By Andy Ostmeyer

aostmeyer@joplinglobe.com

Forty years ago, a young Charlie O’Reilly left Joplin with a suitcase full of lessons learned after the 2 1/2 years he had spent here running the company’s second store.

On Nov. 12, O’Reilly, now 69, returns to Joplin to offer those and some of the other lessons he learned along the way in building O’Reilly Automotive.

O’Reilly, the former president and chairman of O’Reilly Automotive, based in Springfield, will be the featured speaker for the Leadership Joplin Symposium that day.

In 1957, Charles Francis O’Reilly, then 72, and his son, C.H. O’Reilly, were working for Link Motor Supply but opted to start their own company rather than, in the former’s case, be forced into retirement and, in the latter’s case, take a transfer to Kansas City. They opened their first store — O’Reilly Automotive in Springfield — with 13 employees.

It was the third generation of the family — Charlie — who got the job of overseeing the company’s first expansion.

“My dad and granddad had looked at this business that was for sale called Joplin Auto Supply,” said Charlie O’Reilly, recalling the site at Seventh Street and Kentucky Avenue.

And they wanted someone named O’Reilly to run it.

“This was really our first significant expansion and acquisition of any size,” said Charlie O’Reilly.

It turned out to be more than a good investment; that first store provided important lessons that O’Reilly would take back to Springfield when he returned there in 1968. One of those lessons was this: “We identified that we did not have to have someone named O’Reilly to expand into other markets.”

Instead, he said, the company learned to put a good management team into place and to trust it.

It is advice that has served the company well.

With the acquisition earlier this year of CSK Auto Corp., O’Reilly Automotive has grown to around 3,300 stores around the country, Charlie O’Reilly said. CSK was the fourth-largest auto-parts chain at the time of the deal, and was largely focused on the West while O’Reilly concentrated on the Midwest and the South.

With that deal, the company that started with 13 employees grew to 40,000 “team members,” as Charlie O’Reilly calls them, and annual sales could climb to $4.5 billion.