A. Ray Dalton had a perfectly respectable reason to keep the money. In 2008, PartsSource sold a minority interest in the business he had founded seven years earlier. There were partners to reward, a company to grow and, presumably, no shortage of people qualified to explain why the proceeds should remain near the top of the organization. Dalton sent a portion further down the payroll.
More than $7.5 million went to employees. The distribution took account of both earnings and tenure, so a long-serving person on a smaller salary could receive as much as, or more than, a better-paid recent arrival. Time counted. That is a fairly direct way of telling someone their years at work have meant something.
The transaction makes a useful entrance into Dalton’s life because it puts an actual decision beside a familiar management sentiment. Plenty of companies describe their employees as valuable. Here was a founder attaching a dollar amount to the proposition. The interesting part is how often the same concern appears elsewhere in his career, including places with considerably less money on the table.
The awkward email from headquarters
Before PartsSource, Dalton had already built businesses and sold National Medical Diagnostics and OneSource Services to General Electric. Working inside GE gave him an education in scale, and a disagreement he would remember. He recalled trying to recruit for a fast-growing operation while being instructed to reduce staff under the company’s employee-ranking approach.
“This doesn’t make sense,” he said of that collision. The frustration was specific: his business needed people, while the larger system required fewer of them. For an entrepreneur used to judging the problem in front of him, an instruction travelling in the opposite direction was difficult to accept.
PartsSource became a place to try his own answer. Founded in 2001, it paired a commercial problem with an organizational one: make replacement parts easier to find, and give employees enough room to help customers without consulting an encyclopedia of prohibitions. Dalton’s preference was for fewer rules and more responsibility, bounded by respect for colleagues, customers and vendors.
That requires judgment from the people doing the work. It also requires an employer willing to let them exercise it. A business cannot ask for initiative all morning and punish the slightest departure from routine all afternoon without eventually getting exactly the workforce it has trained.
“The answer is yes.”
Dalton’s company motto at PartsSource
A career spent looking behind the catalog
Dalton’s familiarity with equipment began before his founder titles. An Air Force veteran and Chapman University graduate, he worked as an X-ray technician and later became a hospital administrator. Those jobs placed him near the unglamorous mechanics of an organization: the device, the department and the work required to keep both functioning.
PartsSource addressed a chore that could consume a technician’s day. Finding a replacement component meant navigating scattered suppliers, checking availability and comparing prices. Dalton built a company around taking on that search. A catalog might display the object; someone still had to make sure the right object could actually be obtained.
By 2007, customers could use myPartsSource.com to place and manage orders, including purchases from other suppliers. A vendor alliance widened the company’s reach when its own shelves lacked an item. The promised “yes” depended on knowing who else might have what the customer needed.
There is an agreeable lack of vanity in that arrangement. A supplier confident enough to help manage purchases from elsewhere has understood something about the customer’s working day. The customer wants the task completed. Admiration for the supplier’s inventory can wait until a quieter afternoon.
By 2013, Dalton described a system that sorted through 5,700 suppliers to find likely matches. He put the business’s international share at about 12 percent. These were the details behind the simple promise: an application, a network and people who could move an order through them.
He also appears with Dan Betting on a patent granted in May 2011 for a method of sourcing replacement parts. The title is wonderfully plain. It describes the task rather than trying to turn a purchasing process into a philosophy of civilization.
The confidence came with homework
Dalton published Proceed with Confidence: Lessons Learned from a Serial Entrepreneur in 2005. Its account begins with poverty in East Los Angeles and gives his wife, Jan, a consequential line: “You can do more.” By then, he had already made a career out of starting companies rather than waiting for a larger employer to supply the next opportunity.
The title could suggest a taste for charging ahead. His later description of investing is more deliberate. He studies who has attempted a solution, what prevented it from working and whether the apparent opportunity fits the business he wants to build. Confidence, in this version, has reading to do before the meeting.
He has described a regular strategic review followed by a choice among building, buying or partnering. The discipline is to decide which problem deserves attention, then resist attractive detours. An entrepreneur with many ideas needs a way to leave some of them alone. Otherwise, a promising business can become a committee of unfinished projects.
The decision to write those lessons down also mattered. A company can outgrow the moment that produced it; a memoir preserves the founder’s explanation before later events tidy everything into a neat sequence. Dalton’s book appeared while PartsSource was still young. Readers encountered someone already experienced in starting and selling businesses, putting his account into print while another venture was under construction.
The next company was waiting in storage
In November 2014, Dalton founded reLink Medical. Equipment that had become surplus in one organization could still have a buyer elsewhere. Finding that buyer, agreeing on the condition of the item and completing the exchange were separate pieces of work, all capable of going wrong.
The early marketplace borrowed recognizable ideas from Craigslist, eBay and Kelley Blue Book. Sellers could list equipment; buyers could purchase or negotiate; information about value helped frame the exchange. Dalton was comfortable adapting useful mechanisms from other industries rather than insisting that every component arrive wearing the ribbon of invention.
The proposed service reached beyond introductions. It coordinated money, inspection and the transfer of equipment, with a digital record to help resolve disagreements. Anyone who has tried to buy something expensive on the strength of a hopeful description can appreciate the appeal of a referee.
The later business grew into a network of distribution centers. Its company history records an Ohio hub opening in 2019 and a sixth center, in Lakeland, Florida, in 2025. Dalton now serves as founder and executive chairman. At reLink Ventures, he is founder, executive chairman and managing partner, continuing the investment work alongside the operating businesses.
A place at the table
One of the clearer accounts of Dalton’s influence comes from someone whose subsequent business involved robotic lawn care. Logan Fahey was 19 when Dalton brought him into the family foundation as its director. Fahey later credited him with making connections and letting him attend investment meetings.
“He was the reason my career took off,” Fahey said. The useful detail is the access. A young person can be told to think bigger indefinitely. Seeing how experienced people consider an investment gives that instruction something to attach to: questions, numbers, disagreements and decisions.
At reLink, Dalton’s published hiring approach similarly leaves room for people who arrive without the exact industry background. The business looks for transferable skills and teaches the particulars of its work. That broadens the possible applicant pool while placing a real obligation on the employer to train.
The Dalton Foundation’s 2020 account describes another application: a workforce program with reLink Medical, Grafton Correctional facility and True Freedom Ministries. Participants nearing release developed practical work skills, and reLink also hired people after incarceration. The program turned an interest in second chances into the daily responsibilities of a workplace.
The work makes the employment question concrete. Training, scheduling and supervision still have to happen. A second chance becomes convincing through those ordinary arrangements, because an invitation without a way to succeed can be a fragile gift. Dalton’s approach places opportunity inside an operating business, where a person’s contribution can be learned, practiced and recognized over time. It is a demanding place to test a generous intention.
Some of the work happens outside
Ray and Jan established their foundation in 1999. Its founders describe wanting to offer organizations both financial support and business experience. Their Christian faith is explicit in that mission. The practical ambition is to help worthwhile work continue, with enough planning and collaboration to survive beyond the first generous gesture.
One local contribution took the story away from warehouses altogether. In February 2021, a donation from the Ray and Jan Dalton Foundation helped launch the Cuyahoga Valley Bridle Trail Fund. It supported the ordinary necessities of a usable trail: surfaces, crossings, bridges, drainage and signs.
There is no need to dress those things up. A bridge that works and a sign pointing in the right direction are excellent contributions to an afternoon. The gift adds a pleasantly physical detail to a career otherwise crowded with companies, software and transactions.
In 2026, Dalton received TechNation’s Icon of the Year recognition and spoke at MD Expo Baltimore. The honor adds a public milestone to a long working life. The more revealing measures remain closer to the ground: a part found, an employee rewarded, a younger colleague invited into a meeting. The arithmetic depends on who gets counted.
Keep following the work
Meet Dalton through his companies, public writing and conversations.