Pat Felder served as NFIB State Leadership Chairman and was selected as Small Business Champion. Here’s how NFIB has helped her business succeed.
Pat Felder and her husband, Wayne, worked for many years for other companies before deciding to go out on their own in 1986.
“A local banker had enough faith in Wayne to provide us with the whopping starting capital of $60,000, and we worked many 20- to 24-hour days for several years,” Felder says. “We felt that we could achieve a successful business by being able to expand the business model with which Wayne had been working for almost 10 years.”
So, in 1988, Pat and Wayne opened Felder’s Collision Parts, a warehouse distributor for automotive collision parts, in Baton Rouge. Over the following 21 years, they experienced double-digit growth and expanded their product line almost every year. In 1999, they built what is now a 30,000-square-foot warehouse facility and in 2013 added an automotive and industrial paint and supply business.
At its highest point, Felder’s Collision Parts employed 25 people.
“The biggest challenge most small businesses face is being able to find and keep good employees,” Felder says. “The learning curve a business owner has in hiring and terminating employees is often the key to success or failure. We have been very fortunate to have had many employees that have worked for our company for 10 years or more.”
Felder says she considers providing fair-paying jobs for 25 families the biggest success of the business.
“We knew each one of our employees well enough to share their experiences outside of the job,” she says.
While Felder says being in command of your own destiny is the best part of owning a small business, she adds that the most difficult part is watching your business being destroyed by forces beyond your control, including government action and unfair competition in their industry.
NFIB has been able to help with some of this.
“NFIB is the only organization that is completely devoted to serving small business through legislation at the direction of its members,” says Felder, who served as NFIB State Leadership Chairman for five years and was also selected as a Small Business Champion. “Because of the manner in which this organization functions, its members can be as involved as they choose and can avail themselves of information that impacts their businesses directly and can help to support or oppose such legislation. Because of this association with NFIB, our business was able to protect its interests against many issues that would have been extremely detrimental, and to support efforts to bring legislation that would promote small business in Louisiana.”
