History
After being fired from their jobs at Handy Dan in 1978, Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank co-founded The Home Depot, Inc., which would go on to became the world’s largest home-improvement retailer and second largest retailer in the United States. After deciding against calling their business “Bad Bernies Buildall”, under the name of The Home Depot, the two opened the first stores in Atlanta in June 1979 after favorable subleases became available on good store locations. By the end of 1979 the company had three stores in Atlanta with $7 million in sales. The man who helped both Marcus and Blank organize their finances and stocks was a man by the name of Kenneth Langone. He played a critical financial role in the beginning and early expansion of the young company. The Home Depot became profitable in 1980 and went public in 1981 in order to raise expansion capital. Expansion first took place in Florida through new-store openings, and by the end of 1983, The Home Depot had opened nineteen stores and made $250 million in revenue. The number of Home Depot employees substantially grew during the 1990s going from 300 to an incredible 17,500. In May of 1997, Bernie Marcus stepped down as CEO and Arther Blank was then the one to take the company over. Under the leadership of Blank, management created a smaller neighborhood-convenience-store concept in order to compete with the likes of Ace Hardware and True Value and also started with an international expansion. Although Blank was newfound leadership, his time at the position was short lived. In 2000, the board elected Bob Nardelli as their new leader and CEO of Home Depot. By 2005, Nardelli had changed the strategy of the company to improve the core stores, move to international markets, and diversify their services. He invested $2 billion into technology and put General Electric in much more power of the processes of the business. Although the processes of international markets and core stores sored in Nardelli’s tenure, other essential parts of the company suffered like the customer service and stagnating stock prices. Because of these negative consequences and a dispute over salary, Nardelli resigned as the CEO of Home Depot and Frank Blake was hired to the position. To this day, Blake has reignited The Home Depot by focusing less on the overall efficiency of the company and more on the past values of knowledgeable and reliable customer service. Blake has flourished The Home Depot we see today. The Home Depot we see today is much different than the one we saw in 1978, but it has the same local-home-made roots and appeal.