Southwest Airlines Spirit, August 2003
HOME DEPOT FOUNDER BERNIE MARCUS MAY HAVE RETIRED AS CEO, BUT THIS HARD-WORKING BILLIONAIRE STILL BELIEVES IN THE DO-IT-YOURSELF APPROACH, ESPECIALLY WHEN IT COMES TO CHARITABLE CAUSES.
BY NANCY HENDERSON WURST
Bernie Marcus was just a young boy the first time he donated nickels to help plant trees in Israel. “That’s what my mother taught me, that you have to give back,” says the 74-year-old co-founder and retired CEO of The Home Depot. “In fact, I couldn’t understand why I was doing it. This was my ice cream money that I was giving away. But she said, ‘You have to help people who are less fortunate; this is what we do.’ It’s called tzedakah in Hebrew.”
When he and his business partner, Arthur Blank, opened the first three Home Depot stores in Atlanta in 1979, Marcus admits, the goal was more about ensuring financial security than about tzedakah. The son of Russian immigrants enamored with America’s free enterprise system, Marcus had helped build Handy Dan, a California-based home-improvement company, into a successful chain. Losing his job over “a personality conflict” served as the catalyst for a new type of user-friendly, warehouse emporium full of do-it-yourself products. If all went well, he and Blank calculated, their stores would one day number 500.
Today, The Home Depot boasts more than 1,500 locations in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Puerto Rico; 315,000 associates; and $58.2 billion in sales in 2002. Over the years, the company has revolutionized the face of home improvement, and it’s invested more than $25 million annually in its neighboring communities. Associates build playgrounds for underprivileged kids, repair homes for the elderly and disabled, help inner-city teens learn job skills, and shore up overflowing rivers.
Despite his retirement last year, Marcus refuses to squander the fruits of his labor, preferring instead to work with Atlanta’s non-profit agencies, including his namesake Marcus Institute, a treatment center for developmentally disabled children. Three years ago he gave $17.6 million to the Shepherd Center, the nation’s largest catastrophic-care hospital specializing in spinal cord injuries and disease. And he has committed $200 million to build the Georgia Aquarium, which is slated to open in 2005 near Centennial Park.
Marcus, who frequently visits his Home Depot stores and makes suggestions “when I see things that need to be fixed,” recently spoke about his company’s philosophy and the importance of giving back.
SPIRIT: How did you come up with the idea for The Home Depot?
BERNIE MARCUS: I had been thinking about the concept for a number of years. In fact, part of the strategy at Handy Dan was to build a defense against this particular kind of store that would open in years to come. One of the investors in our company, after I’d been fired, said to me, “You’ve just been hit in the rear end with a golden horseshoe. Let’s open up that store you were talking about.”
SPIRIT: Why build a community-minded chain that would help at-risk youth, paralympic athletes and hurricane victims?
BM: People were spending money in our stores. And we felt that if our customers got into trouble that we had to help them out. We did little things, like when people would come in and need a ramp up to their house to make it wheelchair-accessible, we would go out and build it for them. Or some poor woman would come in and she’d give us $5 and say, ‘I have to buy something. I have a hole in my roof.’ Well we would send people out and that would be a training thing for them. And they all felt so good about it that they wanted to continue it. And it became part of the culture of The Home Depot.
SPIRIT:You’ve said you want to devote the “next phase” of your life to philanthropy.
BM: I don’t think that I was ready, and I’m not ready now, to put myself on a shelf. I think that an active body and an active mind keep you young. It keeps you vibrant. It’s part and parcel of your feeling like you’re contributing to society today. And I feel that I am contributing in a very positive way, and I intend to continue doing it.
SPIRIT:You must get many requests from fundraisers. How do you choose which projects to sponsor or fund?
BM: There’s an understanding that before we give them any money they have to give us what the goals are. And then they have to give us the landmarks of how long it’s gonna take and what they hope to achieve. And then we come back and we check on it. And if they don’t achieve what they said they were going to achieve, they don’t get the rest of the money. So we don’t just give the money blindly. You know, it took a lot of work and a lot of effort and a lot of energy on my part to accumulate this kind of money. And I’m not used to throwing anything out.
SPIRIT:Which charitable project is closest to your heart?
BM: At Shepherd [Center in Atlanta], when you see people come in with a spinal cord injury and they think their life is over and they want to kill themselves because their body is not working but their mind is totally alert, to see these people learn to go on with their lives and have successful lives afterwards, the blessing that you get out of that, the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve helped a human being - I don’t know how to explain it to you. And the same thing with the Marcus Institute. Anything that you do with people, where you’ve saved their lives, not only from death but sometimes a fate worse than death, the satisfaction, believe me, beats a great quarterly earning.
SPIRIT:Why stay so philanthropically active in the face of a slow economy and sinking stock prices? Why not be more guarded with your money?
BM: Unfortunately when the economy goes down, people are more in need than they ever were before. So it’s not quite that easy. And you really have an obligation to stay the course. If anything, you have to extend your hand as much as you did before.
SPIRIT:Why build an aquarium in Atlanta? Did you consider other types of capital projects there?
BM: Atlanta and the state of Georgia have been very good to me. This is where we opened the first Home Depot stores. This is the basis of my personal success. I’ve always felt that it’s very, very important for me to give something back to these people, to just say thank you. I want to thank everybody - man, woman, child. I thought about it and thought about it and I came up with the idea for the aquarium. That was the one thing that everybody would enjoy.
SPIRIT:What advice would you give other would-be benefactors about helping others who are less fortunate?
BM: I honestly believe that when you give back, you get back in spades. I really do. And if you don’t get it back in a financial reward, you get it back in satisfaction. You know, life without satisfaction is really a grim place, isn’t it? You don’t have to be a millionaire. You don’t have to be wealthy. You don’t have to have a lot of money to do these things. You can give of your own soul. You can give of your own time. And whatever you give is relative. Even a dollar is relative to somebody who doesn’t have a lot of money. So my advice is: Give and get involved.
SPIRIT:How does your philanthropic work compare with your role as founder and former CEO of The Home Depot?
BM: Listen, running a company on a day-to-day basis with lots of people is a rather large job. Fortunately, this is a lot easier to do. It doesn’t mean that it’s not as intense. But it’s not as intense on a round-the-clock basis. At my age this is a lot more fun.
Freelance journalist Nancy Henderson Wurst has written for Parade, Nation’s Business and other publications.
