My name is Scott Satterlee, and I wanna welcome you to Fastenal's 2022 Annual Meeting of the Shareholders. Before we get into the business portion of the meeting, I would like to introduce and welcome Pastor Mark Dumke to lead us in an invocation.
Thank you, Scott. It is really good to be here this morning with all of you in person after a few years. I'm really delighted. We had a good rain yesterday. It watered the earth, scrubbed the ground, refreshed the air. It was really quite nice to smell that spring air. The tree buds, I know they're eager to burst out. The grass is gathering energy to be able to fill the ground with color. The crocuses, the daffodils, and the tulips, they are waiting their turn for some spring fun. Small pleasures of spring refresh us and can change the course of a day. Please join me as we ask our Creator God for a blessing. Creator God, accept our gratitude as we see that you are at work renewing the earth.
Refresh and recharge us with the hope that is evident in the goodness of creation. We ask that you now bless us as we turn our attention to this annual meeting. May the work that we do today strengthen Team Blue to bring benefit to customers, shareholders, and coworkers. Amen.
Thank you, Pastor Mark Dumke. This annual meeting of shareholders of Fastenal Company is now convened. I am Scott A. Satterlee, Chair of the Board of the company, and I will act as chair of this meeting. Mr. John Milek, who is Vice President and General Counsel of the company, will act as Secretary of this meeting. Right now we'd like to recognize a few people that are in the crowd here, starting with our founders. I'll read all the names, and at the very end, those of you that are here, if you wouldn't mind standing up and acknowledging the crowd, that would be great. Thank you. We have Robert A. Kierlin, Henry K. McConnon, John D. Remick, Stephen M. Slaggie, and Michael M. Gostomski. If you wouldn't mind. Let's give him a big round of applause.
I would also like to recognize the rest of the board of directors that are here today, starting with Michael J. Ancius, if you wouldn't mind standing and acknowledging the crowd. Stephen L. Eastman. Daniel L. Florness. Rita J. Heise. Hsenghung Sam Hsu . Daniel L. Johnson. Nicholas J. Lundquist. Sarah N. Nielsen. And Reyne K. Wisecup. I will now ask Mr. Milek to report on the number of shares present at this meeting and to conduct the voting on the proposals to be considered at this meeting. Following the vote, our Chief Executive Officer and President, Daniel L. Florness, together with other individuals from our organization, will report to you on the company. Mr. Milek.
Thank you, Scott, and good morning, everybody. Before starting, I want to remind shareholders of the rules for this meeting, copies of which are available at the registration table in the back. Most importantly, if you wish to speak, please raise your hand, and someone will bring a microphone to you. Upon being recognized, please state your name clearly and limit your statements to no more than three minutes. There are three management proposals to be voted upon today. Management's position is already stated in the proxy statement that you received. The record date for the determination of the holders of the company's common stock entitled to receive notice of and vote at this meeting was fixed by our board of directors as 23 February 2022.
I present to this meeting a certified list of the holders of the shares of the company's common stock and outstanding common stock as of the close of business on the record date. This list will be kept open and subject to inspection by any shareholder during this meeting. I also present to this meeting an affidavit of a manager of Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc., attesting that the notice of the meeting, together with a proxy statement, a proxy card, and certain other documents were mailed on or about 14 March 2022 to each holder of record of the company's common stock as of the close of business on the record date. The affidavit of mailing of the notice of this meeting will be attached to the minutes of this meeting as Exhibit A.
The certified list of holders of the company's common stock will be filed with the books and records of the company. As of the close of business on the record date, there are outstanding entitled to vote at this meeting 575,553,636 shares . Each share of common stock is entitled to one vote. For a quorum to be present, a majority of the 575,553,636 votes entitled to be cast must be present in person or by proxy at this meeting. On a preliminary count, there were represented at this meeting, either in person or by proxy, a majority of votes entitled to be cast at this meeting. Therefore, a quorum is present for the transaction of business today.
Is there anyone present who has not submitted a proxy or a registration form? Seeing none. A record of the proxies submitted to the meeting and the ballots of the individuals appointed as proxies and the shareholders voting in person at the meeting will be filed with the books and records of the company. Ellen Stoltz has been appointed to act as the Inspector of Election with respect to all matters to be voted upon at this meeting or any adjournment thereof. The Oath of Inspector of Election has been administered and will be attached to the minutes of this meeting as Exhibit B. We hereby make available to the Inspector of Election the list of shareholders, the registration forms, and the records of all proxies submitted to this meeting.
Copies of the minutes of the last annual meeting of the company held on 24 April 2021 are available at the registration desk. We will therefore dispense with reading of the minutes of that meeting. The shareholders of record as of the close of business on 23 February 2022 may vote on the matters to be considered today. If you wish to vote by ballot, please raise your hand when I ask you to do so, and a ballot will be given to you. Shareholders who have appointed others as proxies to vote their shares, whether in writing or by telephone or over the internet, and have not terminated their proxies should not vote by ballot. We will distribute one ballot covering all matters to be voted upon at this meeting, rather than separate ballots for each matter.
We will now take up the business of the meeting. We have three matters to be considered by our shareholders today. The first is the election of directors for this coming year. The board of directors of the company has nominated the following ten persons for election to the board to serve until the next regular meeting of shareholders or until their successors are elected and qualified. Scott A. Satterlee, Michael J. Ancius, Stephen L. Eastman, Daniel L. Florness, Rita J. Heise, Hsenghung Sam Hsu , Daniel L. Johnson, Nicholas J. Lundquist, Sarah N. Nielsen, and Reyne K. Wisecup. I will now open the floor to a motion to formally place before this meeting the nomination of these individuals. I recognize Mr. Tom Munson.
My name is Tom Munson, and I am a shareholder of the company. I move to formally place before the meeting the nomination of the 10 individuals identified for election to the board of directors to serve until the next regular meeting of shareholders or until their successors and elected and qualified.
Thank you. As no other nominations have been made, in accordance with the procedures established in the company's bylaws, I declare the nominations to be closed. The next matter for consideration today is the ratification of the appointment of KPMG LLP as our independent registered public accounting firm for fiscal year 2022. I would like to introduce [Ms. Carrie Person]. She's with us today. She is a partner of that firm who is here today to answer any questions that you may have. No questions? I will now open the floor to a motion to formally place before this meeting a resolutions concerning the ratification of the appointment of KPMG LLP as our independent registered public accounting firm for fiscal year 2022. I recognize Ms. Susan [Kross].
Good morning. My name is Susan [Kross], and I'm a shareholder of the company. I move that the resolution be adopted, resolves that the appointment of KPMG LLP as independent registered public accounting firm for the company for the fiscal year ending 31 December 2022 be and hereby ratified.
Thank you. Is there any discussion of this motion? It has been moved that the appointment of KPMG LLP as independent registered public accounting firm for the company for the fiscal year ending 31 December 2022 be ratified. I will now open the floor to a motion to formally place before this meeting a resolution concerning the approval of executive compensation. I recognize Mr. Bruce Hawkinson.
Good morning. My name is Bruce Hawkinson, and I'm a shareholder of the company. I move that the following resolution be adopted. Resolve that the shareholders of the company approve on an advisory basis the compensation of the company's named executive officers as disclosed in the compensation discussion analysis, compensation tables, and related disclosures contained in the section of the proxy statement for the 2022 annual meeting shareholders captioned Executive Compensation.
Thank you. Is there any discussion of this motion? It has been moved that the compensation of certain of our executive officers be approved. Now, if you wish to vote on these motions by ballot, please raise your hand and a ballot will be given to you. If you have appointed another person as proxy to vote your shares and have not terminated that proxy, do not vote by ballot today. After you have executed your ballot, it will be collected and tabulated. The polls are now closed, and the ballots will be counted. While the ballots are being counted, Mr. Dan Florness, our President and Chief Executive Officer, will report to you on the company. After the conclusion of his report, we will answer any questions that you may have relating to the company and its activities. Thank you.
Thank you, John, and good morning, everybody. Let me start by thanking you for venturing out on a Saturday morning to join us for an in-person annual meeting again. It's been since 2019 and this is the first meeting that's in person that's on a weekend. We'd always met on Tuesdays, and we decided to try sliding it to the weekend a few years ago. Little did we know that the next one would be virtual, and then the following year would be virtual. My grandmother taught me at a young age it's wise not to swear when you're speaking publicly. So let me just soften it by saying it's darn good to see everybody in person again. Thanks. I'd also like to thank the Remlingers.
You know, we've always held our annual meeting within a Fastenal facility, and for those of you that were at our last in-person event, it was over in the old JCPenney building. Later in this talk, we'll be a little bit about our lift facilities. That building operates our local lift terminal, and I'll explain that later. We were looking for a new venue that'd be large enough to accommodate. Several months ago, I visited this facility for the first time. A number of folks at Fastenal had said, "Hey, we should go over and look at the Remlingers facility." To be honest with you, I didn't have a clue what was in here.
I'm really impressed with what they've done, and I think it's a great venue, and walking around looking at some classic cars is always enjoyable. Some thank yous. We'll cover some thoughts on 2021, but a few thank yous are always in order. I'll start with our customers. You know, when COVID hit, and I think the thoughts are probably, since we haven't met in person for a few years, appropriate to cover 2020 and 2021. The world saw a strange chain of events in the spring of 2020. Like everybody else, when something like this happens, anxiety manifests itself in many different ways for people. The second group here are employees.
I have to really compliment them for very quickly calming their own fears, figuring out what they needed to do to keep their family safe and each other safe, 'cause at the end of the day, we had a job to do. That is to be that supply chain partner, a crucial partner for many of our customers. I wanna thank our customers for being open to new ideas and new ways of doing things every day, and allowing us to partner with them and be part of their business where we can find success together. It also requires a crucial element, and that is a well-vetted, great supplier base, where you have products readily available that have great quality to provide to your customer every day.
Finally, our shareholders who are willing to share with us their capital in hopes that we can operate a great business, and they can generate a return on that investment. Hopefully, as you're going through this annual meeting, you see that investment has been a wise choice. During 2021, we hit some milestones, and we always like to recognize things as they happen, and here are a few that stand out. In this period of COVID chaos, we were recognized by EHS Today, so that's a safety publication, named one of the safest companies in North America. I believe the context was North America, but one of the safest companies. You know, there's a lot of great organizations, and to be singled out and recognized, especially in a period like this, was extremely special.
We take it very seriously and only had to double down on that in the last two-year period. Secondly, we operate in 25 countries now, and two of those countries recognized a milestone. Our business in Mexico and our biz in Singapore hit 20 years of age during 2021. FMI Technology, you're gonna hear us talk about that a lot. Fastenal Managed Inventory, and it's the electronic service model that we bring to the marketplace. We hit some milestones in that business, and I'll start with the bottom and work my way up. FASTStock, you know, years past, you'd go out and have a bin stock program or a stocking program on a production floor, and you were out there with a yellow notepad writing stuff down.
We were in the midst of deploying a new technology footprint, our own handheld devices, as COVID hit, and we did a two-year rollout in about 5 months and quickly deployed it. In 2021, we did over half a billion dollars through that new format that, quite frankly, a few years ago didn't exist. Secondly, we've been deploying bins with embedded technology. Last September, that very new piece of our business eclipsed $5 million in business for the month. Basically a $60 million run rate that we hit in September. Finally, the FASTVend platform, our vending platform that you've been quite familiar with for the last 14, 15 years. In fact, vending was the original idea for Fastenal back in the 1960s.
In the month of December, a milestone represented our 1 billionth vend since we started vending in the 2007, 2008 timeframe. A year ago, we broke $30 billion in market cap. That's taken our stock price times all the shares outstanding and saying, "What does the marketplace say Fastenal is worth?" We broke $30 billion for the first time. As of yesterday, we're just shy. We're about $33 billion today. In 2022, we're starting off strong. Just last month, our international business broke $100 million a month for the first time ever. Our e-commerce business, now you don't think of Fastenal as e-commerce, but our e-commerce business that's within our organization also broke $100 million in the month of March.
My co-congratulations to Jeff Watts and the international team, Kirk Talmontas, and our entire e-commerce team for those milestones last month. As I mentioned earlier, I think today is somewhat of an exercise of looking at several years in many ways. We have the typical view of, "Hey, what happened in the last 12 months?" We also have a view that looks at what's happened in the last 2 years. If we go back to 2019 and say, "In the year before COVID, what did we look like? And then in 2021, the year after COVID started, what did we look like, and how does it stand out?" I'm pleased to say the investments we've been making for 50-plus years have served us well and continued during this timeframe.
In the two-year period, our sales are up about 13%. We focused on being really efficient in how we operate. Part of the technology we deploy is a key ingredient. We grew our earnings about 15% in that timeframe. If I think about it in a fastener context or the product line context, our fasteners are up about 10% in that two-year period, and that's a very mature product line for us, and it really represents what's going on with the underlying industrial production in the places we operate. If I skip down to the bottom and I look at other product lines, that's everything besides fasteners and safety, and safety I'll touch on in a second. That grew about the same as our fastener business, up about 8% in that two-year period.
Again, what's going on in the underlying industrial marketplace. What should really stand out is we've developed a great safety business, largely because of the impact of vending over the last 14 years. In the two-year period, our safety revenue grew 35%. Now, you might look at that and say, "Well, sure, they're selling a lot of masks. They're selling a lot of products that are centered on the COVID era." If I strip out respirators and gloves, two components that really expand in that timeframe, you would see that all the remaining safety products we sell grew 26%. That's not about COVID. That's about pure market share gains because the market recognized how special the Fastenal organization is when it comes to that subset of products.
If I take a look at the next slide, some things that will jump out and, you know, they always say cash is king. In my prior role as a CFO, I have a button that Steve Slaggie gave me years ago that basically said, "It's all about cash." Because cash pays the bills. Our checkbook tells us what we can do next week, next month, next year, and how we invest to grow the business. As you'll see in a few minutes, it also supported our ability to react in the marketplace in the last several years. Our working capital in the last 10 years as a percentage of sales, for every $100 in sales, we'll spend $2.50 just to grow our working capital.
We have this big base of working capital, and I'm thinking inventory and accounts receivable, which is the residual of a sale until it's paid. That's the first thing we invest in, more inventory. Last year, that almost doubled to 4.8% as a percentage of sales. Really, what drove that is we had the financial resources to go out, and in 2020 and 2021, we piled on the inventory because, again, we have a covenant with our customer to be there to support them. When all the supply chains get really disrupted, the best way to do that, sometimes having it on the shelf, you know, the old expression, possession is nine-tenths of the law.
It's also nine-tenths of your ability to have confidence that you can come through for your customer if it's sitting on the shelf, and we were not hesitant to invest in inventory. In fact, I'll say something that's gonna probably weaken Terry Owen over here on my left at the knees a little bit. A year ago, recall that we wrote down about $8 million of masks. I can feel the pain in Terry's heart right now. 'Cause Terry came to me, and a few of the supply chain folks came to me, and they apologized about this writedown. We all made this decision together. We went out and vetted some great suppliers.
There was a plant that we literally were 100% of their capacity for one month producing masks just for us because we had the willingness to write out a really big check 'cause we wanted that inventory to support the marketplace. What did we learn 12 months later? Well, we had served the marketplace. Things had changed. Those masks that we purchased that were an emergency were more expensive than the replacement masks on the market right then and there. They were still perfectly good product. They were just too expensive, and we wrote it down. If I had to do it all over, I'd do it in a second, 'cause I think it was a great decision, and it really demonstrated to marketplace what we're willing to do to support them.
We also held true to our shareholder base. Historically, we about 10% of sales get returned to our shareholders. Last year it was almost 11%. This slide here, the only things that are really noteworthy is everybody thinks of us as selling to manufacturers and thinks of us as selling to the construction marketplace. Those two little bar graphs right in the middle, the first one is warehousing, and the next one is government. We have a lot of vending machines. We have a lot of customers that operate in the e-commerce world. Those names that you're familiar with every day, that you're buying stuff on the internet or on some app on your phone or on iPad or whatever it might be. We're in those facilities every day.
When those organizations were standing up their operations to support you, we were standing up our operations to support them. You can see how that warehousing exploded. Again, it's a relatively small piece, but it exploded. If I look at where we are today versus 2 years ago, you can see that's a market share gain, and that's because we were willing and able to help them. The second is looking at government. For a lot of government organizations, and for us, government includes state and local. It includes healthcare. Their supply chains fell apart on them in 2020 and 2021. A couple of things should stand out there. One, we were able to help them in 2020, but look at the sheer market share gain that we have when you compare 2021 to 2019.
That's a reward for being there to support them. That's a reward for going out and buying a bunch of inventory, even if we had to write a little bit of it down the next year of new business we found. When we talk internally, we always look to the future, and we look at what that business, what are we building to? We did about $6 billion last year. When we're a $10 billion organization, we'll get there someday, we just don't know when. At least we're not willing to say it publicly and get ourselves in trouble with the SEC. When we're a $10 billion organization, we think about 70% of our business will be what we would coin as national account. That's large, multi-location organizations that buy from us in many locations around the country, maybe around the planet.
As we've put together this web of distribution, we're a real special partner to them because they can have the same partner in 60 different plants, providing a consistent level of service. We think that's gonna be about 70% of the business. When I joined the organization back in 1996, it was 2% of our business, and it tells you what this special organization has brought to the marketplace in the last 26 years. We think there will be another layer on top of that, what we call an NA-like, and that's state and local governments. That is large regional customers that again see this thing that's special about us because I have 5 locations in Wisconsin, and Fastenal is there to serve me in all 5. We think, add those on top of it, that's 90% of our revenue.
We also think it's gonna be a nicely profitable business. Last quarter, we just reported we were at 21% pre-tax. We think we'll be about 22%, and we think over time, our working capital becomes ever more efficient 'cause we're scaling that across a bigger and bigger base of business, which means we can have healthy cash flows as we're growing into this future organization as well. Remain close to the customer is critical. I talked about the FMI earlier in the milestones we hit. Here's how we think and how we're making investments in that business within Fastenal. FASTStock, again, that's running around with a device about the size of my phone and scanning bins. It might be to a production floor, it might be in a tool crib somewhere. It might be fasteners.
It might be a multitude of supplies. Q1 last year, that was about 8% of our business. If you go a few years before that, it was lower single digits. Q1 of this year, that 8% had expanded to 11%. Now, I don't know if 25% is the right number when I look out to the future, but that's what we're investing in the infrastructure to support 'cause we think it could represent that. In that $10 billion organization, that's a $2.5 billion business. FASTBin and FASTVend, that's all the technology-embedded stuff we have out there. Two years ago, it was 21%, or a year ago, it was 21%, and that's basically our vending platform, 21% of our revenue. Today that 21% has grown to 24%. We think that grows to about 40%.
We think you'll go into production environments and you'll see these bins, these kanban systems with RFID chips in them. It's like having a gas gauge on everything we do. It tells us when it's low, and it needs to be replenished rather than somebody go out there and physically looking at it. We believe add those pieces together, that 29% of our business today is 35%, that it can eventually be 65%. What that means is a lot of what we see in the marketplace we think is highly repetitive and highly predictable once you understand it, and we're building the organization to support that. We can be incredibly efficient and offer incredible value in the marketplace and grow our business accordingly. We also have e-commerce on top of that.
The stuff that isn't repetitive, that's one-off, how are you ordering that? What's an efficient way to order that? When you combine those pieces, today about 47% of our revenue falls under what we call our Digital Footprint, where we can illuminate for the customer what's happening in their business and analyze it and give them suggestions on how to save money. We think eventually that's 85% of our business. In just the vending component of that, if you look at the next slide, you can see I talked earlier about JCPenney, and we have a lift terminal. That stands for Local Inventory Fulfillment Terminal.
What that means is, geez, instead of 3-4,000 Fastenal locations scattered across all these countries, what we do right now is if we have a bunch of vending machines, a bunch of bin stocks, we have a little area in every branch, in every onsite where we have a little pick module, and we're picking product all the time and taking it out the vending machines. Well, what if we said, "You know what? We have these distribution centers that have all this automation. What if we would use that automation to pick and fill this tote right here that's going to machine number 23 up in Red Wing, Minnesota, rather than Red Wing branch doing that?
We can do it a lot more efficiently that way, and it requires a lot less working capital because we don't need inventory in 3,000 or 4,000 places. We need it in 15 distribution centers or in 40 lift terminals. What you see over time is how much of that we'll be picking over in the JCPenney building for this region. This is just looking at the vending subset, but our plans on how much of that we'll be picking over in the JCPenney building for this region. There are facilities like that across the country right now. That means we have more time in the branch to do those things like going out, engaging with your customer rather than picking product inefficiently in the back of the branch. We can reduce the cost to serve.
You can be more competitive in the marketplace and create a great return for your shareholders and a great opportunity for your employees. Provide customer service that's really difficult to compete against, which allows us to grow faster. The close to the customer. I'll touch on our customer show in a few slides, but we had a big customer event earlier this week. In there, we talked to them about how we remain close to their business in the marketplace. Many companies to lower their cost structure, step away from the marketplace and ship everything. You know, think of it as, I have this big DC, it's really efficient, and everything I pick, I throw in a UPS box, and I ship it to my customer. Now that's a great distribution model.
Don't get me wrong. I don't think it's the greatest distribution model because you're not in the customer's facility observing where maybe a different product would be a better solution. When I think of some of the benefits of the last two years and being close to the marketplace means, we now have a business in the healthcare sector that really didn't exist a few years ago. Our e-commerce business, as I touched on, is growing faster than it's ever grown. New customers. This year we will do about $200 million in revenue, $50 million a quarter, with customers that didn't know who we were two and three years ago. They were in a world of hurt during COVID, and somebody said, "Hey, reach out to the folks at Fastenal.
They can help you out." To that $8 million that Terry made me write off a year ago. Sorry, man, I'm just gonna keep punching. That translated into a $200 million business. Now, for those of you that are involved in the M&A world, you probably would take that deal. I would take it again. If you have more inventory to write off and you can find us a $200 million business, we'll do it every month of the year. Government onsites. I touched on that earlier slide, how the government has jumped as a percentage of our business. If I went back 2-3 years ago, and you saw an example of one of our government onsites with the Sarasota, Florida video before we started the annual meeting.
We've been slowly doing that, but if I went back a few years ago, we had a handful, 3, 4 onsites. Today, we have about 25 onsites that we've added in the last several years, where we're in K12 school districts, higher education, healthcare, various cities across the country, metro agencies for supporting their public transportation. We are in there just like we would be at a manufacturing plant, supplying the stuff they need to run their operation. That business has taken off for us, and we're not looking back. We're only looking forward. Finally, as I touched on, that mobility FASTStock of our business is taking off. It allows us to illuminate for the customer what they're doing and bring value and cost savings to their table. Talked about remaining close to the customer. Here's a quick view.
We shared this at our earnings release call in January, except for the gray stuff on top, and it's looking at we've been closing locations. We've closed over 1,000 locations in the last six, seven years. Really what we're doing is we're rationalizing the footprint. In the Minneapolis-Saint Paul market, we'll do about $100 million in revenue this year up in the Twin Cities. If you were up there a few years ago, I think we had close to 25 locations scattered between Rogers on the northwest end and Hudson, Wisconsin, on the eastern end of the metro area.
As we've moved in with some of our customers, we've looked at it and said, "We don't need the same footprint." Maybe we need 12 or 15 branches, but when we have 50 business users in the Twin Cities, the rest are gonna be where we're physically inside the customer's location. That's the gray part you see growing. The only blip in that is during 2020 and 2021, we didn't sign as many onsites, which is a funny thing. When everybody's afraid of being around other people, the idea of people moving in with you doesn't sound that inviting. I'm pleased to say our goal is to sign 100 onsites a quarter. In the Q1 of 2022, we signed 106.
That's our highest signing quarter ever for the organization and feel really good about that little dip in 2020, 2021 not repeating itself. Find and develop great people. Started sharing this slide a handful of years ago with our own employees. Started sharing it at this venue, I think 3 or 4 years ago. A couple of years ago, you asked us to share it even more. Here's a quick look at the last decade. Our industry historically has been very male-dominated because a lot of the sectors we serve into are very male-dominated. I'm pleased to say that our environment is open to an ever more diverse group of people. 10 years ago, just over 17% of our employee base was female. Today, that's 24.2%. The only negative you should see in that column is the last 2 years.
Frankly, and this is not speaking as the CEO of Fastenal, just speaking as a human being, I believe society really let down women in the last two years. Closing schools and daycares being shut down, all these different things disproportionately fell on the female side of our population, and you see it in our numbers right here. That number should be 26%, 27%, 28% right now, and it's just stuck at 24%. I hope as we continue to reemerge and normalcy returns to the world, those numbers continue to climb again, 'cause there is a pursuit of talent out there, and if you aren't embracing both halves of the population, you're not gonna be as successful. Secondly, as we've moved out of more rural areas, we always hire local.
From an ethnicity standpoint, our minority numbers, they haven't doubled as a percentage of our numbers in the last decade, but they're getting close. We've gone from 12 to 21. Again, we hire locally, and our goal is really simple. Go out and find great people, ask them to join, and then give them a reason to stay. It's how you treat them. It's how you develop people and create opportunities for people that make you successful. I think we have some really good trends going here, and I'm encouraged of where they go in the future, 'cause it means our ability to find and build talent is very strong in today's world. Well, some summary bullets that laid out in the president's letter this year, both last year and this year, about some things that really were nuggets in the equation.
Even though I've been here 26 years, what I learned is our people run and learn faster than anyone else in the marketplace. We rally to support each other. Somebody has a reason that they can't be here today or something else going on, we rally to support. We have a skill set to help others that really was powerful in the last two years. When we point a finger, too many people in society do this, and you see it too much every day in the news, you see it too much in social media. We do finger-pointing, too, but we're pointing at ourselves saying, "I've got you covered. I'll take care of this." That's powerful in the marketplace. Finally, we always build for the future, and that showed through in the last two years.
Earlier I mentioned we had a trade show this week. If you'd have been at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville, great big venue. I forget if it's 2,800 or 3,800 rooms. You just get lost in it, and usually about the time you're leaving, you kinda know your way around the place. We ask customers to come in. We ask suppliers to come in. We ask employees to come in. We had thousands of people in the room. We talked to them about supply chain and introduced them to our supply chain partners, our suppliers in the marketplace. It was a great event, and we produce a video every year as part of that event to help tell our story. With that, I'd ask them to play the video quick.
When you read supply chain, what's the next word that comes to mind? Volatility? Disruption? Risk? Problems? If so, it's time to reset the conversation with words like resiliency, predictability, efficiency, and excellence. How do we get there? In a word, partnership. This is a concept that we hold close at Fastenal. It means investing in an end-to-end program to drive risk, cost, and waste out of your business. What does that look like? Let's take a trip across the supply chain. At the far end is a deep, diverse, and closely managed supplier base with multi-source options in core categories and approved factories spanning the globe as a hedge against regional risk. Global sourcing and quality teams help establish agility and control early in the supply chain, and our relationships and volume afford priority allocation in times of supply chain stress.
Moving closer to your facilities, planned product needs are backstopped with multi-tiered inventory in regional distribution centers, in local or on-site stocking locations, and at point-of-use locations supported by technology. Fastenal trucks run consistent daily routes to maintain local inventory levels. Local Fastenal teams execute a consistent service schedule to maintain your target min-max levels. The first time your team needs to think about or touch the product is when they're ready to use it. The system is put into motion by our core investment in the partnership. Great people, close to your business, and powered by technology. Let's break it down. Great people includes a local or on-site team to execute the program, solve problems, and become experts in your processes and products. Along with subject matter experts to provide high-level support in areas like safety, engineering, metalworking, and lean solutions.
Layers of leadership and corporate support to ensure our global resources are aligned with your enterprise vision and local needs. Close to your business refers to our global footprint and ability to scale and integrate with your organization everywhere you operate, whether that's providing tailored inventory and service through a nearby branch or investing in a custom on-site program dedicated to your facility and designed around your needs and KPIs. Through our Nova subsidiary, the integration can be enhanced with procurement and payables processing services. A complete source-to-pay solution for all indirect materials, regardless of the source. Empowered by technology describes solutions to automate, digitalize, and analyze the supply chain. A comprehensive tech infrastructure we refer to as the digital footprint.
The foundation is FMI Technology, a lineup of devices that raise the bar on what we can achieve together through a Fastenal Managed Inventory program. It includes mobile technology to bring visibility to product locations and details and to simplify our local replenishment process. Think of this as a baseline solution for slow returning items that don't require 24/7 monitoring. Faster moving or mission-critical parts can be supported with devices that allow our local teams to monitor your inventory remotely for a more proactive and lean process. Technologies include RFID, infrared, and scale. You also have access to a lineup of solutions to not only monitor products, but also to control and track them, from returnable assets to MRO consumables of all shapes and sizes. The common benefits, 24/7 controlled access and visibility to how products are being allocated in your business. Who, what, where, when, and why.
Without technology, managing supplies is expensive. It requires a chain of tasks and touches by various personnel to get it right. Through a combination of automation and local service, an FMI Technology program frees your team from those repetitive processes, unlocking time and energy for productive work. These solutions don't just automate, they illuminate, taking industrial supplies out of the shadows and into a planned, proactive environment that can be analyzed and continually improved through our partnership. The Digital Footprint is completed with e-business solutions, including our e-commerce websites, as well as e-procurement solutions to integrate our respective systems and automate the procure-to-pay process, generating a robust data story with minimal clicks and processing. We're all familiar with the concept of planned versus unplanned spend. Today, we're shifting the paradigm to digital versus analog. In this context, think of the Digital Footprint as a self-evolving ecosystem.
It captures the data needed to analyze purchasing and usage trends, to proactively plan the upstream supply chain, and to dial in on the most effective method to supply the product. It also redefines what can be managed by Fastenal and how. With technology to bring transparency and planning to an ever-expanding scope of product needs. On all fronts, the movement is toward more data-driven decision-making, better planning, more relevance, and impact. This is what we strive to deliver to your business. Not just supplies, but a stronger supply chain. Not just a product, but solutions for productivity. Not just a part, but a partnership. Fastenal, where industry meets innovation.
You know, back in 1995, a young individual down in the Dallas, Texas area joined our organization. He started working part-time for us for a few years. He was coaching football. I didn't know they had football in Texas, but evidently he was coaching it. He worked part-time. In 1999, we asked him to move to Kansas City and be a leader in our distribution center. In 2004, we asked him to move to Scranton, Pennsylvania, and be a leader in our distribution center. In 2007, we asked him to move to Mexico with his family and be a leader in our business unit down there. In 2010, Terry moved to Texas. In 2011, he moved to Panama.
2012, he moved to Texas again. 2014, he moved to Winona. I think he came here for the weather. He currently lives in Virginia, but I think if I add that up, that's about seven moves that Terry's made for the organization. He's got a great leader, breadth of knowledge. I'd ask Terry to share a few things with the group. Thanks, Terry.
Thank you, Dan. I appreciate it. Good morning. Dan came to me a few months ago, and he asked me to speak at today's meeting, and of course, I said yes. When he told me he wanted me to speak for 20 minutes about supply chain, I got this really uneasy feeling. I got this uneasy feeling because I knew I was about to have to tell my boss that I didn't think his idea was a very good idea. I was uneasy also because I'm not known for my finesse in those discussions. It's not my forte. I went to Dan, and I said, "Dan, you know, with all due respect," because I'm from Texas, and they teach us, if you preface a statement with the words, with all due respect, you can say anything after that.
I told Dan, "Dan, with all due respect, this is a terrible idea. Six minutes into the conversation, and there are gonna be lines forming for lunch. It's going to put people to sleep. I can't do that." He stopped me, redirected me, and told me, "Just, you know, think about what's been going on for the last two years, what's happening, and every person around the world has been impacted by supply chain, and specifically by the disruptions in the supply chain." I had to step back, redirect. That's the polite way, that's the way we say politely. Take myself out of my day-to-day of demand planning, forecasting, line points, order points, lead times, all the things that will make you get up and start going to the lunch line.
I started thinking about it from my everyday view. If you've ever shopped online, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Product that you buy today, three years ago, you probably would've gotten it the next day, or in some cases, even the same day. Now, those same items are taking you several days or even weeks. You know, my son, he just started a new season of baseball. In fact, right now he's playing a game on a tournament this weekend, and so he's playing as I speak. But he started a new season. He's grown a lot over the last year, and he had outgrown his cleats, and he'd outgrown his baseball bat was too small.
He and I loaded up in the truck, went to our local sporting goods store, and what we found when we got there, it wasn't shocking, it wasn't even surprising. It was really just disappointing. They didn't have a single pair of cleats in his size. They had one bat his size, and they were really proud of that bat. I was just unwilling to pay the price they were asking me to pay for that bat. No chance, no way. For me, it's, it was an inconvenience. For my son, it was probably devastating because I just said, "Hey, buddy, this season you're gonna have to swing that little bat, and you're gonna have to stuff your feet in those little cleats.
Just loosen up the laces a little bit, and you'll be okay." I'll tell you this, it's a lot easier for me to tell my son he's gotta wear little shoes than it is for us to go to one of our customers and tell that customer that we don't have the bolt they need to assemble or produce their generator, their motor, their HVAC system. That's the challenge we face today, and that's the real impact of the supply chain chaos that's going on. For Fastenal as a business, supply chain's never been more important than it is today. The reason is this: our customers today are asking us to create more value for their business, and they're asking us to create that value through managing their supply chain.
I'm gonna talk about really what does that mean. I brought a prop with me today, and this is a zinc-plated grade five hex cap screw. It's one of the fastest-moving parts we sell in Fastenal. Last year, we sold 16 million pieces of this bolt. If you go on our website today, the bolt sells for $0.43. Thousands of our customers use this bolt, and they use it for thousands of applications, and they do use it for production and assembly in their finished goods. The challenge today with supply chain is managing or even before today, managing the supply chain for this $0.43 bolt is complex, surprisingly complex. It's not a core competency for our customers. It is a core competency for Fastenal.
More and more, our customers are asking us to create value for their business by managing this bolt along with tens of thousands of other SKUs. What do they expect when they ask us to manage this bolt? They expect us to have it at their facility on time when they need it. They expect us to deliver a bolt that meets their quality standards. Those are just table stakes. They expect a lot more than that. They expect us to free up their working capital. They expect us to lower their expenses. They expect us to improve their P&L, increase their quality, increase their production, impact their capacity and lead times, and to improve their worker and end user satisfaction. Those are a lot of expectations for a $0.43 bolt.
The last two years of 2020, 2021 has made that commitment we had to our customers challenging. It's been very challenging. We all know what happened in 2020. It was a very scary time. We had number one priority for us was to take care of our employees. It was the health, safety, welfare of our employees. Nothing was more important than that. I personally lost three uncles to COVID, so I was very sensitive to how important that was. At the same time, we had a role to play in society. There was a real shortage of masks, disposable gloves, hand sanitizer, disinfecting wipes, all of these, now we call them pandemic-related products. There was a shortage in the market, a real shortage. A lot of companies tried to fill those gaps.
Few companies were as prepared as Fastenal was during that time to serve our society the way we did, and we did a great job. We worked hard. We brought product in. We got it to the first responders. We got it to the frontline workers, healthcare, our strategic customers. By the end of 2020, we were in a really good position. As Dan stated a few times in his talk, not only did we have enough inventory, sometimes we had too much inventory. I can imagine sitting on that Q1 earnings call last year and hearing that we had to write down $8 million worth of masks. I can just picture people sitting there going, "Boy, who was the moron that made that decision?" I'm that moron. Thank you. 2021 coming in, we had a great plan. Supply chain was going great.
We put a solid plan in place. We were going to, after a really hard year, a lot of work, we were gonna just focus on taking care of our employees. We were gonna be able to step back and take a breath. Here's the thing about plans. Mike Tyson once said, somebody should write this down. These are things that I thought I would never do, quote Mike Tyson in an annual shareholders meeting. Mike Tyson once said when talking about plans, "Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the mouth." In the Marine Corps, they taught us that battle plans never survive first contact with the enemy. Well, it felt like day after day. The enemy just kept punching us in the mouth. It was a challenging time, all through 2021, and it hasn't let up yet.
I'm gonna go back to my bolt example to kinda give you an idea of some of the challenges we're seeing. Go back before COVID. Go back to 2019. We bought this bolt from 4 suppliers. 85% of our spend on this bolt was here in North America. Fast-forward to 2021, we had to buy this bolt from 14 suppliers around the world. That number one supplier from 2019 went from 85% to 3% of our spend. Challenging. Think about the lead times for this bolt. In 2019, from the time we cut a purchase order to our supplier to the time we received it into our inventory, on average was about 165 days. In 2021, that number is now two hundred and eighty-five days. That's a 73% increase in lead time on this bolt.
I told you that if you go on our website today and you buy this bolt, it's $0.43. 2019, this bolt was $0.24. Those are all challenges that we've had to face over the last 2 years. I'm gonna give you my unbiased opinion. Nobody did a better job than we did. I'm gonna talk about what I believe, these are my opinions again, three keys to success that we had that made us so successful over the past 2 years. One, it's our local footprint. When I talk about local footprint, I'm talking about that local footprint in 25 countries around the world, and that served us a few ways. First way it served us is our employees, our operations teams, they were very close to our suppliers, and that was critical during this time.
When we had to go from 14 suppliers to 14 suppliers for this bolt, we had teams there to source it. We had teams, we had compliance teams to make sure that that supplier and that product met regulations. We had quality teams that stepped in and certified a supplier before we bought from them, and it came back again when the product was manufactured and audited the product to make sure it met our quality standards. We had distribution, logistics, transportation teams to move that product around the world to get it to our customers as quickly as possible. That's the first way our local teams served us over the last 2 years. The second way our local teams served us was 73% of our employees in Fastenal are customer-facing.
We have 15,000 employees, 15,000+ employees that live and work in the communities where their customers operate. They know those customers. They know the products they manufacture. They know the products that the customer buys from us. There were times, many, many times over the last year where our corporate teams couldn't find a source of supply. Our sales teams went in. They offered the customer deviations, substitutions or some other solution that our customer could continue to manufacture, and that was a key to our success. The final way that our local footprint served us, there were times when we couldn't find the source corporately. Our local teams couldn't find a solution. We have global manufacturing. We have manufacturing facilities around the world.
We called on those manufacturing teams time after time over the, especially the past year, to step in and help our customers with a solution to get them manufacturing. Our ability to put teams around the world close to our suppliers, close to our customers, that was a key to our success. Along that same line is something that's cultural for Fastenal. It's our decentralized decision-making ability. In Fastenal, we grow up making higher and higher levels of decisions as we go through the company. Our expectation is that we are making decisions as close to the customer and as close to the supplier as possible. Over the last two years, that's allowed us to run faster than our competitors.
In situations where in other companies, decisions may have had to go higher into the organization, in Fastenal, many of those decisions were made locally, and we were able to help our customers in a critical situation. The final key to our success over the last 2 years, I believe, is another structural thing that we've built up over the last 50+ years, and that's our scale. That's the balance sheet that we've built up, and we were able to do things that others could not do over the last 2 years because we had a strong balance sheet. Our number 1 priority was our employees. Our number 2 priority was maintaining the supply chain for our customers, and we used our balance sheet to do that. We chartered jets, flew masks around the world. We transloaded containers when they came in.
We did a lot of things that we were able to do only because we had that strong balance sheet. Those are our three keys to success. The one thing that ties all three of those things together, it's our employees. I tell you, there were some long, hard, stressful days, and I would sit back at the end of some of those days, and you're just exhausted. The thing that motivated me and inspired me was watching what our employees had done that day to take care of their societies and their communities. It was impressive. That keeps us going. Our employees are the real key to our success, and I'm honored and humbled to be able to be on the field with that team.
In true Fastenal way, anytime, regardless of how well we do, what the situation is, we're always looking at how can we improve, how can we get better. There are some lessons learned over the last two years. The first lesson that we learned is the importance of that trilateral partnership between customer, Fastenal, and our supplier. In those instances where we had all three of those stakeholders aligned, we performed much better. When we were able to collaborate, we performed much better in maintaining the supply chain for our customers. Our goal going forward is to continue. We wanna be the preferred supplier for our most strategic customers, and we wanna be the preferred customer for our most strategic suppliers, and we're gonna continue to invest in that into the future.
The second thing we learned, and you saw the video, is how important it is to continue to invest in technology. We've always invested in technology. I don't think anybody's more innovative than Fastenal is, but we're gonna continue to make that investment. The thing that excites me is the way we're using data today. You think about the millions of points of data we get from our suppliers, from our customers, and we're taking that data today, bringing visibility, bringing reporting, using the data to be able to analyze. What's really exciting is when we can take that data, and we're working on some of this today, and you'll see it into the future, taking that data and using it prescriptively.
Being able to go to our customers and tell them what they need before they even know they need it or what they should be using without them even knowing they should use that. That's our second lesson learned. The final lesson learned from the past two years, our strategy is the right strategy. Our strategy that our customers have driven us to create value for their business and create that value through managing their supply chain, it's the right one. We're on the right path, and we've been successful at it. I wish that I could stand here in front of you today and tell you that the supply chain chaos that we've been through for the past few years is over.
If you filled up your car or your vehicle with gas lately, you know that's not true. The reality is supply chain disruptions didn't just happen over the last 2 years. 3 years, 4 years ago, it was tariffs. 3 years, 4 years from now, it's gonna be something different. I'll tell you this, today we're better prepared than we were 3 years ago, and 3 years from now, we're gonna be better prepared than we are today to manage the supply chain for our customers. Thank you.
Picture the last 2 years. You have a day, you kinda get to the end of it or you're partway through it, you're not sure which way is up, which way is down, what's happening right now. We have 21,000 people like Terry Owen in the organization.
I neglected to mention, Terry also spent 6 years in the Marine Corps. Does it show? To Terry and the other leaders throughout the Fastenal organization, all I can say to you for the last several years is thank you for everything you've done. A tradition that we do internally at our employee expo in December of a year, and then externally at this meeting, is we recognize some folks that have served the Blue Team with distinction. On this next slide, you see a list of. If you went back 25, 26 years ago, we just hit 2,000 employees. We've grown that about tenfold in the last quarter century. About 30% of our personnel throughout our branch and on-site network are part-time.
We go in every day to four-year state colleges, two-year technical schools, and we find great people looking for an opportunity and we say, "Hey, come work for us 15 hours a week. We think that this is a great opportunity for you. You need to be part of our team." As you can appreciate, when you recruit that way, there's a certain amount of churn that occurs 'cause some people decide, "This is for me," and some people decide, "You know what? This isn't for me." It's 'cause it's a pretty intense environment. To be sitting here a quarter century later, of that 2,000 employees of which 600 were part-time, 516 people are still with the organization. We've had 14 people that have hit 40 years with the organization.
Five of them are still employed. The other nine have decided to retire. I guess after 40 years, they have that coming. There are two people here today who will be adding to that 40-year group come June. Bruce Hawkinson and Thom Hellman and their respective spouses drove over from Central Wisconsin and Eastern Wisconsin to join us here today, and I would ask them to stand right now and be recognized by the room. Thirty-five, 36 years ago, I was graduating from college, and I went to work for an organization up in Minneapolis. At the time, a person who I worked for and learned a tremendous amount from. You can flip to the next slide. His name is Mike Dolan. In the late 1990s.
We were looking at adding financial expertise to our board and it was my wife who said, "You know, you've talked about this Mike Dolan guy for forever. Why don't you mention his name to Bob Kierlin?" I mentioned his name to Bob and Bob knew Mike because Mike was involved when we went public in 1987, but from the other side of the fence. We reached out to Mike, and he graciously agreed to join our board back in 2000. Mike served you shareholders really well. We weren't able to honor him last year when he retired, and so I asked him to come back and be recognized today. Mike, would you stand up, please?
Early on in his career, this young man from Central Minnesota, you know, I think he was working at UPS back in the day and he had a friend that worked at Fastenal, and he found out, you know, you could manage a branch. You can lead a business, and you can work right here. Over the next 40 years, between being an employee and being on our board of directors and eventually being our President and CEO, Will was there when a lot of the things that we take for granted today were being built. I don't think there's any of the leadership within Fastenal that haven't learned something from Will over their career at the organization.
I wanna personally thank Will for what he taught me and the legacy he left in this organization. Will. With that said, are there any questions in the audience? Anything's fair game. We're doing a little Q&A, and I think there's some microphones probably floating around the room, so if you have a question, raise your hand, and we'll do our best to answer. If there's none because we've gone really long and you're just tired of hearing us talk, that's okay, too. Very good. Most of you that live in the community have probably seen this building once or twice. A number of years ago, we were jammed with people in our building. We were looking for some room to expand.
I asked Dana Johnson, "Hey, see if you can pick up some land downtown. You know, if we move 500-600 people downtown, it'd give us more room 'cause part of that parking lot that you see out on Third Boulevard is gonna be part of our warehouse someday. And so maybe moving a few people out of that building would be a good idea." Dana was able to quietly figure out a spot. I have to compliment Dana and our property team for an incredibly wonderful building they built for us. We moved two groups down there. We moved our technology team downtown, and they're on the third and fourth floor. We moved our accounting and finance teams down, and they're on the first and second floor.
The reason for those two groups, in all honesty, it's a great environment for our technology teams and our accounting teams from the perspective of a lot of our technology folks moved to this area. We thought the idea of having them downtown would be great for restaurants and places downtown. We thought a bunch of them might choose to live downtown, and we thought it would be really good economic development opportunity for the downtown community. It's. I grew up on the Mississippi River, up on Lake Pepin, and quite frankly, it's a gorgeous area. It really played into that.
I'm proud to say that we also looked at it and said, "Let's design a building for the next 40 years, next 50 years of our existence." If you look at that building compared to a building built 20 years ago, it is 62% more efficient in how it's laid out from the standpoint of the energy it takes to operate that building. If you compare it to the Minnesota standard, it's 20% more efficient. 8% of that comes from, as you can see on the roof, it's full of solar panels. I'll share some math with you. Those solar panels on that roof cost $400,000 to purchase and install. Based on the energy savings they will create, it will take us 16 years to pay it back.
Not a great return from an investment standpoint. That, quite frankly, it's a lousy return from an investment standpoint. You sometimes don't do things for returns. All I said to our team is all we have to do, if we spend 1% of our CapEx budget every year on things like this, on the other 99%, we just need to get a 1% better return, and it makes it work for everybody in the organization, everybody in society, and our shareholders at the same time. Our employees can be proud because of the way we operate and the sustainability that it entails. After the meeting here, we do have lunch served.
I've had people ask me for the last week and a half, "Hey, what's for lunch? What's for lunch?" I kept saying to them, "I don't know. I don't know." I did find out during the meeting 'cause Steak Shop Catering is here serving food today. My wife and I are blessed with four kids, and our youngest, our daughter, works for Steak Shop Catering. When she was on the way over here, I got a text, "It's turkey, Dad." We're having turkey. I hope you enjoy the meal after the meeting. I also, if you have time this afternoon, please take an opportunity to head downtown.
We'll be doing tours this afternoon of our new facility, give you a chance to see it from the inside. With that, I'm gonna turn it back over to Scott A. Satterlee. Thank you, everybody.
Thank you, Dan. The ballots have now been counted, and the report of the Inspector of Elections indicates that Scott A. Satterlee, Michael J. Ancius, Stephen L. Eastman, Daniel L. Florness, Rita J. Heise, Hsenghung Sam Hsu , Daniel L. Johnson, Nicholas J. Lundquist, Sarah N. Nielsen, and Reyne K. Wisecup have received the required number of votes and are hereby elected directors of the company. The report of the Inspector of Elections also indicates that, one, the resolution for ratification of KPMG LLP as the independent registered public accounting firm for the company for the fiscal year ending 31 December 2022, has received the required number of votes and has been adopted. Two, the resolution for the approval on an advisory basis of the compensation of certain of our executive officers has received the required number of votes and has also been adopted.
All ballots and a record of all proxies will be filed with the books and records of the company. The certificate of the Inspector of Election will be attached to the minutes of the meeting as Exhibit C. With that, before we adjourn, I have the honor of announcing our prize winners for today. We have two prize winners. The first one is Sandra [Curtain]. Sandra? The second one, and I hope that I do not butcher this name, it's Steve [Cledrowski], I believe. Congratulations to both of you. With that, the meeting is now adjourned. Thank you everybody for coming and taking some time on Saturday. Appreciate it.