Business
Running a small, family-owned business is no easy feat. I should know. In 1990, my brother and I acquired Field Fastener, a global supplier of inventory management, technical support services, and complete supply chain solutions for fasteners and other “c” class items.
Over the nearly 35 years of working together, our business has expanded from 12 employees to over 360 team members. We have added a new generation of our family in leadership roles, and we’ve also undergone tremendous growth, achieving an 18% average growth rate per year due to our world class culture and commitment to remaining customer centric in an increasingly virtual world.
But the most fulfilling part of my career is fostering a work culture that reflects our personal and company-wide core values. A work culture whereby our team members — and by extension, our company — thrive both at work and outside the office.
Focused on a mission of improving lives, the Field team regularly gives time, effort, enthusiasm and financial support to our community. Our team delivers the highest return on investment not only to our company and our clients but to our very neighbors. We were honored to receive an award for our philanthropic efforts in 2024 in the Rockford community.
Likewise, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) provides important tax relief for workers and small businesses, provisions that directly return benefits to all Americans.
The law, which directly supports over two and a half million jobs nationwide, created the 20% small business deduction to ensure we remain competitive with larger publicly traded companies. In my home state of Illinois, the deduction was claimed by over 1 million small businesses and independent contractors in 2022, the most recent year the data is available.
This has meant that businesses like ours have had extra resources to invest in hiring new team members, increasing wages, provided more generous benefits and career development, and even giving our team members paid time off for volunteering. We have absorbed all the annual increases in our health care costs for the past 8 years, none of the increases we passed along to our team members.
The TCJA also provided our workforce with strong tax cuts, including a lowering of individual tax rates, a doubling of the standard deduction and a doubling of the child tax credit. Taken together, these provisions benefit small business and the workforce alike, allowing us to better embrace this culture we’ve worked so diligently and intentionally to build.
The pro-growth TCJA provisions underpinning the ongoing success of U.S. small businesses are due to sunset in 2025. Our lawmakers in Congress cannot allow this to happen.