Fuel for growth

by Rich Vurva

The Fastenal School of Business helps ensure a constant flow of qualified employees to fuel the company’s future growth.

When your company’s goal is to open new stores at a rate of 15 percent a year, having enough qualified employees to staff those locations is no small task. If you expect to continue to fuel sales growth, you’d better have a plan for training salespeople and other employees.

One reason the Fastenal Company managed to reach $1 billion in annual sales for the first time in 2004 is because of its company-wide training and education effort. Introduced in 2000, the Fastenal School of Business provides a variety of opportunities for professional education and development.

Since its inception, more than 8,000 employees have participated in classes covering topics such as effective negotiation strategies, performance management and coaching, and customer-focused selling.

In recognition of its commitment to training, Fastenal earned the 2005 Progressive Distributor Sales Training Excellence Award.

Pete Guidinger is director of the Fastenal School of Business. In 1999, he undertook a comprehensive needs assessment to uncover Fastenal’s specific training needs and also to learn how other major corporations developed corporate universities.

“The first step was trying to understand what our needs were and also what was working and not working at other companies. The original challenge started with the simple question, ‘Can we do a better and more comprehensive job developing our employees?’ ” he says.

Although Fastenal always provided product training and other educational opportunities for employees, Guidinger says creating the Fastenal School of Business was a way to better coordinate its employee development efforts.

“We usually hire people that are just getting started in their careers. So, for us to grow, we need to grow those people,” he says.

Reyne Wisecup, vice president of employee development, says the Fastenal School of Business provides a way for employees to learn or brush up on job skills, but also helps foster the Fastenal vision, values and culture.

“Because of how we develop people, we are able to promote from within. We can teach them the way we want to approach business to fulfill what we want to do for our growth long term,” she says. She adds the program couldn’t succeed without a strong commitment from top management even when the economy was soft.

“We have the complete backing of CEO and president Will Oberton as well as our chairman and founder Bob Keirlin. Both are very big supporters of education and both understand that the continued growth of our company will only happen with the development of our people,” Wisecup says.

She adds one key to success is a willingness to support employee development efforts on an ongoing basis.

“In many companies, if sales are down, training is the first thing to go. That’s not true here. We’ve continued to invest in training, even when things were tight. And it’s paying us dividends very handsomely now,” she says.

Reaching out
The Fastenal School of Business consists of six Institutes of Learning focused on a specific area of business.

• The Leadership Institute provides education and tools to develop effective managers and leaders.

• The Operations Institute teaches best practices and operational efficiencies to operations employees within Fastenal’s 13 nationwide distribution centers. 

• The Product Education Institute provides self-study, hands-on application and sales instruction on the various products sold at Fastenal.

• The Sales & Marketing Institute teaches basic through advanced sales and marketing techniques such as developing customer relations, customer research, product knowledge and profitable sales growth.

• The Effective Store Institute teaches best practices to store employees and also offers one-week and two-week training for new employees pulled from Fastenal’s 1,450 stores.

• The Support Institute trains various support departments such as accounting, marketing, purchasing, inventory, quality control, human resources and information systems.

Most classes are held at Fastenal’s corporate headquarters in Winona, Minn., where 20 full-time instructors and four training coordinators handle day-to-day responsibilities. The building houses seven classrooms, and each can hold up to 25 students at a time. In 2005, more training will be offered at Fastenal’s distribution centers, which will enable the program to reach as many as 4,000 employees.

Classes are designed to provide hands-on learning and problem-solving, and students often participate in group projects. In the Accelerated Branch Manager Development course, for example, students work with a variety of tools to improve their understanding of the products they sell.

Cooper Terry is a district manager in east Texas who has attended classes in market-based planning and customer-focused selling. He says both classes improved his ability to deal more effectively with customers. He says the market-based planning course helped him learn how to evaluate customers who buy from a Fastenal store and the types of products they buy.

“It gives you the ability to come up with a plan to attack that business instead of just going out and knocking on doors without a plan,” he says.

He adds that the customer-focused selling course opened his eyes to a new way of dealing with customers.

“Over the years, we’ve typically had a sales mentality that focused on overcoming objections. This course is centered around identifying problems and needs of the customer and giving me the process to provide solutions to the customer and presenting ideas to the customer to get them aboard much quicker. Instead of being an adversarial type of selling relationship, it’s looking more at the problem-solving aspects,” he says.

When Terry hires a new employee, he tries to schedule that person for the new employee training course after about one month on the job. “If you did a good job of training that employee during the first four weeks at the store and then send them to that course, you’ve cut three to six months off the employee’s learning curve,” he says.

A 13-year employee at Fastenal, Terry says the Fastenal School of Business is beneficial to new employees and seasoned veterans.

This article originally appeared in the January/February 2005 issue of Progressive Distributor. Copyright 2005.

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