Mr. Henslee: Our company started in 1957 as a single parts store owned by the O'Reilly family here in Springfield, Mo. We grew over time, opening an additional store in the early 1960s and then an occasional store as the company had incremental success. And over time, ended up as a pretty good-sized operation here in Southwest Missouri and Northern Arkansas. In 1993 we took the company public on the Nasdaq. At the time, we had approximately 125 stores and were doing over 100 million in total revenue. We've now grown the company to 3,469 stores as of the end of the first quarter. We sell auto parts, lubricants and appearance chemicals. Some of our stores sell paint and body shop supplies, and then we sell the equipment, tools and so forth that the shops use to work on cars, and DIY customers use to work on cars.
One of the things that has differentiated O'Reilly from many of our competitors for years is that we execute what we call a dual-market strategy. By that I mean that we focus on selling parts to repair shops and partnering with them to help them be more successful, and we deliver parts to them on a hot-shot basis. We give them electronic connections to our inventories for inquiry, estimating and ordering. We also focus on the do-it-yourself/retail side of the business. We bought CSK Auto, which was a publicly traded company headquartered out of Phoenix, Ariz., which had approximately 1,300 stores on July 11 of 2008. Prior to buying them, our business mix was approximately 50% do-it-yourself and 50% what I'll call "do-it-for-me" - the supply business to the repair shops. Our effort with the purchase of CSK is to convert them to this 50-50 business model, whereas they were approximately 90% DIY and only about 10% do-it-for-me at the time we bought them.
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