Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Fastenal Company Q1 2011 Earnings Results Conference Call. At this time, all lines are in a listen only mode. Later in the answer session and instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host today, Ellen Trestor, Investor Relations.
Please begin.
Welcome to the Fastenal Company 2011 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. This call will be hosted by Will Overton, our Chief Executive Officer and Dan Flores, our Chief Financial Officer. The call will last for up to 45 minutes. The call will start with a general overview of our quarterly results and operations by Will and Dan with the remainder of the time being open for questions and answers. Today's conference call is a proprietary Fastenal presentation and is being recorded by Fastenal.
No recording, reproduction, transmission or distribution of today's call is permitted without Fastenal's consent. This call is being audio simulcast on the Internet via the Fastenal Investor Relations homepage, investor. Fastenal.com. A replay of the webcast will be available on the website until June 1, 2011 at midnight Central Time. As a reminder, today's conference call includes statements regarding the company's anticipated financial and operating results as well as other forward looking statements based on current expectations as defined by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.
Forward looking statements may often be identified with words such as we expect, we anticipate, upcoming or similar indications of future expectations. It is important to note that the company's actual results may differ materially from those anticipated. Information on factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those forward looking statements are contained in the company's periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and we encourage you to review those carefully. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward looking statements as these there is no assurance that the matter contained in such statements will occur. Forward looking statements are made as of today's date only and we undertake no duty to update the information provided on this call.
I would now like to turn the call over to Will Overson. Go ahead, Mr. Overson.
Thank you, Owen, and thank everyone for joining us today. Very happy about the quarter. I think the Fastenal team performed well in the Q1. We had sales growth of 23%. We were helped by an extra day, but we'll take it.
The real exciting thing or the thing that makes us very optimistic about going into the year is our strong sequential trend. The way the quarter played out, we had a good January and then it went a little bit soft in February. We believe it was due to weather, but then we came back very strong in March where our March daily average was 7% higher than our February daily average, much above our normal sequential trend. For the January to March trend, more historically, we would be up 6.2%, but this year, we're up 8.6%. So moving forward at a nice pace and we're excited about the progress that we've made.
I feel good about our progress on the gross margin. Our gross margin was up 90 basis points over the Q1 of last year. It was even with the Q4, but a lot of that is geography and Dan is going to give a better report on that. But we're making nice progress working on our margin and we're well within our 51% to 53% range that we talked about right in the middle of that. From an expense standpoint, our SG and A grew at 16.7% and that's a I believe they did a really good job and the group did a really good job on that.
Labor was up when you put in all the health costs and all the other things about 26%, well above sales growth, but it's really being driven by the rebound of our bonuses, which we're very happy that that's happening. Bonuses were up more than 100% year over year. So we're going to spend money, that's the place to spend it. The other expenses, once you take the labor out, were actually flat to slightly down year over year. And that's just due to a strong focus in all the details.
We learned a lot in the 2,009 recession about where we needed to spend money and where we shouldn't be spending money and it's coming through in the quarter results in 2011. From a pre tax profit standpoint, we reported 20.1 percent, the first time that we've been over 20% in the Q1 for more well over a decade. So we're proud of that and it really puts us on a good track for our pathway to profit progress that we talked about in the Q4 of being over 20%. So we're really moving towards the goals that we need to hit. From a future standpoint, what we're looking for going forward, I'll start with a little history on that.
At the beginning of 2010, really the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010, we were really working hard to determine where we should invest in growth drivers outside of our normal new store openings. And the decisions we made were to add additional salespeople at a higher level, national accounts, government sales, automated supplier, vending and some product specialists, which we did. So looking at those groups, our national accounts business, we over invested in that group, was growing very nicely. We have a lot of activity with the large customers. We've seen tremendous sales with our tremendous success with our government sales efforts.
At the beginning of 2010, we put in a Vice President of Government Sales. We restructured how we approach that business. So we hadn't done what we felt to be a very good job at chasing that business or trying to go out and get that business. John and his team, the new government sales rep, were very active in the last year trying to understand the business. And at the end of 2010, we signed a contract with the TPCN, which is a purchasing network that represents state buyers.
At the beginning of this year, we signed a contract with WSCA, which is Western States Cooperative Alliance, which is also a large purchasing alliance that represents state and political subgroups. Basically, they negotiate deals for states and then states can opt in to the bids. That business is not coming through yet because we're working out all the details, but we think it has a lot of potential for the future. Our large competitors have done a very nice job with that. So we're very optimistic with what we're doing with government sales going forward.
And what it really does if you think about it, it just expands the local market for a store because without these agreements, we really don't have the ability to sell to these local entities. With the agreement, it expands the market for the local store. Another area that we're optimistic about going into the future is our Fastenal automated supply technology otherwise known as vending. We've been investing in that program for about the last 2 to 2.5 years. We really started at the beginning of 2,009.
We're seeing very nice progress. We're seeing good adoption from our customers. And our plan is to continue to invest in the automated supply and continue to roll that out to our customers. The other growth driver and probably the most important growth driver that we have is hiring quality people. What we foresee going into the rest of the year or the remainder of the year is that we'll continue to hire sales people, sales in the store and around the store at a rate of about 60% to 70% of sales growth.
So if we were able to grow our sales at 20%, we would put in 13% 12% to 14% new headcount into the stores. And then we'll continue to hire support people at a lower rate, but at a rate sufficient to support the sales growth. And that way you'd really see most of those people would be in distribution and manufacturing roles because that's really where we need the people to drive and support the sales going forward. So although this is a brief report, I'm very happy with the quarter. I'd like to congratulate the Fastenal people that are on here today and thank them for the effort that they put forth.
And with that, I'll turn it over to Dan to report give us a more in-depth report. Thank you, Will, and good morning everybody and again thank you for participating in our call. Today, much to everybody's pleasure, I will be very brief. Some highlights I'd note from our earnings release. Again, on Pages 12, we highlight year over year growth patterns in our stores and in a subset of our stores, our 2 plus and our 5 plus and I'm happy to report that the 25 year old plus stores, they saw nice gains in the second half of twenty ten as their growth was taking off and we're seeing that continue in the 1st 3 months of 2011.
From a sequential sales pattern, as Will said, from January to March, despite the weather impacts in February, we've seen sequential gains that are well above our expected. In fact, March was about 2.4% sequentially better than history would tell us it should be. And that bodes well as we go into the second and third quarters. And the information you hear out of ISM also bodes well as I look forward into the second and third quarters. From an end market perspective, manufacturing continues to hold strong.
We are seeing a pickup in momentum in our construction end markets, which is one piece of our business that was lagging as we went through 2010 and seeing very nice sequential gains in that business. Pathway to profit, Will mentioned some of the investments we've been making on the people side. A few things that I'd point out, if I look at the store FTE, which is up about 12% from a year ago, since we started to pass it to profit, our store FTE is up about almost 23%. Our non store selling personnel, the 3 areas that Will mentioned as well as the investments in manufacturing sales personnel, is up 27% from where it was at the start of 2,007. So a lot of additional selling energy embedded in our organization, not only over the last 12 months, but over the last 4 years.
If you look at DC and Manufacturing, our previous peak month was September 2008 and that's where our headcount in distribution and manufacturing had peaked. Right now, we're actually about 8.5% below that. A lot of that from the efficiencies we've gained in our investments in distribution over the last 4 to 5 years. If I would remove the Holocomb acquisition of late 2009, our manufacturing and distribution headcount is actually down about 12.5% from the peak in the fall of 2,008. And again, largely credited to the efficiency gains that we've incorporated into our distribution systems over the last several years.
One of the things that we highlighted when we started the pathway to profit was the efficiency we'd also see in our support personnel because of the overhead that's associated with opening stores more than growing sales. And if I look at our support FTE, we're actually flat, down slightly in fact from where we were in Q1 of 2007, the last quarter before the path for the profit. When we look at gross profit margin, as Will touched on, we are soundly in the middle of our long term stated range of 51 to 53, a range that we think allows for good efficient growth of our business and serves well on our pathway to profit initiative. If I look at the components of our gross margin, on a year over year basis and a sequential basis, our transactional margin improved. So it improved both from Q1 to Q1 and from Q4 2010 to Q1 2011.
Our organizational gross profit, which is really our buying scale, that improved from Q1 to Q1 and from Q4 to Q1. So we have nice momentum in the components that make up our gross margin. The 3rd piece, when we look at vendor allowances, everything from rebate programs to the way we move product with freight, etcetera, on a year over year basis that's up nicely. On a Q4 to Q1 basis, Q1 is more than normalized number. Q4 was actually a little bit higher than normal because of some rebate programs coming stronger than we expected late last year.
So despite about a 30 basis point drop in that from Q4 to Q1, again, now we're back to a more normalized number, we were able to maintain our gross margins and that 30 basis point improvement all came from the first two categories I mentioned. As Will touched on, our payroll and healthcare our people cost included in SG and A increased about 27% from a year ago. If you look at all the remaining expenses within SG and A, they're actually flat with a year ago and that's our overall increase of about 17%. If I peel back that onion a little bit, there's a few things in there that were working against us. One is, as a distribution organization, we spend a fair amount on energy both at our store locations and at our within our vehicle fleet.
If you look at some of the information we put into the earnings release, our diesel fuel is up about 25% from Q1 to Q1 and that's a per gallon cost. Our gasoline is up about 20%, That's a per gallon cost. All I can say to those 2 stats is out because that raised our fuel dollar spent by about 34% when you combine it with the growth in our business. If you look at occupancy, we did a nice job on that. We had some increases due to both energy costs that I just mentioned, the new Holocron facility in Connecticut that we moved into and increases in real estate taxes.
But if I look at the actual rent dollars that we paid out, they were up about 2.5% from Q1 of 2010. Lastly, on the balance sheet side, on the working capital piece, I think we did a nice job managing both our accounts receivable growth and inventory growth when you factor in the added sales March to March. When I look at cash flow as a percentage of earnings, our operating cash came in at 93.4%. Typically, Q1 is seasonally high. Our stated range for that is 80% to 90% on an annualized basis.
We were able to announce for the first time in our history a dividend for the Q2. We announced a $0.26 dividend last night and we also announced the intention of our Board to migrate from a semiannual dividend payment frequency to a quarterly payment frequency and this is the first evidence of that. The final thing I'll touch on and this is just a little tidbit for the day. One thing that jumped out at me as I was looking at not only the quarter, but also the month of March and some activity in our stock price recently. This quarter appeared to be the quarter of 10 for us.
It's the first time in our history our market capitalization snapped above $10,000,000,000 and congratulations to all the Fastenal employees and shareholders on the call. 2nd, our international business is now 10.3% of sales. That's what it came out to in the Q1. So we've made a nice transition over the last decade from primarily a U. S.
North American business, but primarily U. S. To truly an international distribution business. And then the final piece is, if you noticed in our monthly sales release, our daily average for the month of March was $10,501,000 per day. That is the 1st month since September of 2,008 where our daily average is over $10,000,000 a day.
And so it's nice to have the finally the shadow of the meltdown of late 2008 and early 2009 behind us as we move into the rest of the year. With that, Bill and I are open to questions. Thank you.
Thank you. In the interest of time, we are asking that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up only. Our first question comes from David Manthey with Robert W. Baird. Please go ahead with your question.
Hi, good morning guys. First off, I was wondering was there any impact from price increases in the Q1? And if you could discuss fasteners and all the rest of your products separately? And then second related question is, do you plan to hold prices down in order to gain share until your cost of goods sold rises via FIFO or will you raise prices with the market as fasteners go up and try capture incremental margin earlier? This is Will.
I'll answer the second question first, Dave. We plan to push prices up as soon as we can and hopefully capture incremental margin. But we're not seeing a tremendous amount of inflation. If you look at the Asian Steel Index, we use CRU. If you look at the April, May price per ton and you look at the December price per ton, steel was very flat throughout 2010.
It has gone up in the 1st 3 months of this year. We have to understand on the fastener side of our business, it's a long cycle. The product we buy, say, in October of 2010, we'll be selling in June to October of 2011. We have about 6 to 7 months worth of inventory and it takes 3 to 4 months to get the product. So it's a very long cycle.
So we have not seen a lot of inflation in either the fasteners. We've seen a little bit more in the non fastener business, but we do anticipate inflation coming through and we're hearing that from our suppliers. One of the reasons we believe we've not seen more inflation in the fasteners is the Taiwanese fact mainly Taiwanese, but some Chinese factories we're buying from are running at about anywhere between 75% and 85% capacity and they're reluctant to push real hard on pricing because volume is the game for them. Our purchasing manager was just over there in Asia about 2 or 3 weeks ago along. In fact, Dan was with them and that's what they saw when they were there.
All right. Thanks, Will. And just as a quick follow-up to that, through our surveys and other things we've been hearing about significant price increases in fasteners, some of our contacts from overseas. Do you think you have an advantage relative to others in the market? So, when you look at competitively, are you seeing others being forced to raise prices at this time or in the near future?
And again, you might be able to operate under that umbrella for a while? We're hearing more about price increases from the investment community than we are from the industrial distribution community. We've talked to our guys a lot about it. We're pushing some and we've pushed some of our wholesale prices up, but it's a little bit of a longer cycle. And we one of the things that happened in the fastener industry is Heads and Threads, which was the largest middle person, they were the largest distributor in the U.
S. That bought from Asia and sold to distributors. They went out of business and it's kind of settled the market a little bit right now. We're not sure where it's going. Again, we do anticipate fasteners going up.
We're seeing increases as we speak, but we have to push those through to the customers. And I'd have to I will say, John. One big difference between now and 2,007 and 20 8 is in 2,007 and 20 8, the angle was very clear. It was sharp and it was moving up. If you look at steel over the last year and a half, it's been rolling.
It's generally rolling up, but it's going up and going down. It's a little bit harder to peg.
Our next question comes from Ryan Merkel with William Blair. Please go ahead.
Thanks. Two questions from me. The first is on gross margins. Is 52% a number we can improve as the year goes along? Or does the mix shift to larger OEM accounts and away from FASTERS hold that back a little bit?
Ryan. The mix shift is definitely keeping both away from Fasteners and with a lot of OEM business. Those two mix shifts have been holding our margin in check quite frankly for the last 15 months, 16 months and it still holds it somewhat in check. The wildcard is, as Will just touched on, some of the inflation and how that plays out as we go into the year. We think there is a potential for some upside and as we cycle through our inventory that's on the shelf and the stuff we ordered last fall.
But at the end of the day, you have to you always have to take a step back and appreciate the way we go to market and the way we price our product. We have 2,500 locations out there. We influence those locations, don't get me wrong, by periodic adjustments to our wholesale prices, pushing the group of stores, group of districts that maybe are performing on the bottom half of the group that felt there pushing them to rise to the performance of the remaining group. But at the end of the day, our pricing from day to day and from week to week is dictated by those 2,500 store managers and their support group and their local marketplace. And so and their compensation programs, which we've always touched on.
And that's why we always cite that 51% to 53% range. We think in a period of inflation, we can be in the upper half of that in a period of deflation like we saw in 2,009, we could beat up a little bit. Okay. And then I noticed that fasteners were below 48% of sales in the quarter. What is driving this mix change?
And should this trend continue or does it slow down a bit as we move throughout the year? Well, I guess, I would phrase it a little differently. I'd say our non fasteners are growing exceptionally well. Our fasteners are growing very well and our non fasteners have grown to close to 52 rather than the other has dropped to 48. Because I think it's supportive of the improvements we're seeing right now in our construction business, the headway that we're making in some of the government business is coming up because that tends to have a pretty strong non faster balance to it as well.
And so it's more of a function of other things that are gaining momentum more than I'd say faster slowing down because the fasteners are doing quite well for us. Okay. That makes sense. And then the last question, just touch briefly on what you're seeing for growth in terms of the reseller, international and government end markets? Thanks.
They're growing above the company number. Thanks. Thanks, Matt. Yes. And you don't get a 4th one.
You have to go to the next guy now.
Our next question comes from Sam Darkatsh with Raymond James. Please go ahead with your question.
Good morning, Will. Good morning, Dan. How are you? Good morning. A couple of quick ones.
First off, the inventory per store was up less than the organic sales growth. I'm curious as to is this a function of better efficiency? Was this a strategic decision? How should we look at inventory levels on a go forward basis? The inventories will continue to grow well below sales growth, overall sales growth.
And actually if you looked at our inventory per store, it's close to flat with where it was a year ago. We've continued to expand the inventories in our distribution centers to support the growth of the business and the initiatives we have in place, supporting a broader category and good fulfillment as we enter into some of these other arenas such as the manufacturing growth, the government sales growth and the industrial lending. Last question for others. How much do you suppose was the March very strong March results, a result of perhaps some get back from the poor weather in February January? And how much of that do you believe is reflective of the underlying strength in your end markets?
We think this is Will. I think that the vast majority is due to the underlying strength in our end markets and our execution. Historically, we've never really gotten back much from weather because when plants don't open up, they don't make that up. And so there may be
a little bit, but very little.
It's really driven by, I think, good execution. The only The only thing I would add in to support that is if you look at February and what happened with our business, the weather impacts in February was all centered on the first 7 to 8 days of the month. I mean, it was that think of the Super Bowl week. You saw our business, especially in the Texas markets, what we call Mid South Oklahoma, etcetera, that those areas there were just hammered. And so some of that was able to snap back, but then there was in the month of February just a hole.
That would suggest that April is still running above seasonal trend then? We don't comment on April, but March definitely ran above seasonal trend. Yes. Okay. Thank you, gentlemen.
You bet. Our next question comes from Holden Lewis with BB and T. Please go ahead with your question.
Thank you. Good morning. Good morning, Holden. Can you just speak about your expectations for these 4 SG and A elements that you talked about, the payroll costs, the healthcare, occupancy, selling. Now, I guess, obviously, payroll goes up as revenues go up, but in profits.
But what are you expecting out of healthcare, occupancy and selling transportation? Do you expect that those will remain leveraged? Have they been has the spending been really squeezed and therefore that needs to pick up? And how do we look at that? Well, if you let's start with the components.
If you look at payroll and you think back to what was going on in our business as we emerged from 2,009 to 2010, our incentive compensation, commissions at the store, profitability bonuses, profit sharing dollars that go into our 401, If you look at those things, they really took off in the Q2 of 2010 because that's when our growth really took off because Q1 of 2010, we still had a pretty weak quarter. Our year over year sales numbers were very weak. Our performance, again, driven by the economy was weaker. And so this is really the Q4 of a period where our year over year comparisons on the labor side are in the situation they're in. When I look at Q2, Q3 and Q4, I would expect the payroll numbers as a percentage increase over last year will come back dramatically.
Probably grow very similar to sales growth. Or lower. Lower than sales growth. If I look at the remaining operating expenses, health insurance really peaked up as we got into the summer months of 2,009 and in the latter half of two thousand and nine. That was quite strong in the first half of twenty ten.
And we even started seeing it last year where because the healthcare was getting more normal. Some things that really drove it up for us were we had a lot of employees that switched from single coverage to family coverage. And a lot of those situations were their spouse either lost insurance coverage or lost a job and they came on board and family coverage is more expensive than single coverage and part of it because you're insuring more people, part of it because the population is typically a little bit older and whereas 20 year olds don't incur a lot of healthcare. And so when I look through the balance of the year, I feel very confident about our ability to manage our non both our payroll costs and that will improve, not only a percentage of sales, but the percent increase and the remaining expenses will improve as well. Keep in mind in 2010, we also had our settlement with the GSA and that was recorded throughout the 2010 year.
That won't reoccur in 2011. So there's a bit of advantage there. Okay. So, all 4 of those categories then continue to look leverageable to you is what I'm hearing. The second question, I guess, following up on that is, if you look at just your incremental margins each quarter over the last 4, I mean, it come down from 44% to 39% to 37%, about 32% in Q1.
Where do you expect those incrementals to go to? Do you expect them to keep coming down into the mid-20s or should we sustain at this level? What sort of a thought process with that? I expect those remain in the 30s as we go through the year. And again, I believe the bias is positive for us when I look at the gross margin side.
When I look at the operating expenses, I believe the bias is positive. And so, I believe our ability to maintain incremental margin in the 30th is very achievable for the rest of the year. And does that require pricing to achieve Pardon? Does that require pricing to achieve that or you can do it even if pricing doesn't materialize? If you look at our gross margin from Q4 to Q1, we were we actually improved our transactional gross margin from Q4 to Q1 and that was absent any type of meaningful price increase.
And the signs are that we will have pricing. We are paying more for product today. It's just the cycle coming through. Okay. All right.
Thanks.
Our next question comes from Brent Brackers with Morgan Kiegan. Please go ahead with your question.
Good morning. And Dan, I think in your earlier comments, you, I believe, referenced the international contribution to overall revenues in the month of March being 10.3%. Last year, I'm showing that number was only 8.8% of revenues. So we're just wondering if you could maybe talk through over the last couple of 2, 3 months, what is going on in the international markets, where you're seeing particular strength and such? This is Bill.
It really isn't the last 2 or 3 months. We've had well above average growth out of our international markets throughout 2010 continuing in 2011. All of the markets that we are in outside the United States are very strong. Canada is above the U. S, not nearly as much as the rest of the markets.
Mexico is very strong right now. China, Singapore, UK and Eastern Europe are the areas that we're seeing unusually good growth. Our international business as a whole was up, you have, I think, about 40 49%. 49%. 49% and it was right at 50 percent.
So that group of business grew at 50% or 49% year over year, but there's nothing unusual in that. And Steve Versinski, our Executive Vice President who runs that is investing to maintain growth levels far above Fasl, I'm not saying 49%, but he believes he can outpace the company by double digit margins for years to come if he continues to invest. If you look back historically at Fastenal, the constraints to investing were finding enough people and having enough cash. Steve doesn't have the cash problem because we can support him and he has a large population of U. S.
Citizens that are willing to go and support his business in other areas of the world. So those are two things that he can work use to drive this growth for years to come. Great. And then I guess my other question, in terms of the additions you made in some of the strategic selling areas, some of the non store selling areas, is there any way I mean, I know in the past you signaled out data points about strategic account growth or maybe government or national accounts, is there any other data points you can show us in terms of revenue growth contribution from some of these initiatives or is most of that outperformance still in front of us? I can share this much and part of it we're being a little close with some of the information, but I can tell you that all those areas you talked about are growing well above what the company is performing.
And as we've mentioned, one of the things that we're making investments in is the industrial vending and it has to go through 2011. We'll be sharing more of that information. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Adam Uhlman with Cleveland Research. Please go ahead with your question.
Hi guys, good morning. Hi Adam. I was hoping maybe you could give us a little bit more color on the strength that you're seeing in near construction related business? And then secondly, could you just address the cadence of store openings this year, how you expect that to progress and what was behind the 5 store closings in the Q1? Thanks.
Well, first off on the construction, I'll be honest with you, our information is always a bit cryptic because it's so many active accounts out there that make up the number. What I can tell you is we're seeing nice improvements in the trends and it's not geographically limited. It's pretty well diverse across the continent. And so it's just you're seeing a pickup in activity. And like we saw at the when the markets really melted down, that was the last one to slow down because the projects once they're funded, you don't stop a building when you have a 10 story building and you have 2 stories left.
But you might not start a new one or you might not start a new road project or a bridge. But when the energy starts going into getting that relit, again, there's a latency because there's funding constraints, there's permitting constraints, there's construction constraints. But once it starts being lit, you see nice improvements and they tend to be sustainable improvements. And that's really what we're seeing right now, but it's well stood across the country. As far as store openings, the 37 was a nice start to the year.
It's on pace with the 150 to 200 we talked about. When I look at Q2, we have a big customer show coming up in May. And so you will see some slippage in the openings probably in April May because of that because all of our new stores ship out of that facility. We're trying to work around as much as possible pre prepping if that's the correct verb, some of the materials so we can maintain our store openings. But we're still confident about our $150,000,000 to $200,000,000 range for the year.
As far as the closings, over the last several years you've seen some closings. It's typically a case of people doing a nice job every day of assessing their investments, their locations and where the best investment dollars need to be. In some markets where we've seen very depressed situations, we've actually consolidated some of our stores. And part of that was on the managing of occupancy side. You had a market where we could easily service instead of having 3 locations, you could easily service the market out of 2, you had a lease that was coming due and you combine those stores.
And I think that's always a good move and something that's healthy for a company to do every year. The and with that said, when I look at those markets, I still believe those markets will support additional stores in the future. I don't think this is a statement about any given markets or stores. It's really a statement about being prudent in a time that still is a weakened financial period. And our district and regional leadership are making hard decisions every day.
I think, Adam, if you look at our small stores and how much they're losing, that number continues to drop because of this focus and part of that focus is the guys are in the field are saying, you know what, this one's on the bottom of that losing list, Let's make a business decision and move on. Great. Thanks.
Our next question comes from Hamzah Mazari with Credit Suisse. Please go ahead with your question.
Thank you. Just a question on your inventory levels. It seems like you've been building for the last couple of quarters. Are you going to continue to build given where your demand environment is right now, given that you're seeing stronger than expected seasonality? Just wondering how to think about that going forward.
For us, the opportunity cost that comes from not staying ahead of your customers' needs is some periodically when you run out of product you have to do what's called a fill in buy. That fill in buy is extremely expensive proposition for us. In a situation where we have a very strong balance sheet and we have products that have very strong attributes from a gross margin standpoint and we have a very, very good distribution system. We've been willing to let that inventory grow a little bit faster over the last few years. 2 years ago, we contracted it quite dramatically as a reaction to the economic slowdown.
But what we're really focusing our energy on every day is obviously managing the growth and being smart about it, buying a little bit of extra product last fall or even in the Q1 of this year before some potential inflation, I think it's always a good move as long as you don't get carried away with it. And then we're working every day to better position where our inventory is. Does this belong? Is it better for this group of products to be in a store or in a distribution center to support our customers and their needs. So our inventory will grow this year, but we're very confident in our ability to continue to improve our inventory turns and our days on hand.
All right. Thank you. Just a follow-up question. When you look at your long term 23% EBIT margin target, are you assuming that your mix goes back to normal or the fasteners go back above 50%? Just wondering what that assumes in terms of mix or does that not really matter?
Well, mix matters, but we're not assuming to be honest with you, I would be surprised if our fasteners ever go above 50% again. This is a long trend that we knew would happen 15 years ago when we started selling other products. These fasteners as a percentage of industrial consumption or distribution business only represents 8% to 10% of the overall opportunity. So our 23% target is based maintaining a gross margin between 51% 53% and driving our average store size to between 101,101,000. And if you look at the information that we provide, if you put the pieces together, that will point you in that direction that if we're able to maintain that margin, have the average store size where it is or where I just stated, we will be in that 23% EBIT margin range at that point in history and we're confident that we can do that.
Thank you very much. Thanks.
Our next question comes from Robert Barry with UBS. Please go ahead with your question.
Good morning, guys. Good morning. Good morning. I wanted to follow-up on the non res question. I think last quarter, you had mentioned that you were seeing signs of strength in energy, healthcare, education and government.
And I was wondering if the comment today indicated that there are now other areas in non res besides those that are starting to see momentum. Well, the real strength we're seeing is in the ones that you just stated, but because of the improvement based on the improvement we've dug deeper, it looks like there's some other project, but nothing of size. There's just more activity, which lends us to believe that other companies are spending money. We know that some factories are being built. We know there's improvement within factories to meet capacity.
And we're doing some things within our business. We're expanding we just expanded our IT area and put in a bunch of mechanicals because we had to There's more of that activity going on, but it's not big projects where they're getting out the bulldozer and putting up 50 storey buildings. The real strength in our the real core of our construction strength non res would first be energy and a lot of that has to do with power plants and oil refineries. There's still some good government spending, which would be typically buildings, courthouses, things like that, colleges. And then medical industry continues to build a lot of it is like smaller clinics and rural or new facilities.
That's been good business for us. But overall, there is more activity and what we're seeing in a small scale is these renovations and things like that for people to pick up capacity. Okay. And then with just We're still seeing nothing on the like the retail, the Targets, the Home Depots, the Strip Malls, the towers downtown, that's pretty much non existent from what we're seeing. Right.
Okay. And then just a little shift in focus to the growth outlook. I mean, really good performance in the Q1, up 23% organic. The comps get much tougher as we move through the year. I'm wondering how you're thinking about the top line growth outlook in the context of those much more difficult comps?
Well, if you look at the sequential patterns to our business, it's all about where we are now and where do we think we'll be in June or we think we'll be in September. And when I look at 2010 and if you look at that chart we have that graph that we have on the Page 3 of our press release, I think it really tells that story that the sequential patterns, it sometimes amazes me how close 2010 near the sequential pattern. And when I look at 2011, we're nearing to exceeding that pattern. Some of the points where we exceeded the pattern were in the last once we get past July of last year, but even that wasn't excessive. And I think we're in a great position to have very nice growth throughout 2011 because of our sequential pattern and the momentum it creates and some other data points, the strong ISM, etcetera.
Our comps really have been consistent since our sequential pattern since July of 2009 coming off the bottom. If you look at month to month and map it out, there's been tremendous amount of consistency. What we have to do to provide to produce above average results is our month to month improvement, which we've been able to do for 3 months this year, but there's 9 months left. Okay. And then just finally, on the distribution side, can you remind us what initiatives, if any, that are noteworthy are still to come in terms of the distribution network?
Or was Indianapolis kind of the last big? If you look out further into the future, what we did in both Dallas and Indianapolis is we installed automation that reduced our labor and improved our throughput. We're testing the automation. We're very confident with we're very comfortable with what we did. And in the future, we would foresee putting that automation eventually in most of our distribution centers, but we're not going to install it until we have volume issues because it really only pays for itself if you need the capacity increase the throughput.
So what we're doing at this point is we're looking at all of our distribution centers. We have it kind of mapped out in a timeline and where we have the what we predict, foresee the greatest sales growth and demand. And over the next 3 to 5 years, we will be rolling this technology out into most of our distribution centers, let's say, 3 to 7 years. And I'm sure as we go on, we'll find new technologies and new automation to make it even better and give us even a greater return is what we would foresee because that's been our history. How significant a component is that to the margin growth expectation?
I mean, I know it's mostly focused You mean the operating margin? Yes. It really isn't. It's not built in. We're going to our gross or operating margin is really what I said.
Average store size and gross margin in the 51% to 53% range. I mean, it sounds simple. It's not. It's hard work, but that's what we're focused on. But the math is simple.
The math is simple. Yes. Okay. Thank you. With that, it is 45 minutes past the hour, actually 47.
Again, thank you for everybody participating in our call this morning and we look forward to progressing through the balance of the
year. Have a good day. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the conference.
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