A Vending Machine That Wouldn't Vend
The idea arrived when he was eleven or twelve years old, tagging along behind his father at the Seifert-Baldwin Motor Company on West Fourth Street in Winona, Minnesota — a boy watching a man inventory drawers of threaded fasteners, hex bolts, carriage bolts, lock nuts, flat washers, each sorted into its own tiny compartment in wooden cabinets that smelled of machine oil and sawdust. What if, the boy thought, you could put them in vending machines? What if a contractor on a job site could drop in a quarter and get the exact bolt he needed, the way you'd get a Coca-Cola or a pack of Wrigley's? It was the kind of idea that sounds like genius to a twelve-year-old and lunacy to a banker, and for the next two decades, roughly thirty investors agreed with the bankers. Nobody would fund a vending machine for nuts and bolts. The idea was too simple to be taken seriously. It was also, as it turned out, ahead of its time by about forty-three years.
Robert A. Kierlin — known to everyone in Winona and throughout the company he built as "BK" — founded Fastenal in November 1967 with four friends and $31,000 in pooled capital, the equivalent of roughly $274,000 today. The vending concept failed almost immediately. The product complexity of industrial fasteners — thousands of SKUs in varying grades, thread pitches, and materials — made the machines impractical. Kierlin pivoted to a storefront model, selling fasteners over the counter in his father's former auto parts shop in downtown Winona. He kept his day job at IBM in Rochester, driving back and forth on weekends to check on the store. For six years, the business barely survived.
Then something remarkable happened. Not a single dramatic event, not a leveraged buyout or a venture round or a visionary product launch, but rather the slow, patient accumulation of small decisions made well — about people, about costs, about the stubborn insistence that a commodity business could become extraordinary if you treated your employees like owners and your customers like neighbors. Fastenal grew. And grew. And kept growing. By the time Kierlin died on February 10, 2025, at the age of eighty-five, the company he started in a small-town shop had expanded to more than 3,400 locations across twenty-five countries, employed over 23,000 people, and generated $7.55 billion in annual revenue. Its market capitalization exceeded $53 billion. Fastenal was the top-performing stock in America during the quarter century that began with the crash of 1987 — not a software company, not a biotech firm, not a financial engineering vehicle, but a distributor of nuts and bolts headquartered in a Mississippi River town of 25,000 people.
And the vending machines? They came back. In 2010, Fastenal began deploying industrial vending devices at customer sites — the childhood dream, resurrected by Kierlin's successor. By 2024, over 100,000 such machines operated in twenty-five countries, accounting for more than a third of sales. The twelve-year-old's idea had simply needed half a century of infrastructure, culture, and patience to work.
By the Numbers
The Fastenal Empire
$31,000Initial capitalization in 1967 (five co-founders)
$7.55BAnnual revenue in 2024
$53B+Market capitalization (2024)
3,400+Locations across 25 countries
23,700+Employees worldwide
100,000+Industrial vending devices deployed
$61,000Kierlin's annual salary when he left the CEO role (2002)
The Block Where Everything Happened
Not long after they had the youngest of their five children, Edmund and Dorothy Kierlin bought a home at 175 West Fourth Street in Winona. Edmund worked a block away at the Seifert-Baldwin Motor Company, where his only son, Robert, often tagged along because there was no preschool or kindergarten in those years. The boy watched, absorbed the rhythms of a small auto supply business, and collected popsicle wrappers — he and a friend gathered 4,000 in a single summer, redeemable for prizes from the popsicle company. Even then, the instinct was to find efficiency in the overlooked.
Winona sits in southeastern Minnesota where the bluffs meet the Mississippi, a town founded in the 1850s by steamboat men who named it for a Dakota legend. By the mid-twentieth century it was a modest place — a few colleges, some light manufacturing, the kind of community where a dentist could name you the five most important people in local history and a newcomer would recognize none of them. Bob Kierlin grew up in this world, in what he later described as a "modest, German-Polish Catholic household," graduating from Cotter High School and then heading to the University of Minnesota, where he earned a bachelor's in mechanical engineering and, in 1964, a master's in business administration. He spent two years in the Peace Corps in Venezuela — at the industrial relations center of the University of Carabobo in Valencia — before returning to take a job as a cost engineer and financial planner at IBM in Rochester.
The IBM years were formative in ways that had nothing to do with technology. Kierlin learned cost accounting, business controls, financial planning — the grammar of operational discipline. He was a cost engineer, which meant he spent his days understanding where money went, and more importantly, where it didn't need to go. This would become the marrow of everything he built. But while he was analyzing IBM's numbers by day, evenings and weekends he was drafting a business plan for that childhood vending machine idea, pitching it to anyone who would listen. Nobody would. Thirty investors said no. It's worth pausing on that number. Thirty rejections, in a town and region where everyone knew everyone, where the social cost of repeated failure was real and immediate. Kierlin kept asking.
The four who finally said yes were not venture capitalists or angel investors. They were friends. Steve Slaggie — a fellow Cotter High School graduate who would serve as Fastenal's treasurer for decades, the kind of quiet, meticulous man who makes an entrepreneurial vision actually function. Jack Remick and Van McConnon, early believers who contributed capital and sweat equity. Mike Gostomski, who joined shortly after, rounding out the founding group. Together they scraped together $31,000. Kierlin put up just over half.
More than sixty years later, the block where Kierlin grew up, where he followed his father to work, where he and his friends watched rainstorms from under the awning at Owl Motor Company, became the site of his Main Square Development — apartments, retail, office space, and a Montessori preschool. He broke ground on the project as an old man, standing on the same concrete his father had walked to work on. The circularity was not lost on him, though he would never have said so. That wasn't his way.
Commodity as Canvas
Here is the central puzzle of Fastenal, the thing that makes it interesting rather than merely successful: the company sells a commodity. Nuts. Bolts. Screws. Washers. Threaded rods. Products with no meaningful differentiation, no brand premium, no patent protection, no network effects. Kierlin himself acknowledged this plainly in his book
The Power of Fastenal People: he had no advantage on products. Any competitor could source the same hex bolt from the same manufacturer in the same grade of steel. The product was — and remains — irrelevant to the competitive story. What matters is everything else.
And yet this company, selling things you could buy from ten thousand other distributors, was the best-performing stock in America for twenty-five years. The annual report data, read sequentially from 1996 to 2021, tells a story of almost absurd consistency: from 484 locations, $288 million in revenue, and $33 million in net income in 1996, to 3,209 locations, $6 billion in revenue, and $925 million in net income in 2021. The compounding is relentless. How?
The answer Kierlin gave — the one he repeated so often it became a kind of liturgy — was people. "Back in 1967, we were the smallest of an estimated 10,000 fastener sellers in the U.S.," he said in 2017, on the company's fiftieth anniversary. "By the mid-1990s we had outgrown them all. We had to be doing something different. It wasn't the product, and it wasn't how we distributed the product: It was our belief in people."
This sounds like a platitude. It is not. What Kierlin meant was something precise and structural: that by keeping operating costs radically low, the company could pay its employees incrementally higher wages than competitors, which allowed it to attract and retain better salespeople, whose superior knowledge and relationships brought in more revenue, which further lowered operating costs as a percentage of sales, which funded more competitive compensation, which attracted more talent. A flywheel. A virtuous circle built not on technology or intellectual property but on the mundane discipline of watching every dollar.
We've never really cared how everybody else does things or tried to follow them. We've found that hard work and good thinking have led to the best possible results.
The cost discipline was not an abstraction. Kierlin bought suits secondhand. He drove company minivans rather than executive sedans. He built his own basement wine cabinet one weekend, though he could certainly have afforded to hire a carpenter. He routinely refused raises. By the late 1990s, he was taking home roughly $120,000 a year — making him, by his own delighted accounting, the lowest-paid CEO in Minnesota. When he stepped down from the top job in 2002 to serve in the state senate, his final salary was $61,000. He drove to conferences rather than flying. He stayed in budget hotels. These were not affectations. They were the physical manifestations of a worldview: that cost control is the foundation on which all other competitive advantages are built, and that the leader who asks employees to be frugal must be the most frugal of all.
The Uncommon Pursuit of the Common Goal
The central thesis of Kierlin's book, and arguably of his entire life, can be stated in a single sentence: Organizations succeed to the extent that all of their members pursue a common goal. He repeated this idea — "growth through customer service" — with the frequency and conviction of a man who understood that simplicity is the hardest thing to maintain. As David Senra observed on the Founders podcast, it is "a very simple and powerful idea that's excessively hard to practice over a long time because it goes against human nature. It's in our nature to drift and complicate things."
The danger, in Kierlin's telling, was never external competition. It was internal entropy. "The greatest danger to the success of the organization is that it starts developing unnecessary subgroups, and these subgroups start pursuing their own goals rather than the common goal of the organization." He was talking about fiefdoms, departmental politics, the way a marketing team starts optimizing for awards rather than customers, the way a finance department starts optimizing for control rather than service, the way every human institution tends to fracture along the fault lines of ego and self-interest. His answer was not to eliminate subgroups through centralized authority — the opposite, in fact — but to align every incentive, every ritual, every promotion, every public statement so relentlessly toward the common goal that deviation became culturally unthinkable.
This meant, among other things, that Fastenal promoted almost exclusively from within. Most general managers and senior leaders started in entry-level positions in Fastenal stores. The CEO who succeeded Kierlin, Willard "Will" Oberton, started as a store clerk. The next CEO, Daniel Florness, joined in 1996 as chief financial officer and spent decades absorbing the culture before taking the top role in 2016. When Fastenal announced its most recent CEO transition in December 2025, appointing Jeffery M. Watts, the press release described him as having "30 years of knowledge serving our customers" and praised his "great ability to align people and resources in the pursuit of a common goal." That phrase — common goal — appeared in the announcement as naturally as a signature.
Organizations succeed to the extent that all of their members pursue a common goal. This is one of those simple ideas that are so difficult to practice.
Twenty-Seven Hundred Small Businesses in a Trench Coat
Fastenal's organizational structure reads like a deliberate inversion of corporate orthodoxy. Where most companies centralize to gain efficiency, Fastenal radically decentralizes to gain speed, ownership, and accountability. Each store — and there are thousands — operates as a standalone business, its manager empowered to make real-time decisions about inventory, pricing, hiring, and customer relationships without seeking approval from Winona. "We are not one giant organization," Kierlin wrote. "We are 2,700 small businesses wrapped up into one big company."
This was not chaos. It was designed autonomy, and the design had two load-bearing walls. The first was the common goal — growth through customer service — which provided directional alignment without prescriptive control. The second was the cost structure. By keeping overhead low at every level, Fastenal could afford to let individual stores experiment, fail, adapt, and succeed without the financial fragility that centralized cost structures impose. A bad quarter at a single store wouldn't threaten the system. A good idea at a single store could be shared across the network.
The echoes of other great operators are unmistakable.
Sam Walton — whose autobiography Kierlin read and admired — ran Walmart with a similar philosophy of empowered store managers operating within a framework of obsessive cost control.
Sol Price, the founder of Price Club and mentor to Jim Sinegal at Costco, preached the same gospel: keep costs down, treat employees well, and trust them to serve the customer.
Les Schwab, the tire magnate whose autobiography Kierlin also referenced, built his empire on the identical insight that ordinary people given extraordinary autonomy will produce extraordinary results.
What distinguished Kierlin from these peers was the degree to which he embedded the philosophy into language. He did not talk about "empowerment" or "decentralization" in the abstract corporate sense. He talked about seeing the unique humanness in all persons. He talked about suppressing your ego. He talked about letting people learn. His ten leadership rules, published in The Power of Fastenal People and still cited by Fastenal in 2022, read less like a management framework and more like an ethical code:
- Challenge rather than control.
- Treat everyone as your equal.
- Stay out of the spotlight.
- Share the rewards.
- Listen rather than speak.
- See the unique humanness in all persons.
- Develop empathy.
- Suppress your ego.
- Let people learn.
- Remember how little you know.
"When you control," Kierlin explained in a 2022 interview, "you limit what people can do to what you tell them to do. You will get better-than-expected results by telling people what outcomes you expect, and then challenging them to exceed your outcome expectations by using their unique abilities."
The Apprentice Learner and the Master Learner
Kierlin made a distinction — obsessively, in nearly every speech and interview — between a manager and a leader. A manager, in his framing, tells people what to do. A leader develops people into the kind of individuals who can figure out what to do themselves. "A leader is somewhat like that of the master learner among apprentice learners of all different levels," he wrote, "with the intention of developing more master learners to allow the organization to grow."
This was not metaphor. It was operational policy. Fastenal invested relentlessly in training, not as a one-time onboarding exercise but as a continuous, permanent feature of working life. Kierlin believed that leaders at every level of the organization should spend the overwhelming majority of their time teaching. "As a leader, if you're not spending 90% of your time teaching, you're not doing your job," he said. "A business achieves long-term success by continuously replenishing leaders inside the organization."
The teaching orientation flowed from Kierlin's own habits. Daniel Florness, who served as Fastenal's CEO for a decade before announcing his transition in December 2025, observed something revealing: "There was not a day that Bob Kierlin did not read the Wall Street Journal from cover to cover." Kierlin consumed biographies, management literature, trade publications. He was, in the language of
Warren Buffett — another obsessive reader who admired Fastenal — building a mental filing cabinet, accumulating layers of knowledge that changed slowly and therefore compounded.
The connection to Buffett was real, not just rhetorical. Buffett praised Fastenal publicly on television for its robust financial performance and straightforward business plan. The unexpected shout-out prompted Will Oberton — Kierlin's successor, the former store clerk — to travel to Omaha and lunch with Buffett at his favorite diner. "We talked about the importance of sticking to basics," Oberton recalled. Buffett asked Oberton about profit margins on threaded fasteners, Fastenal's number-one product line, and — in a detail that says everything about both men — "erupted with glee" when told the numbers. Two cost-conscious operators, one running a $500 billion conglomerate and the other running a nuts-and-bolts distributor, finding joy in the same arithmetic.
The Lowest-Paid CEO in Minnesota
There is a genre of CEO frugality that functions as performance — the billionaire who drives a Honda, the tech founder who wears the same gray T-shirt. Kierlin's frugality was different because it was structural, not aesthetic. He did not merely refuse raises; he structured his compensation to be visibly, almost aggressively aligned with the rank-and-file workforce. If the engineers could take off to watch their kids in a softball game, so could the lathe operators and the data entry people. If the store clerk flew economy, the CEO drove.
This was a deliberate cultural signal. Fastenal's egalitarian compensation philosophy — no executive dining rooms, no reserved parking, no special perks that separated leadership from the front lines — was not a human resources initiative. It was a strategic weapon. By eliminating the visible markers of hierarchy, Kierlin made it impossible for subgroups to form around status. When everyone eats at the same cafeteria and parks in the same lot, the organizational energy that would otherwise be spent navigating political hierarchies gets redirected toward the common goal. This is obvious in theory and almost impossible in practice, because it requires the people at the top to genuinely believe they are not more important than the people at the bottom. Most executives cannot do this. Kierlin could, or at least came closer than most.
He went further. In 2003, after stepping down as CEO, Kierlin created the "Robert A. Kierlin Option Plan" — funded not by the company, but by his own shares. He personally sponsored stock options for Fastenal employees, transferring ownership stake from himself to the people he believed had built the company. It was a gesture so far outside the norms of executive behavior that it barely registered in the business press. No press release, no ceremony, no self-congratulation. He simply did it, and the details appeared in a footnote to the annual report.
Senator Kierlin
In April 1999, Kierlin did something unexpected: he ran for the Minnesota State Senate. He won, representing District 32 — Fillmore, Houston, and Winona counties — as a Republican, though the partisan label fit loosely. He served until 2006.
His critics said he was buying the seat. In the late 1990s, Kierlin had donated hundreds of desktop computers to budget-strapped Catholic schools in southeastern Minnesota, and skeptics argued the generosity was strategic positioning for a political campaign. This was unfair, or at least incomplete. The donations continued and expanded long after the election, and Kierlin's philanthropic impulse predated any political ambition. But the charge stuck, at least locally, because people struggle to believe that someone with money can be both generous and politically ambitious without the second explaining the first.
In the Senate, Kierlin was a fiscal conservative and a social pragmatist. He broke with fellow Republicans on at least one significant issue: the legalization of medical marijuana. His advocacy grew personal after his first wife, Stephanie Valencia — a Venezuelan ballerina he had met during his Peace Corps years — died of cancer at forty-nine. He had watched her suffer. The abstract policy debate became immediate and unbearable. His push for medical marijuana did not succeed at the time, but the conviction was characteristic: quiet, rooted in lived experience, indifferent to partisan orthodoxy.
State Senator Jeremy Miller, who now holds Kierlin's former seat, remembered advice Kierlin gave him early in his career: "Talk less and listen more." The counsel was vintage BK — one of his ten rules made personal, passed on without ceremony. Former DFL Representative Gene Pelowski, from across the aisle, remembered Kierlin's generosity in supporting the Winona Model Legislature, where students simulate the legislative process. Pelowski had helped run it for almost fifty years. Kierlin emailed him in 2001 to express admiration for how well the students conducted themselves, then quietly began funding it.
Kierlin chose not to seek a third term, telling friends he was disillusioned with what he described as the pettiness and disingenuousness of the legislative process. He had run an organization of thousands by suppressing ego and pursuing a common goal. The Minnesota legislature operated on different principles.
The Marine Art Museum and the $5.9 Million Sunset
When Kierlin married Mary Burrichter — his second wife, after Stephanie Valencia's death — the union created one of Winona's most unlikely cultural institutions. Burrichter was a collector of art and signed guitars (Stephen Stills, Arlo Guthrie, Joe Cocker, among others), and together they turned their shared passion into the Minnesota Marine Art Museum, which opened on Riverfront Drive in 2006.
The museum was a characteristically Kierlin project: built with their own money, stocked initially with their own collection, designed not for personal glory but as a civic asset. They hung their own print of Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware — one of only two surviving versions of the iconic painting. In 2016, as they shifted the museum toward financial self-sustainability, they sold the Leutze for $45 million.
The collecting continued. In November 2015, at Sotheby's in New York, Burrichter and Kierlin paid $5.9 million for The Great Florida Sunset by Martin Johnson Heade — more than double the previous auction record for the artist. The painting, at eight feet wide, was the largest Heade ever made, originally commissioned in 1887 by Henry Morrison Flagler, the Standard Oil co-founder who built Florida into a resort destination. The purchase allowed the museum to reunite two companion paintings that had been separated for decades: Florida Sunset and View from Fern-Tree Walk, Jamaica, which the Kierlins already owned.
A nuts-and-bolts distributor from a Mississippi River town of 25,000 people, buying luminous masterworks of American art at Sotheby's. There is something about the juxtaposition that captures the essential Kierlin paradox: the man who drove company minivans and refused raises spending millions on paintings of unspoiled paradise. But the paradox resolves when you understand that for Kierlin, both acts — the frugality and the extravagance — served the same purpose. The cost control built the company. The art enriched the community. Neither was for him.
Still Improving
Kierlin retired from the Fastenal board in 2014, at the mandatory age of seventy-five. He did not retire from Fastenal. He appointed himself, with characteristic self-deprecation, as the company's "cheerleader" — visiting stores, writing columns for internal publications, speaking to new managers. He was still doing this into his eighties.
"At my senior citizen age, I am still improving," he told an interviewer. "Perhaps at a faster rate than I was several decades ago." This was not false modesty. It was the logical expression of his own philosophy: that potential is always partly unrealized, that learning never stops, that the leader is merely the master learner among apprentice learners.
His final years were spent building things for Winona. The Main Square Development — apartments, retail, office space, and a Montessori preschool — broke ground on the same block where he had followed his father to work as a boy. The Minnesota Masterpiece Hall, a performance center, was under construction in downtown Winona at the time of his death. He and Burrichter had established the Hiawatha Education Foundation, which funded Montessori programs for children from low-income families across Minnesota. The foundation's work reflected a conviction he had carried since his Peace Corps years in Venezuela: that education is the mechanism through which potential becomes real.
Bob was a generational figure within Winona in terms of his philanthropy, his foresight into economic development within our community, and then also a strong supporter of the arts and culture segment within our community.
Winona dentist Peter Zehren, asked to place Kierlin in the context of local history, reached back more than a century: "He's an icon in this community. The only people bigger were Chief Wapasha, William Windom, J.R. Watkins, and John Latsch." Kierlin's fingerprints, Zehren noted, were all over the local landscape — from the arts to Bridges Golf Course.
When Fastenal announced its most recent CEO transition on December 21, 2025 — Daniel Florness stepping down, Jeffery Watts stepping up — Board Chair Scott Satterlee said something that would have been unremarkable at most companies but was deeply revealing at this one: "We are very excited about this next chapter in Fastenal's history," he said, and then the crucial phrase, "to further lead with the cultural values Robert Kierlin and the Founders established decades ago."
Sixty years after a twelve-year-old boy watched his father sort fasteners in a Winona auto shop, the company he built was still being organized around his ideas. Not his products — those remained commodity items available from thousands of competitors. Not his technology — though the resurrected vending machines had become a transformative business. Not his capital — the original $31,000 had long since been compounded beyond recognition. His ideas. About people, about costs, about the stubborn, unglamorous, day-after-day discipline of pursuing a common goal.
Bob Kierlin died on February 10, 2025, at a hospital in Winona, the town where he was born, the town he never left, the town he spent his life enriching with the same quiet intensity that he brought to reading the Wall Street Journal every morning, cover to cover, without exception. The Fastenal company issued no public statement. A spokesperson said they declined to comment. That was exactly right. The man who wrote "stay out of the spotlight" as the third of his ten leadership rules had, in the end, built an organization so thoroughly in his image that even his death was handled with restraint — the information surfacing in local papers, in community tributes, in the quiet grief of a company town that had been made extraordinary by an ordinary man who believed, against all evidence of how the world actually works, that if you suppress your ego and develop the potential in others, something much larger than yourself will grow.
On the same block where Edmund Kierlin once sold auto parts, the Main Square Development stands, its Montessori preschool full of children learning the way Bob Kierlin believed all learning should happen: through freedom, opportunity, and the patient faith that potential, given room, will always reveal itself.
