It takes a unique set of skills to shepherd a business through a century of operation, let alone grow a family-owned company into a major player in its industry. As a part of that long lineage, E. Fletcher Lord Jr. has guided Little Rock-based Bumper to Bumper/Crow-Burlingame Co. through good and lean times, survived intense competition from the rise of national auto parts chains and expanded the company’s footprint as one of the few remaining independently owned companies of its kind.
Not bad for someone whose initial steps into the company were tentative at best.
“I’m not sure that I was the kind of kid who sat down and created a big book of plans,” he said. “I’d get up every morning and go to school. I knew I was going to graduate, and when I graduated, I knew I’d go into the Army for a while and knew I was going to get a job.
“I had no vision whatsoever that I was going to be in the parts business. It wasn’t ever discussed with me, nor was planning part of the process at all. I was just going my own way and wound up in the parts business anyway.”
In fact, after graduating from what was then UALR, Lord had his eye on banking. He was mulling a job at Union National Bank as a correspondent banker when a friend of his father asked him to lunch.
“He told me, ‘You know, you can be a banker anytime you want to, but you’re never going to get the chance to be involved with a family business like you’ve got. You’re silly not to give it a try,’” Lord said. “That’s how I wound up coming to work for us.”
The origins of the family firm lie with Bob Crow, Lord’s maternal grandfather, and J.G. Burlingame who together founded Crow-Burlingame Co. on April 21, 1919, 11 years after Henry Ford’s Model T was introduced and William Durant founded General Motors. Six years earlier, Ford introduced the moving assembly line, bringing the automobile within financial reach of millions.
Recognizing this shift in market forces, Crow and Burlingame entered the “auto accessories” business, selling bumpers, seats, steering wheels and other components that, while standard today, were not included on cars of that era. When automakers started including those elements during production, the partners quickly pivoted to selling repair and maintenance parts, recognizing the impending demand as millions of cars flooded the market, many running on unpaved roads.
“You’ve got to remember that in 1919, they invented this business,” Lord said of the original partners. “It wasn’t already established where everybody knew how to do it and how much you could charge and what would pay the bills. They learned it as they went.”
Nevertheless, leadership’s instincts proved sound, and the company grew by opening locations throughout the state.
“In many cases, we were the first ones to open a store in the given town we were in,” Lord said. “We bought a store in El Dorado, Arkansas, in 1928, and then between 1928 and about middle or end of the Depression, we focused just on opening stores.”
Lord remembers with a knowing chuckle how company leadership puzzled over how to best leverage his skills, something that almost ended his career before it ever began.
“Quite frankly, when I went to work they didn’t know what to do with me,” he said. “I was a college graduate with an economics degree, and most people in the business weren’t college graduates or even college attendees. It was kind of a down and dirty sort of business, wasn’t anything very glamorous about it.
“I spent a year in the office and finally went into my boss and I quit. I said this isn’t working. And he told me that he knew it wasn’t, but it was his fault, and he should have done something about it. If I’d give him some more time, he would.”
The solution, sending Lord out into the stores throughout the company’s territory, not only struck a chord with him but was the best industry education he could ask for.
“I spent the next 10 or 12 years traveling all over our territory, working with our stores in various capacities. And that’s where I really fell in love with the business,” he said. “I was on the road all the time. I went some places because it was an emergency, something needed to be done. But a lot of times, I would just go to poor performing stores or even good performing stores and figure out what was going on there and learn from that.
“I learned it was all about the people, and it wasn’t very much about anything else. The pricing was pretty well-established at that point in time. There was a routine you learned how to do, but it wasn’t that complicated; you just had to hire good people to take care of your customers. If you had the right people everything else took care of itself.”
Lord’s career ran parallel to major changes in the parts business, from government regulations that pushed companies into warehouse distribution to the changing retail landscape that saw the rise of dedicated parts chains and big-box retail. Named company president in 1979 – with Bobby Lord, his brother and vice president, at his side – he kept up with the times by employing a mix of well-worn growth strategies and bold new thinking, sometimes having to fight to do so.
Such was the case when, during a period of rampant consolidation in the 1980s, Lord saw an opportunity to buy a major competitor.
“I went to our board, and my daddy and told them I wanted to buy that business,” he said. “They didn’t like the idea of borrowing money at all. They were Depression-era people, and we never owed any money to speak of. The thought of going out and borrowing a bunch of money and buying a business like that was just terrible.
“That was the first major battle I had to fight, and I got the help of my board to convince my daddy that he should do something like that. He agreed to not fight me about it, and we bought our competitor, and that was a major change for us.”
In another deal from that era, Lord not only boosted distribution considerably, but also brought with it some new technology.
“They had more distribution than they had stores, and we had more stores than we had distribution, so you put them together we were a legitimate business that competed for both the independent market and the company-owned store market,” Lord said. “Plus, they had just finished computerizing and had a big modern conveyorized warehouse system, where we were still using pencil and paper and shoving carts around.”
Today, the company boasts four distribution centers, 210 company stores and serves as exclusive parts supplier for 190 additional independent outfits. The second largest independently owned parts company in the country, Bumper to Bumper/Crow-Burlingame Co. serves a market area from Kansas City to New Orleans and Texas to Atlanta, employing 1,500 workers in peak season.
The family legacy has expanded by a generation as well, with Lord’s son, E. Fletcher Lord III, taking the reins as president in 2019; his son-in-law, Ben Butler, serving as executive vice president; and his nephew, Crow Lord, marshaling the stores like his uncle once did. Now chairman, Lord describes himself as semiretired, enjoying more time for his wife, Diane, their seven grandchildren and more than a little golf.
As he enters the Arkansas Business Hall of Fame, he’s grateful for having had the opportunity to build a successful company the right way, benefiting employees and customers alike.
“Everybody that we compete against is public, with lots of money to throw at the marketplace, and they do,” he said. “It’s a challenge, but it still gets back down to being a people business. You can have all the inventory in the world and the best location in the world, but if you don’t have people in the stores that customers want to do business with, it’s not worth very much.”
