Will D. Oberton
Management
Dave, we think the days ahead of us are as good as -- or better than, the ones behind us. When you look at the overall market and you look at our share of the market being -- who knows exactly what it is, but it's no more than 3%, even 4% if you really go crazy on it and say it's only $80 billion or so. So, we're a very small player in a large market. We know that many of our stores can be three or four, five times bigger than they are based on their current size, so there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. We have some of the -- we have the best service in the industry we believe. We have some of the best systems with our vending, with our distribution, with our FASTCO Trading Company. We have the ability to buy well, move it efficiently, and deliver it on time, almost every time. And -- so, we're very focused on the future. Can we grow the business at 20% every year, year-over-year? I mean, the future will tell us that time; time will tell us, but we're going to invest to that level as long as we can afford to. We know that the profitability will go up. Even if the gross margin goes down some, if you look at our bigger stores, their average gross margin is lower, but their operating margins are much higher. So, we're not super focused on the gross margin -- we're focused on it, don't get me wrong, but that's not the real measure. The measure is way further down on the sheet, the operating margins and the return on capital. So, we believe the company will continue to grow well above inflation or GDP. We believe the business will continue to grow above most of our competitors, if not all of the large competitors hopefully, and we believe that the profitability will continue to improve year-over-year. And as I said earlier, sometimes you take a step back to get two steps ahead and sometimes that is caused because we make some bad decisions, like pulling back on labor too much as we did in the past. But overall, the future, we believe is very, very good. A couple things that are going in the direction of us and our large competitors -- more and more of the industry is getting bought up by bigger companies, the Danahers and all those companies, the GEs of the world. And what they want to do is they want to buy from fewer suppliers. At the same time, there are fewer big brands. The Stanleys are buying the DeWalts, and so on, and they want to sell to big distributors because it's easier and more profitable. So, the larger distributors, not just Fastenal, we all have an advantage in that situation and we think that we can leverage that advantage.