What's Their Growth Strategy?

Fastenal's growth strategy is to: 1) In large part - increase their Onsite (within customer facility) footprint and 2) In smaller part, grow the sales and profitability of the fixed number of branch (brick and mortar) locations. Fastenal has just in 2023 finished a decades long consolidation of branch locations. They have made them much more profitable and cut and consolidated the unprofitable ones, without losing much coverage (as measured by % of manufacturing sites they are within 30 minutes of). Branch location numbers were cut in half while coverage only lowered from 95% to 93.5%. In their 2023 Annual earnings report, Fastenal reported 1822 total onsite locations. They need a plan to grow this. The only mention of growth is the 12,000 identified locations for a potential onsite in North America. The lack of an aggressive plan outside of the 12,000 potential locations is a yellow flag.