Willard D. Oberton – Chairman
Let me say we got a couple of positives on the market and we do have a couple TL wins. One is we still have a tremendous opportunity on upside for our exclusive brands, our private brands and the other is our transportation costs with fuel where it is, our oil situation is going to drop and you saw on the fourth quarter and other quarters, our latte quarters that the flexibility of our fuel and the cost going up on our fuel and utilization. Our utilization will be high in the first quarter of our transportation and it looks right now fuel costs will be down so how are we going to get gross margins, looks great. So exclusive brands till when are on the fuel and also our Fastenals business is doing a little bit better, so there are gives and takes all over the place in margin and it’s always gonna be a fight. But, I tell you that the team has done a great job of managing our margin through changing business environment.
Raymond Jane
So no reason to think why the 28-33% incremental margins should not hold true in 15.
Daniel L. Florness – Chief Financial Officer
We feel very good about our ability in getting strong incremental margins. You know we had in July and well in April, we talked about getting the 20% in the third quarter. Excuse me. In the third quarter call we talked about this quarter really being in the upper 20s. And, we feel very good about what where we positioned, going into 2015.
Leland J. Hein – President & CEO
And, I think going into other reasons I feel good about that is that we made very heavy investments at the end of 13. And our district managers, a lot of outside sales people of the stores. So we were in a heavy investment mode. We don’t have to do much of that this year in fact in the leadership role district, regional, outside sales people were very set for at least the first 6 months of the year. And if that’ll come through in the PNL and incremental margins.
Raymond Jane
That was very helpful. Thank you guys. Thank you all.
Operator
Our next question comes from John Millani with Janie capital market. Tour line is open.
John Milani – John Capital Market
Good morning, thanks for taking question. Dan is part of the assumption for 15, i know it’s really in the year but w.r.t to gross margins the fact that you pointed out the the mix business being a larger customer is it fitting the time being expecting that the mix just kinda stays where it is ?
Daniel L. Florness – Chief Financial Officer
Well, the mix has been changing over many years. That our large account business, if you see it when you look at our vending numbers. Because a good chunk of that is largely become business, our national business, and you see that the rest of the group like we talked on that, on that first question. The rest of the group has stepped up and gotten closer to it. So, we actually have a little bit of more balanced growth in impact of gross margins and dated in the next 12 months and we probably did in the last 24. Because by adding the selling energy in the store the local business is stepping up to the plate a bit more so that it’s not being pulled by the vending, large account business. But there’s still little bit of mix right there but we’ll touch down both the fuel and our private brands are really powerful.
