Business View Magazine - October 2018

322 323 betweenmanufacturers and vendors participating in themotorsports and racing arena.Initially,theycam- paigned a BMWE30 inAmerican Endurance Racing events,an amateur series for production-based race cars.In 2017,“we compressed the build of ourMercedes C300EnduranceCardowntotwomonths,andwonthe first racewecompeted in,”Drozdrecounts.“Our teamwent onto finish2ndoutof139teamsoverall inchampion- ship.” “Last year,we put a prettybig emphasis on kicking off our in-house amateur motorsports program,”adds AlexFrank,FCPEuro’sVice President of eCommerce. “The ideawas to support communityefforts and a catalog that we already spent a lot of time develop- ing.Last year we raced fromOhio down toAtlanta. This year,however,we’ve gone fromLime RockPark in Connecticut to Portland International Raceway in Oregon.We’ve done Utah,Oregon,Texas,Virginia,Con- necticut,andWatkins Glen in upstateNewYork,and next year,we have a race inMichigan and California,as well.Rolling into 2018,therewere newvehiclemakes -in particular,Volkswagen andAudi-that we sawa lot of potential in.We thought that theycould become sig- nificant parts of the business. We also knewthat therewas a bigger communityacross the nation that was not yet FCP EURO familiar with us.” The companychose to focus on one of Volkswagen’s most popular models–the Golf,more specifically the GTI.“The reasonwe chose themwas that wewere concurrentlybuilding the eCommerce catalog for VW andAudi in order to better service those customers,” Frankexplains.“Frankly,therewas amajor cataloging effort and amajor motorsport effort to introduce us to a lot of newcustomers across the countryandwe tookadvantage of it.We expanded our reach and got in touchwithmanygroups wewere not involvedwith in previous years.The result is that the company is on a trajectory to reach about $50million in revenue for 2018,andwe’ve seen several months with over 70 percent growth year over year.” Franknotes that the company’s recent growth has put a strain on its operational capacity,but that it has met the challenge by revitalizing its processes with newautomated procedures while simultaneously growing its staff from40 to 74 employees. “We’ve implemented automation into our distri- bution center,”he says.“We nowhave a conveyance system that runs through the entire outbound depart- ment tomake sure that all these orders coming in are all being efficientlypicked,qualitychecked,and packed promptly.The automation also includes a categori- zation of the parts on the shelf,which is nowdone algorithmically.We built a system that identifies where parts should be located in proximity to each other,to make sure theyare picked as quicklyand efficiently