FCP needs your vote!

Chase and LivingSocial are sponsoring “Mission: Small Business℠” a grant program awarding up to $3 million to small business owners nationwide.

VOTING IS EASY:
1. Visit: Mission Small Business and click “Log in and support”
(NOTE: It won’t post anything to Facebook, it just uses it to make it easier for you to log in)

2. Search for “FCP” then scroll down and VOTE!

Please help us by voting for FCP and sharing with your friends and family encouraging them to do the same.

Here’s a copy of the essay we submitted:

You could call FCP an auto parts distributor, but we are so much more than that. We’re building on what we have already established, a brick and mortar auto parts store with 26 years of history. Over the past 11 years we’ve successfully transitioned our organization online, while always keeping the same values that kept us afloat and supported for all of those years.

At FCP we’ve valued our strong focus on customer service, quality, and community, since FCP’s founding inception. We regularly contribute to open source software; a dynamic and sustainable decision that has lead our software development and technology back to the development communities, now other companies to gain knowledge and learn from what we have learned thus far.

When developing our strategies and concepts, we look to our FCP family first. We have a wild bunch that is passionate about the work they do. They are at FCP because of their love of the culture within the company and because they know their participation in the company is always valued. It’s fun here, we’re a family and a team first.

We have taken pride in establishing this crew and believe they should be a part of our processes. Every single person’s opinions, recommendations and criticisms holds incredible value, as we all play an different and important role in improving FCP constantly and consistently.

Listening first is a priority. This, not only is how FCP works internally, but with our customers and partners as well. Our online presence, social media and videos are portals for us to make our customers part of our family. And if they’re all happy to know if there’s ever an issue with something or a suggestion to make something better, we’re always listening.

Our customers and friends have learned to rely on us for a wealth of automotive information. We provide free installation, repair and maintenance videos across YouTube and our blog. We answer customers public questions openly often recommending cost saving alternatives to work done by a dealer or automotive mechanic. We empower our customers to try their repair themselves, and we help them along every step of the process.

We have grown the business successfully with only an initial $9,000 equity on the owner’s behalf. All of FCP’s growth has been through debt and re-investments of our own profits. We have put back into the company without regret. It’s the only way we saw fit to see our fantastic organization grow. We knew by investing back into FCP, we were investing in ourselves and the family that works here at FCP.

This grant would help us properly capitalize our organization to remove some of that debt. It would also greatly improve a tight cash flow and help expand our undersized website and technology team, which would in turn provide more improvements and advancements to the open source community and our incredible customers.

We’ve always valued the process and constantly look forward to sharing our knowledge to help others that are going through the same trials small businesses like ours often do. It’s a bumpy road, and we are looking for some fresh pavement ahead. Pardon the auto pun, it’s hard not to sometimes.

Making the transition from a team of founders and entrepreneurs to a strong operational management and executive team came with a lot of trial and error, but we are doing it and we’re writing the book in the process. Our team has learned to transition their thinking from tactical to strategic planning, from reactive to proactive. We’ve grown to base our decision making on data and analysis to mitigate risk, and it’s helped us set the foundation right and structure our family and organization in such a way that we can support our well earned growth for years to come.

The company is driven by an amazing group of employees that care. Our employees are part of our family and taking care of them is always in the best interest of the organization. Although our talent pool is diverse, we focus and make communication a frequent priority, to assess our strengths and weakness, and we work together to fill the gaps.

Our passion, interest, and enthusiasm is obvious in every aspect of our company. From our online support team to our sales staff, from our warehouse to our marketing and technology teams. The staff looks forward to helping out each other and we regularly put in the extra time to help our customers in every way possible. We do this because we are our own customers, our family within the staff. We are ecstatic that FCP is turning out the way we envisioned it, and we’re always looking to drive it further forward.