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HOME DEPOT COFOUNDER MARCUS BELIEVES THERE'S
MORE TO LIFE'S BOTTOM LINE THAN THE PURSUIT OF WEALTH
 The first three years at the Home Depot were touch and
go. The founders, Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank, had a
visionary concept: to offer everything customers would need
for home construction and repair in a giant warehouse at
rock-bottom prices. But the practical parts of bringing the
idea to reality took cash. Although they somehow managed to
make the payroll, they lost one million dollars in the first year.
When they couldn’t afford to keep the gigantic stores fully
stocked, they filled shelves with empty paint cans and empty
boxes to make the inventory look bigger.
Each day the two owners took to the sales floor to talk with
customers. "We learned by listening to our customers, which
products were right, what quality people wanted," Marcus
says. "We made changes every day. We’d come back to the
office every night and make calls to vendors to readjust the
product lines."
That attention to feedback paid off, and in just a few short
years, the Home Depot was in the black and rapidly ascending
to the top of the home improvement retail ladder. Today,
with more than 2,040 retail stores, it is the world’s largest
retailer of home improvement products and the world’s
third largest retailer of any kind. It is traded on the New
York Stock Exchange and has made its owners and principal
stockholders wealthy.
Marcus hangs the phenomenal success on the company’s
ability to change. "What you plan doesn’t always happen that
way," he says. "When you go from A-to-Z, it’s not in a straight
line, but instead the road is curvy, full of barriers and setbacks.
What we started with is not what we have today."
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