.
Yeah. We just reached 25 employees. We have the majority of the TMS market connected to us now. So we just had, and I can announce this here, we just had Rose Rocket TMS and three PL systems sign up to, for us to be their preferred EDI partner. So that's a big deal for us. And we're going to continue to partner with TMS platforms to make it easier to connect for their logistics companies to connect to their shippers. So for Bitfrater, we are quoting automation and integration platform. So what that means is we automate the lifecycle of a load. We're the only platform to be able to do that with EDI and API capabilities. And on top of that, we offer that with unlimited messaging. So that's the big thing that we started the company at.
The idea for the company was the traditional integration platforms all charge transactionally. They're called character charges. And what we decided to do is offer unlimited messaging. And for instance, we have a customer that works with Anheuser Busch. We processed 100,000 transactions for them last month and they paid us $175. Holy 100,000 transactions. So that company was able to grow their messages by ten x and I not have to worry about transactional fees. And that is the power of what we're doing for logistics companies, allowing them to grow their volumes with their shippers without the fear of increased integration costs.
So what is that like, what's the standard EDI fee that's out there, man? Because like, I mean, those are those things where like when I talk about selling into customers and you know this, I'm not like knocking on your business or anything like that, but like, if you can't afford EDI and you get an EDI customer, I don't think people realize that costs money.
Yeah, I mean it, I've heard it all over the place. We had somebody that just switched to us that was paying four to five grand a month for one shipper. So, you know, you go from that to, you know, $175 per shipper. It's, it's a yemenite, it's a huge savings, allows our customers to grow. And again, it's about helping them in having people on our staff that understand their business. Because all of our sales and ops people have freight backgrounds. Whether they brokered freight before, they've been on at a freight tech company, but they all come. Nobody's new to the space.
No, I think that's one thing that a lot of people look at, right? Because, you know, there's a lot of great technology that's out there, but there's a lot of very expensive technology. And, you know, I'm all about automation in ways that we can. I want to automate most processes internally, but I never want to automate the customer and the carrier experience. I want them to deal with live humans you know, that's just a personal preference of mine.
I.
But there's a lot of stuff out there though, that it's like, you know, it literally, like it'll put you out of business, you know, because it's like you can't, you know, buy all and invest in all of this technology.
Yeah, you can't have a $10,000 freight tech stack when you're only making $20,000 a month. Like it, that doesn't work. Right. It has to make sense. And the other big thing that we've been working on since September of 22, we've been working on our Livequote tool. Livequote is an automated API, spot board and real time rating API tool. And it allows companies to set up automation to essentially run in the background and win spot freight and win real time rating dynamic pricing loads from their shippers. And we currently have 18 APIs available now. So we can connect to 18 different spot boards, which is, I don't know if that's the most in the market, but it is a very large, robust API catalog and we're adding one to two new APIs every month. And we just introduced our new rules engine.
So Livequip 2.0 was released in Mayenne, which allows our customers to completely automate how they quote, with a very robust rules engine.
So where are you guys pulling, like, what does this look like? Where are you guys pulling rates from? Are you guys integrated with load boards, with greenscreen, stuff like that? And then your user choose because they have their own, like, you know, they're, they have a green screens account and they want to be able to automatically bid to a shipper's TMS without having somebody manually do it. Then they just use you guys to make that connection between green screens and the shipper TMS.
Correct. We are the, I would call us an orchestration platform. So we orchestrate truck prices, capacity, and then a rules engine. The rules engine allows you to do markups, but also allows you to opt out so you can build out, let's say middle Tennessee is a place that you don't want to take freight from. You can create three digit zip code clusters to opt out of certain areas and have the whole rules engine be able to process through the quotes as they come in. So it's looking at not only the truck price from your preferred pricing engine, but also your capacities. You enter your capacities into our platform and then also it has a full rules engine. So it's an orchestration platform. Then on top of that, you can go pick up to 18 different APIs to quote your freight.
And right now we're still seeing that the primary and secondary tenders are all being accepted. So the spot market is still pretty low. But as the volumes do pick up, we believe that a tool like this will be really handy.
Dude, I agree, man. I've been saying this here a lot lately that I truly feel that the mass exodus from the industry is going to come on the brokerage side. I think all the carriers that are running today are all, I don't want to say like they're out of the clear because I don't know what their p and ls look like or anything like that. But I think over the next 1212 to 24 months, I think that the brokerage market is going to be the most affected by what because it's going to be like just tenders acceptance right now is at all. It's at like an all time high.
And I think that and why I'm saying that is customers, I think, are going to have a very small appetite for when tender rejections start to rise and service failures start to increase due to not having trucks. And I'm using air quotes there because we all know what that means. They don't want to take a loss on a load or whatever that looks like. Right. So I think, like, the people who are using you are going to exponentially benefit from this. Like this. This is where that automation factor is going to come into it because you're going, they're going to be looking like your opportunity. If they got that integration, man.
If, then, if they're using bit freighter, that first opportunity that they're waiting for that rejection to come through, it's going to come down to them and they got to be quick on that. Right. So it's like having that in place because, you know, I don't know who your users are or anything like that, but some of these guys might be fourth or fifth on the waterfall, you know, and then it's going to be that one time and it's like when then with you guys having the infrastructure in place already. If it does say they're in with a shipper, that they're not even on the waterfall, but they get to bid on spot loads, that rate, that response, all of that is going to need to happen in like a second to be able to have them get their first opportunity with them.
Yeah. And what we've seen is, you know, our system can bid within 3 seconds of a load coming available. And there's some of these platforms, some of these shippers have, you know, thousands of loads available every single day. So you can essentially have a huge reach and cast a wide net of spot freight. But what we've seen is, and you're exactly right, like, a lot of shippers don't want to wait around. If they get a rate that they like, they're going to tender the load. So you have to be the first one to get your pricing out there. And if it's reasonable, they're going to send it to you.
Yeah. Now, dude, I completely agree, man. So where do you think, you know, you're talking to brokers all the time out there, Mandy, where are this, where's the sentiment right now from a lot of your users on where things currently are and where they feel like it's going to kind of start to unravel here?
That's a great question. I mean, the market's still really tough. It's, it's tough for everybody. It's, I mean, that's what we're hearing. We're still seeing it. Everybody's watching their budgets. So it's, we're still in the thick of it, right? Like, we're all in this together and hoping that things start to turn around a little bit. But, yeah, I mean, it's still tough out there. And hopefully as we reach, you know, end of the year, things start to move back the other way. But right now, we're still hearing the same thing.
So, yeah, it's, you know, I think that this is where the real players start to show up. Isn't, is in times like this, right? Like, I'll say this, I've said this in the past, too, man. If you're developing new business right now, just wait till the market flips. You're going to be really developing new business. Because this is. Because, dude, like, I'm out there, man. I'm out there cold calling. I'm out there prospecting shippers every single day. This is the longest sales cycle that I've literally ever seen, man. Because, like, for me, Brad, what it is it could take you four months to get in the door with somebody, and then it could take you another four months to win your first shipment.
It used to be like, do 90 days, maybe 120 days, you're in the door and then they'll try you out right away. Now, no, man, it's a, once you're in the door with somebody. Brad, it's a brand new sales cycle that starts all over again.
What I would say the thing that I've seen are like our, we're connected to 150 plus logistics companies and the ones that are doing the best are the ones that solve the toughest problems for their shippers.
Yep.
And if you can't, if you, if I ask you know, what problem do you solve? And you're just telling me that you just move loads from a to b and you're the cheapest, you're not solving problems for them. And so the ones that are like, you know, able to do and understand the certain niches in our industry and really solve problems and really be a service oriented brokerage, those are the ones that are excelling. And, you know, there's lots of different ways to go attack that market. But if you can't tell me the problem you solve and it's just moving freight, then you're going to struggle.
Yeah, dude, I'm right there with you, man. Our biggest problem that we solve for all of our shippers is literally, it's our top tier communication. We take over all parties. When it comes down to it, our relationship is say our shipper is our customer. We go to a lot of job sites. You know, we, there's some other specialized moves. We're calling everybody. I'm staying in contact with project managers. I'm letting them know I'm verifying. Do you have the right equipment to offload? You know, I'm keeping everybody informed in transit as well, too. And you know, I've been told by numerous customers of ours here that we communicate at a level that they've never seen. And that's the level that I bring to the table on every single shipment.
Because to me, Brad, it's not only on the ones that we're making a lot of money on, it's on the one. It's more important to do it on the ones where you're maybe only making $50 on that and it's delivering that consistency across the board. Right. Because whether it's me or another member of my team that our customers are dealing with in those moments, I want them to receive the exact same level of service and communication that they would, whether it was me doing it or anybody else out there.
And that's hard to do. And what you're doing for that person that's tendering you the load is. It sounds like they wear multiple hats. They're not just a legit, like, load planner. They're probably a project manager, a load planner, you know, wearing a couple warehouse manager, whatever they may be doing, but they probably don't. Just tender freight. And so you being able to take over that entire communication aspect and them being able to lay their head down at night and know that you are going to take care of that entire load from a to z, that's a big deal.
Yeah. And dude, like, what are my customers? I. Cause like, I made a point earlier this year, Brad, to fly to every single one of our shippers facilities and meet with them in person just so they could see, hey, I'm real. Yes, I am as good looking in person as I am on tv and everything. But I went out there and, you know, because, same thing. One of my, one of my customers, he leads a team of like 35 people across 14 facilities, right? So he's like, and when we're. Whether we're doing a full truckload for him or we do a hotshot partial forum, he's like, I love it.
He's like, I don't need to respond to you because you just keep feeding me updates, and then I can just forward that along or make sure that the parties that need to be informed know what's going on. He's like, that's just what you do. He's like. And he's like, I've been a shipping manager for 30 years, and he's like, I've never experienced this. So it's like, to me, and I talk about this openly, you guys, that's literally all you can deliver as a broker, all right? We don't own the freight. We don't own the trucks. We own our processes, and we own our communication. And you need to consistently deliver that no matter what. Whether you're making dollar 500 or losing dollar 500, you need to do that every single time.
For sure. 100% agree.
So, Brad, what's this event you got going on here, man? I want to help pump this out because I'm a massive supporter of giving back and especially helping people in need and everything. So you got a user? Is it a user golf tournament coming up here?
Yep. It's our integrated technology summer user golf tournament on August 12. We started this last year. I actually hired Hannah Feldhacker to put this together last year. In 67 days, she knocked it out of the park. So this year, she had an entire year to plan for it, which is, you know, a little easier for her. But we already have the playbook from last year, so we're excited to do it again. It's benefiting the Alsace association. We're trying to raise awareness and raise money. Our goal is $25,000 to write a check to them. Hopefully we can get there. A lot of our key sponsors have come in and come in with some really great sponsorships to help us put on this event and also help write a check to the ALS association.
We chose that philanthropy because my mother in law was diagnosed with Alsace September 2022. In just little over two years, she's gone from being a perfectly healthy human to she's on end of life care now. So it's gone really fast. It's been really difficult and, you know, happy to be able to support ALS and raise some awareness. But the tournament's gonna be awesome. I mean, it was amazing last year. It was a lot of fun. It's a one day event, so you don't have to miss work that much work. You're missing one day, essentially. And it's from 09:00 a.m. To midnight, essentially. You come out there, we have speakers in the morning, we'll have an API quoting panel. We'll have a shipper speaking and a broker and break tech person on that panel to talk about API quoting.
And then we'll actually have USP's there to talk about how they're rolling out EDi and we'll have ALS, a representative from ALS there. And yeah, the integrated technology summit is an hour. And then from there we'll tee off. And after that we'll have a after party at Tennessee Brew works here in Nashville. So it's a full day event. It's going to be awesome. It's free for our users and our prospects to come attend. So if you're interested, reach out to me. Would love to talk about it.
No, man, is, are you guys going to create a link or anything where people, if they can't attend, they can donate?
Bitfred or golf.com, you can go there, you can donate, you can sign up to attend. Has all the information there. So check out bitfratergolf.com. And that's really where all the information is.
Perfect, man. Yeah. Bit freighter golf.com. And yeah, I'm going to make sure. Send me that link, Brad. And then I will make sure that it's all out there in the promo stuff. And then I'll make sure to share it on my live show and stuff for you to help spread awareness to this man. Because again, I feel like we lost my nephew back in December of 2023, and he was a make a wish recipient and everything. And this show, man, between the two things, we raised twelve grand in a short amount of time. You know, my brother and sister in law were just completely taken back by how much people gave to a stranger. You know, like, they tune into this show, but they, you know, they don't.
I try my, like, I like to keep my personal life personal and, you know, but it's like to see the community step up for events like this. Like, that's what I want to drive this vessel towards, man. I want to use this to help benefit others. And, you know, and especially, you know, ALS is something that it's seemingly affecting more and more people every single year. And I'm not a doctor, so I'm not going to try and go into anything of it, but I'm meeting more and more people that are affected by this.
Every 90 minutes, somebody gets diagnosed with ALS now. So it's about 30,000 people a year that are being diagnosed with ALS, and there's no cure and there's no test for it. So in the first six months, were in denial because you had to rule everything out. So they're like, there's no way she has Alsace. This can't be possible. This can't be happening to us. And then, yeah, it's a, it took a while for us to, for all of us, including Karen, to accept that she did have it and there is no cure for it. So, yeah, you know, right now we're fighting it by raising awareness and raising money for it. And apparently, you know, to create a cure, it's going to cost a billion dollars. So, we're just trying to do our part.
No, man, we. We will use this to pump this up as much as we can, man, so we can get you at that goal, you know, because, you know, 25 grand is, you know, that's very attainable. It's a very attainable goal out there, and let's push it out there as much as we possibly can. And to do that, man, and I love that you are doing that in this event. And it's not just, you know, just a user conference, right. And I don't want to, like, discredit other people who put user conferences out there, but I think it brings more validity for me to where it's like, hey, how can we do this to benefit a cause? Because, man, at times I feel like a lot of people don't understand how fragile life is.
Like, we all know, you know, like, we all know it is at the end of the day, but, like, until it hits you in a situation like this, do you realize, like, a. What's, what's most important? You know? And it's like, for me, it's like, dude, at the end of the day, I just want my wife to think I'm a good husband and I want my son to think I'm a good dad. Like that. That's ultimately all I'm really concerned about because everything else is kind of irrelevant, right? Like, you know, I was actually, I was talking to my wife about this. I was just like, you know, really, at the end of the day, like, I could lose everything tomorrow. I'm like, we'll be all right. Like, I'll go work three jobs. I don't care. Like, we'll be fine.
Because you two are the only ones that matter to me. Your loved ones are the only ones that matter.
And I think, dude, 100%, it's what my friend Nate shoots. He talks about this, and we talk about why we're doing all of this. And it all goes back to your why. And most people's why is their family and the reason they're working so hard. And it's easy to forget that. It's easy to forget why you're working so hard. It's easy to forget why you put in so many hours. It's easy to forget all those things until something like this happens. And then your why. And then you realize what your why is. So, you know, while you're putting in all those hours, remember, your kid comes up to you and asks you to pay attention. That's like, my daughter will come up to me.
I work from home, so I can take my lunch break and go hang out with her for a little bit. So, yeah, you got to remember your why.
I just also look at it like this, man. At the end of the day, when it comes down to it, don't discount what a five dollar donation can do when you compound that and put that out there. And we saw that with the fundraiser that we did for my nephew was we raised twelve grand, just this last one alone. And my brother set a small goal. Im like, no, Im like, put it up to $10,000. Lets make this and Im like, I will make sure that we hit that. And people came through with it. And either its $5 donations, $2,500, but every little bit helps.
So it's like, you know, I look at it like this, at this point in my life, Brad, I'm like, if you can afford to go to Starbucks five days a week, you can afford to miss it one day and just donate your $5 cup of coffee out there to help a cause that you can be passionate about. And it doesn't, you know, it's not even, you know, just als or the make a Wish foundation. There, there could be other causes that people that you're passionate about. And I think, like, don't discount what that small gift can do to help.
Other people, for sure. And, you know, we had a huge following last year and a huge response to our event last year. So many, so many freight executives took the Als ice bucket challenge and ran with it. And they had no idea that bit freighter even started it. It kind of snowballed and so many different people picked it up. It was amazing. And that's a big part of this is just raising awareness. And, and that ice bucket challenge was really well received last year and we just kicked it off last week. We nominated our first eight companies last week and we have some more ice bucket challenges coming out this week and hopefully people that will start snowballing again. But that was really cool to see, you know, the logistics community. It's no, it's what, a $350 billion a year industry?
But it's a small industry. Everybody, once you're in it for a while, people really know each other. And it was really neat to see all the different types of people in the community really run with it and be a part of that challenge.
No, man, I love it. I would say start tagging some people out here in Arizona, man. It's 112 degrees. I don't think anybody, I have a feeling I might be on this list now. Coming up.
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It's that you don't realize when that ice water hits your head, it'll take your breath away.
Yeah, dude, people do ice baths for fun now. So let's, let's get this out and get this rolling, man. But, Brad, I appreciate your time. Thank you for joining me today. And again, send me that information so we can put this out there one last time. How can anybody find out more about to donate to this?
Yeah, they can go to bitfriend or golf.com dot. There's a place for them to donate there. And if they're interested in signing up, just reach out to me. Happy to talk through what the event's going to be like.
Perfect. Brad, thank you so much. And I know you guys made it this far. And if you made it this far a donate to bitfratergolf.com. Do that out there. But also, if you got value, subscribe to the show. You guys share it out there. Dear network, because if you see value, your network will see value as well. I appreciate you guys. I love you guys and we'll be talking to you soon.