When I was born in 1978, O’Reilly Auto Parts was a modestly sized, family-owned company with a single distribution center and about ten stores in and around Springfield, Mo. As I grew from infancy to maturity, so did our business. By the time I was old enough to become part of it on a corporate level, it had become a public company traded on the nasdaq. In 2003, when I decided to end my employment with the company, it had 12 distribution centers and more than 1,500 stores spanning 26 states.
As a child, I had the romantic notion that the business my great-grandfather and grandfather had started would always be small and would always be our family business, and that I would one day pass it on to my own children. But as with all things from childhood, the business changed, and I began to see it in a different light. What happened to the relationship between our family and our business as time went on was inevitable.
My ‘family outside the family’
From a very early age I had always been aware of the “family outside of my family” that was O’Reilly Auto Parts, and how tightly connected we were to it. I remember as a young boy being unable to distinguish family members from a core group of O’Reilly employees. Certain people, including Ted Wise, the current co-president and COO, were so tightly connected to our family through the company that they basically were family.
At times, my father’s assistant, Roberta, would pick me up from school. I would spend the evening cruising around the office and the warehouse, talking to everyone and exploring that fascinatingly strange and huge part of my life. As my father worked, bent over his heavy oak desk, I would sometimes simply lie underneath it and thumb through my two favorite picture books in his office: the history of the automobile, and a Time-Life book about Henry Ford.
As O’Reilly Auto Parts grew more successful, and my father’s workdays became longer, we began to see him less and less. In those days, he always seemed to be gone before the sun was up, and home after it had already gone down. However, the company was always present, even when he was not; from our conversation around the dinner table, to the calendars we looked at, the pens we used and the cups we drank from—all with O’Reilly Auto Parts logos emblazoned on them. Even the folders and pens I took to school had the company’s name across the top, as did the T-shirts I played in, and the ball caps I wore in the summer.
Starting below the bottom
In my teenage years, my relationship with the family business began to change. Instead of a quiet, childish presence, I began to adopt an active role in the company as an employee. When I was 13, while my friends were riding bikes and fishing during the summer, I took a job with O’Reilly Auto Parts at $3.50 an hour, paid in cash. As both my parents worked, it was up to me to ride my bike the seven-and-a-half miles into town to the store and back again in the evenings. My grandfather, “Chub” O’Reilly, told me at one point that this was the way I was expected to start: somewhere below the bottom. And that is exactly what I did.
When the store shelves were empty, I filled them. When there was oil in the parking lot, I cleaned it up. When there were weeds growing through the cracks in the sidewalk, I dug them out with a screwdriver. When there was a line at the counter, I sold auto parts. When the delivery trucks from the warehouse came in, I unloaded them. That was what I did for the rest of high school and on into college.
During my time in the stores I learned how the company operated and to respect my co-workers. I was preparing for a time when I would join my father and the rest of our “family” in the corporate office and carry on my great-grandfather’s legacy. However, that simply wasn’t to be.
While I was growing up and working in the stores, there was something else going on in the company, which I knew about but didn’t quite understand. My father had told me that I wasn’t to talk about it to anyone until after it had happened. I didn’t understand, but I complied. In 1993, when O’Reilly Auto Parts went public, I only knew it to “be a good thing for our family.” What I didn’t realize was that this event signaled the beginning of the end of our family involvement in the day-to-day operation of the -company.
A changed perspective
After college, in 2000, I moved back to Springfield and went to work in the customer service department at the home office. At that time, the public offering hadn’t changed the company much, and the tradition of O’Reillys at the head of the company still continued. My grandfather was in his 80s and still working in the business, as were my father, my two uncles, my aunt and my brother, who was vice president of distribution.
I had worked in the corporate office for about three years when my attitude toward the company and my understanding about my future within it began to change. I began to understand that my notion of running the business one day and passing it on to my children had taken a backseat to the cold reality of business, and that the company was now too big to be just a family business.
Things came to a head when my father announced his retirement. At about that same time I began to look around and fearfully realize that I was only 24 and involved in a potentially permanent career, owned a house and had a serious girlfriend. I was still very young but had already planned a direct roadmap to retirement.
Suddenly, working for the family business was no longer a blessing. It felt as though it wasn’t even the family business that I had been working for. As the company grew exponentially bigger, I began to understand that it was separating from our family and by the time I would be old enough to run it, it wouldn’t be ours to run. Finally, when my brother announced his plans to leave the company, I decided that I was not destined for a career with O’Reilly Auto Parts.
Call it a quarter-life crisis if you want to, but after a two-week motorcycle trip around the western U.S. in the summer of 2003, I sat down with my father and told him about my plan to leave the company, and Springfield, to move to Austin, Texas, to be a part of the burgeoning country music business. His response to my plan was very surprising.
“All we have ever wanted for you,” he said, “was to find something you loved, something you were passionate about, and do it.”
“What about O’Reilly?” I asked. “I always thought that it would stay in the family.”
“Look,” he replied, “the future of our company was decided long ago when we went public, and we made that decision with all of you kids in mind. O’Reilly Auto Parts will always have the legacy of our family, and your grandfather and great-grandfather’s hard work in the beginning and my and your aunt and uncle’s hard work. The truth is that our family has just moved on to a different kind of future. You kids all have the ability to go out and do whatever you want. That’s quite an opportunity!”
His response amazed me. It was almost the opposite of the disappointment I assumed he would express. All of the anxiety I had felt about my scripted life had suddenly vanished. For the first time I saw the opportunity for an entirely different kind of journey, and surprisingly it didn’t scare me at all. Within three months of that conversation I had left my girlfriend, my hometown and my family business behind to strike out on my own.
As my business endeavors in event promotion in Texas became successful, my father began to feel proud of me. I was proud of myself for being able to go out on my own and succeed at life on my own terms. Yet I feel I was able to carry on our business model in my own way.
My grandfather used to talk about what those in the company now refer to as the “O’Reilly culture.” It was a certain way of doing business that centered on the idea that if you treat the people who work in the business as if they were family, and take care of them, then they will work harder to make the company successful. Now in my own business I try to emulate that philosophy. In a sense I am able to carry on the same family tradition that I would’ve been obligated to uphold had I stayed with the company.
O’Reilly Auto Parts continues to grow, and my father and his brothers and sister continue to guide it as members of the board of directors. I enjoy watching its progress from the outside, and I know that the people entrusted with its future success are the very people I had always thought of as family. In that sense, perhaps, it will always be a family company. It will always be our company.
Ryan O’Reilly is currently the managing director of 415 Entertainment in Austin, Texas, and the author of a novel, Snapshot.