Arthur Blank and Bernie Marcus built Home Depot on two rules: great prices and great service. After a disastrous opening day in 1978, word-of-mouth spread through low prices, friendly staff, and hands-on workshops that taught customers to DIY. The billion-dollar lesson: focus on core competency and create experiences people talk about.
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Welcome to another Famous Friday. I believe that whatever goal you have, whatever mission you're on, whatever challenge is in front of you, somebody has already solved it. So the fastest way to grow is to model success. Find what worked for them and apply their strategies to your business so you can achieve similar success yourself. Today we're going to learn from Arthur Blank and Bernie Marcus, the co-founders of The Home Depot. When Blank and Marcus started Home Depot, they wanted to make it the Sears of the home improvement industry. People laughed at them and told them they could never do it. And today Home Depot is more than twice the size of Sears. Here's how they did it. So in the 1970s, Blank and Marcus were both executives at a home improvement company called Handy Dan's in Southern California. Then turnaround artist Sanford Sigaloff bought the company, and he was known for gutting executives out of the new companies that he bought. Blank and Marcus thought they were safe because Handy Dan was making so much money that Sanford Sigaloff would be stupid to fire them. They were wrong. And in 1978, he let them go. So they decided now was the time to be entrepreneurs. They were testing a discounting strategy in one of the Handy Dan's locations before they were let go. It was working, and they wanted to expand it to the other Handy Dan's, but now they thought, hey, we could do this ourselves. So they took over two former Treasure Island stores in suburban Atlanta and set up shop. They started the business off of two rules: great prices and great service. They stocked the shelves, slashed the prices, and personally hired all of the staff. On opening day, they gave their kids stacks of $1 bills to hand out to every new customer who came into the door. They figured they'd be out of money by noon, but by 6 o'clock, their kids were still chasing people down in the parking lot, begging them to come into the store. It was a huge disaster. They were so disappointed that Marcus's wife wouldn't let him shave for 3 days. She didn't want him to have a razor in his hand, and she was afraid of what he might do. By day 3, there was a little bit of hope. One of the customers came back with some okra as a gift. Gift to the founders to say thank you for the great service that we had in your store. Even though none of their marketing efforts worked out, word of mouth started to spread. Because they focused on great prices and great service, people started to come back. They started to tell their friends and they started to buy more. Blanken Marcus wanted people to feel safe and comfortable into being their own Mr. and Mrs. Fix-It so that you didn't always have to call a plumber or a contractor to help you out. They hired great and friendly staff that would help you figure out what you needed to solve the job. They also held workshops and clinics to teach you how you could do things yourself. And that focus on amazing service helped the company grow. Find something that you're great at. Find something that you really believe in. Give people a reason to talk about you and come back, and you might be on your way to building the next billion-dollar business as well. Believe. For those of you watching, like the video, subscribe to the channel to see more just like it. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you soon. It's cold, it's cold, we gotta go. Maybe we should do it again. No, no, no, no. Oh wow, look at the colors now. Should we do it again? No, no, no. Look at that. Okay, that's it, we're done. Believe. Was that stupid? It's crazy. Mwah! Love you. Sign up for the newsletter for more Believe.
