This week on the Be Epic Podcast Matt sits down with E. Fletcher Lord, Jr., Chairman of the Board for Bumper-to-Bumper/Crow Burlingame Company and 2023 inductee to the Arkansas Business Hall of Fame. During the episode, they discuss the history of the company that Fletcher’s grandfather founded with J.G. Burlingame in 1919 along with their growth across a 12 state market area. The company started in Little Rock, Arkansas and continued expanding across the state and then to neighboring states even through the Great Depression and World War Two. They wrap up their discussion with a focus on the technological evolution of the automobile industry including their company focus now on data just as much as auto parts.

The only way you're gonna be successful

is you got to be involved. You got to get in it. You can't just

stand around and ponder it and worry about it and think about

it. You got to get in it and do the best you can to get all of

it you can and and figure out what's going on.

Excellence, professionalism, innovation and

collegiality. These are the values the Sam M Walton College

of Business explores in education, business, and the

lives of people we meet every day, I'm Matt Waller, Dean of

the Walton College and welcome to the be epic podcast. I have

with me today Fletcher Lord Jr., who is the chairman of

Replacement Parts, Inc. He has a very interesting career but most

noteworthy. He is being inducted into the Arkansas Business Hall

of Fame in February, and we have been running the Arkansas

Business Hall of Fame. Since 1999, inductees include many

names you would recognize like Sam Walton, Don Tyson, JB and

Johnelle Hunt, you know, Warren Stephens, many, many, many

others who Bill Dillard, many very successful people, Arkansas

Business Hall of Fame, the purpose of it really, is to

celebrate the achievement of business people in business,

celebrate their achievement, recognize it. And we pick people

who not only have had huge impacts on industries in

Arkansas and business, but also are great role models in terms

of integrity and ethics and so forth. And so Fletcher,

congratulations on being inducted into the Arkansas

Business Hall of Fame.

Thank you, came as a big surprise.

Well, well deserved. I remember reading

your background and all you've accomplished and it's so, so

remarkable what you've done in the automotive accessories

business as a privately held firm. Would you tell us a little

bit about the company?

Well, we are a Little Rock based auto

parts distribution company. We operate both warehouses and

store operations. We're in the 12 state market area, from west

of Atlanta to the east or west of Tulsa and down to Beaumont,

Texas. We have 210 of our own stores, and about 180

independent part stores that are owned by independent

individuals, but buy their products from our warehouse.

They use our signage, our marketing, our computers. And

they are, for all practical purposes, an affiliate of ours.

This business was founded by my grandfather back in 1919.

So that is an unusually long time for a firm

to be around. Fletcher, how did the company start 102 years ago

and what was it actually doing back then?

Well, it was started by my grandfather

who moved from Arkadelphia to Little Rock, and he came to town

and got a job as a traveling grocery salesman. And back then

there were no roads between towns so ever, all the commerce

was done on the railroad. And he traveled the state selling

groceries and on his travels, he ran into a fellow that was a

competitor of his and they became friends. Ultimately, they

became business partners. And he was also a grocery salesman. His

name was JG Burlingame. And they continue to be in the grocery

business and my grandfather Elderwood became a salesman for

a candy company, the Karcher candy company. But they became

friends and one day Mr. Berlingame invited my

grandfather over to his house for Sunday dinner. And he

accepted and the next week on the train, he invited him to

move in with him. He was older than my grandfather, and he

didn't have anybody at home with his wife and big ole' house and

nobody in it and my grandfather was living in the boarding house

and so he moved in and lived together for about six or seven

years before he married and they remained competitors and they

remained friends but like a lot of people do at that age they

were rattin' around for some way to make some extra money. And

Mr. Crow started going to St. Louis to the National Automotive

Show and they would go up and he would go up and he would look at

the cars that were on show there. And back then there was

about 102, or three four car manufacturers in the country.

And he would pick up cars that he thought would sell in

Arkansas, and he would buy some cars and bring them home. And

ultimately, that's the way a lot of car dealers started. And they

did that for a couple of years. But in 1918, he went up and came

back and said they weren't going to stay in the car business,

they were going into the accessory business. And back

then when the Detroit built a car, they shipped it in a box.

So it arrive without tops and seats and wheels and lamps and

all the stuff that went on it. And it was up to the dealers to

locate that stuff, put it on the car and make it roadworthy. And

so they founded a company to do that ran a big ad in the paper

and said, if your call main 464 will get your order off on the

next train. So they did that till about 1922. And about that

time the car manufacturer started to, to ship cars that

were complete. And their business had to shift and they

became a supplier of replacement parts. And at one point in time,

they had a large machine shop because the engines in cars

didn't last very long. It had to be rebuilt constantly. And they

had to rebuild the wheels. Remember the wheels, he said

wooden spokes and they would break and they had leaf springs

that had to be retorqued. And there was a lot of effort made

to keep cars running. And they did that for a long time. And in

1928, they bought a competitor down in El Dorado, Arkansas, and

they became a branch operator at that point in time. And then the

next several years, they opened branches throughout the state.

They, I think of the stores as numerically as where we opened.

Number two was El Dorado, and number three was Pine Bluff,

number four was Hot Springs, number five Stuttgart, Texarkana

and so forth. So they continued to open stores during the course

of the Depression. And my grandfather always said that, if

somebody had a car and it wasn't working, they were going to fix

it, they weren't going to go out and hook up a team of mules to

go to town anymore. Pretty much right about that so. The

depression made it hard for people to afford it, but they

weren't going to do something different. And so the business

continued to grow and expand. And then after the depression,

the war came along and everything went on allocation.

They didn't make very many cars, they made jeeps and tanks, and

tires weren't available and fuel was on allocation. So people

who've had cars continued to get them repaired and keep them

maintained because they couldn't afford not to. And then at the

end of the war, when all the GIs came home, there was all kinds

of people availability to go into the business. And they

opened 19 stores in a year during that era, with the GIs

coming home, and that was in essence what we did for a long

time. And then back in the early 50s they formed a holding

company and and merged with a group in Memphis and one in Fort

Smith. And it was called OCY. And OCY at that time was the

largest buying group in the country. And we had one of us

had nine stores and one of us had 12 stores, another one had

10 stores. So being great big didn't mean anything back then.

But they they merged and continued to grow and open

branches. And in about 1953 the government sued them and said

that keeping your own goods for redistribution doesn't cause you

to be eligible for discounts from factories. And if you're

going to stay in the distribution business, you've

got to sell 40% of what you sell to somebody beside yourself. So

at that point the industry started to sell to independent

operators. And so we started trying to establish and sell to

people who ran their own part stores. And we did that for a

number of years due to the requirement that we had to sell

a certain percentage of our stuff to somebody else.

And that sounds like a very significant change

in the business.

It was it was a significant change. And it

was the formation of what became known as the warehouse

distribution business. And that's it. We are an unusual

business in that we are a multi step distribution business. We

ship to the vendor ships to the warehouse who ships to the

stores, who ships to the installer, who is basically the

retailer, the fellow who bolts the parts on.

what's really a that's, that's a huge change.

Were there any other types of big changes? That was clearly a

change? Were there any big changes that really affected

aftermarket from maybe, maybe like technological?

Well, the the major thing that was

changing was the dynamics of the automobile. You know, when we

first started selling parts, there weren't many parts. You

didn't have starters, and alternators, and air

conditioning and transmissions and all that sort of thing, you

go out and grab hold of the crank and crank the car up and

started that way. And that was replaced by starters and

batteries. And the technology just continued to evolve and

cars became more complicated and, and so the parts required

to keep them going became broader and broader and broader

indoors today, they're astronomical in the number of

units required to take care of the industry. That's the way

they started. We didn't really get into the technological stuff

very often until way up into the when a computer age started to

come along. Way back in the 70s, we put a IBM 34 into our office

to manage accounts receivable. And that was when we first

started seeing some computer technology changed the business.

And of course, it's dramatic and changed everything since then.

Fletcher, what would you say, is your most

important formula for success?

I was at a cocktail party a number of

years ago, for some of the older fellows in the industry. And we

were standing around this and I was talking to several of the

guys that run genuine parts company in APA. And one of them

said, I'm the guy that opened the distribution center in

Little Rock. I said, really? He said, you know, it's the most

unsuccessful distribution center we ever opened. And I said, why

do you think that is? And the other ones that I know why it is

he said, because you never left. You most people when we come to

town decide they're gonna sell out, and they call us an want to

see if we will buy the company. And you never did. And you're

still here. So I think our formula was, don't quit.

Whatever you have to do you just stay in there and keep plugging

away and do what you got to do. Nothing particularly fancy about

it. It's just surround yourself with good people and do what you

got to do.

Fletcher, there's so many things going on in the

world right now that are changing rapidly. How do you see

these changes and so forth, affecting your industry in your

business out into the future decades from now?

Well, there's a lot of changes going

on, which are a challenge for everybody, not just privately

held, but publicly held companies that are in this

business as well. One of them is the challenge of trying to find

the kind of people that would do well in the industry. When I was

growing up and first got in this business, every boy around knew

something about automobiles, and was interested in em, in finding

somebody that wanted to be in the parts business was pretty

easy. That's not true today, the vast majority of young people

grow up without ever looking under the hood of a car and

don't really have a lot of interest in what's under there.

Another challenge that's that's significant is the parts

proliferation problem that, that dynamic, the number of cars on

the road, or the number of parts to service them is growing

geometrically. In addition to that, the stuff that we used to

sell, it gave us a lot of turnover and a lot of solidity

in our business is going away and it's been replaced by things

that you used to sell 200 of, now you sell none of and you

sell a lot of items that are expensive, but you sell one or

two of them at a time and not in mass. So you got to have a lot

more coverage that cost a lot more money. And you've got to

have that to be able to be able to service the business and

there's just a limit to how much dollars and money you can throw

at a problem because it's past a certain point. It doesn't make

any sense, no matter how much money you got, there's just not

enough statistical evidence to support how much inventory you

could put in, in the field and be successful doing it. The

other thing that's that is a challenge. And this continued to

be a real challenge is the fact that we're really not in the

parts business. We're in the data business. And having the

right part in the right place at the right time at the right

price is a challenge. And that was always what we had to do.

It's just harder today. And we spend most of our time talking

about things that don't have to do with auto parts they have to

do with data and how to determine all the things that we

need to know so that we can go to the street be profitable and

successful.

Fletcher again, congratulations on your

induction to the Arkansas Business Hall of Fame and

congratulations on your amazing career and your successes. We're

really proud of you.

Well thank you, it's an honor to be

sitting there talking to you.

On behalf of the Sam M. Walton College of

Business I want to thank everyone for spending time with

us for another engaging conversation. You can subscribe

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