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Just a quick note to tip my hat to the people from Pac-West and the NFDA.  I just returned from the table top show in Long Beach.  Due to some personal obligations I could not stay for the entire conference but I was very impressed with the parts I did attend.  Local and regional shows are very valuable as you really do get an opportunity to have more in depth conversations than you are sometimes able to have at a national show.  I am absolutely a fan of the Vegas Show and value it greatly.  But the regional shows just lend themselves to more one-on-one time that I sometimes cannot get at Vegas.

I traveled in from Ohio and was not sure how many east coasters I would see out in CA.  There were plenty.  The table top was very well attended and there was a wide range of attendees including many local distributors from Southern California.  But there were a lot of distributors from other parts of the country including Minnesota, Ohio, Colorado, Florida and others.  Perhaps it was because the NFDA was involved and it is a national association and pulls in people from throughout the country.  Whatever the reason, the show was well attended and very well run.  Great job.

For those of you not from around the Midwest, the Fastenal purchase of Manufacturers Supply, AKA MANSCO, was a very interesting move.  I have called on MANSCO for years.  It is a great company.  This is not a Fastenal branch, this is a company that I would have expected a company like Wurth or Supply Tech or maybe AFC Industries to have acquired, not Fastenal.  While MANSCO has some MRO business, I think of them as an innovative, VMI provider with strong technical abilities and the ability to sell specials.  They are not just selling commodity items out in the mean fastener streets and fighting it out on price.

I do not mean to dismiss how far Fastenal has evolved from its early days of opening store front after storefront.  Fastenal has many national accounts and is very good at VMI programs, and they have some very good OEM customers to prove it.  And, they kind of brought the vending machine to the Fastener world.  It’s just that they have not acquired other companies like MANSCO before, at least not to my knowledge.  They often let those acquisitions go to other multi branch distributors.  Fastenal stock is publicly traded and while I do not closely follow the stock I’m guessing they can get their hands on money when they need it.  Is their intention to continue to pursue these types of distributors in the future?

There seems to be a race to identify any and all distributors who are privately owned and where there is not an obvious succession plan.  Every week there seems to be another announcement.  At some point, there will be large acquisitions with multi-branch distributors being gobbled up by other larger distributors or holding companies.  But there is still plenty of low hanging fruit as the fastener industry still has a good amount of small and medium sized companies that were started by individuals.  And now it certainly appears Fastenal is in that game.

Our industry has caught the attention of the likes Warren Buffet and Amazon and yet we continue to see new, small operations started up by former Fastenal employees or individuals who once sold for one of the companies that has hundreds of salespeople spread throughout the country.  We are a funny industry.