Thousands of Home Depot employees were busy volunteering their time on a myriad of projects across the country in honor of Veterans Day.
At the Store Support Center, a corporate headquarters for most companies, hundreds of associates braved nearly freezing temperatures to build a variety of toy houses or to assemble bicycles and wagons for the families of U.S. veterans.
Ted Decker, who has been Home Depot’s CEO since 2022, spoke of the importance of Home Depot’s culture during a 30-minute interview on Nov. 11. The day of service reinforced the company’s commitment to veterans’ causes and continuing that philanthropic emphasis established by former CEO Frank Blake in 2011.
The company, through its foundation, has pledged a series of goals since 2011 to veterans’ causes — initially $100 million, then $250 million and then $500 million — reaching those respective goals ahead of schedule.
Then in 2023, Home Depot announced that it would give away $750 million by 2030.
“We’re already well over $600 million, so we won’t have a problem meeting that goal,” Decker said. “But much more important than the financial resource, and this is our culture speaking again, we get engaged. Home Depot is an active “can-do” participatory company, and we love to get engaged. We love to get boots on the ground. We love to put our sweat equity into things.”
Throughout the conversation, Decker repeatedly mentioned Home Depot’s three founders, Bernie Marcus, Arthur Blank and Ken Langone, with reverence.
“We just had our annual Supplier Partnership meeting,” Decker said. “Arthur came and spoke, and you could hear a pin drop. It was so fantastic. He so energized that supplier base… It was absolutely magical.”
Decker joined Home Depot on Valentine’s Day in 2000 when the founders were still running the company.
In late 1999, Decker was based in London, working on mergers and acquisitions for Kimberly-Clark. He got a call from a headhunter about a possible job with Home Depot in Atlanta. Carol Tomé had just been promoted, and she needed help negotiating possible deals.
It just so happened that Decker got the call when he had stopped by his London office three hours before flying to Atlanta for meetings with Kimberly-Clark executives in Roswell.
“It’s the craziest thing trying to explain how life works,” Decker said. “I snuck out at lunch during a (Kimberly Clark) meeting in Roswell and drove down here and met Carol. We had a great conversation. She said, come back tomorrow and meet some other people. I snuck out at lunch again and drove over here. Then I flew back to London, and she calls me and says, ‘When are you coming?'”
Between 2000 and 2022, the year he became CEO, Decker had multiple roles with increasing responsibility — strategic business development, head of merchandising becoming president and chief operating officer in 2020, right when COVID hit, which was a boom for the housing industry.
“We had massive growth for three years of 2020, 2021 and 2022 and then a bit of moderation as housing settled down a little bit after that explosive period of growth,” Decker said.
As more people were working where they lived, it was fortuitous to have “Home” in the company’s name.
“That’s the beauty. I always say the founders were brilliant in so many ways,” Decker said. “They picked an amazing business model, this notion of putting product selection — breadth, value and service all under one roof. The business model was supported by this incredible value structure and culture.”
Today, Home Depot has 475,000 associates and 2,300 stores. But Decker said the future for Home Depot is bright.
“We think our addressable market is a trillion odd dollars,” Decker said, adding the market is still largely fragmented, with Home Depot having about a 15 percent market share. “As big as we are, there’s so much opportunity to continue to grow.”
Although there have been ups and downs, Decker said Home Depot’s culture is alive and well 46 years after the founding of the company. When asked whether he will be CEO when the company celebrates its 50th anniversary, Decker laughed, saying that was up to the board.
Giving back has always been one of Home Depot’s core values. Thousands of company associates were volunteering in force on Veterans Day. But Decker said such initiatives occur all year long across the breadth of the company.
“That’s what the founders instilled in us,” said Decker, who described the company’s “bottom-up” approach where store managers have the authority to help out communities and customers without needing approval from above. “Other than giving back, another one of our key values is to do the right thing.”
Decker said that on any given night, there are 33,000 veterans sleeping on the streets. Home Depot’s focus on veterans includes housing, life skills and work training as well as improvement projects at local facilities of the Veterans Administration.
In the Atlanta region, Decker’s main civic work is serving on the board of the Atlanta Committee for Progress as well as on the board of the Georgia Historical Society.
The Metro Atlanta Chamber just announced that Richard McPhail, chief financial officer of the Home Depot, will serve as its 2027 chair.
Home Depot is actively engaged with revitalization efforts on the Westside, and it gave money to the expanded National Center for Civil and Human Rights.
During our conversation, no matter the topic, Decker would connect it to Home Depot’s founders – acknowledging the one-year anniversary of Bernie Marcus’ death.
Decker still fondly remembers when he first joined the company and was immediately struck by its unique corporate culture.
“I fell in love with it on day one,” Decker said. “I mean, I bled orange from day one.”
Around that time the book – “Built from Scratch: How a Couple of Regular Guys Grew The Home Depot from Nothing to $30 Billion” – had just been published.
“The book truly resonated with me immediately. This place is special. It’s hard to articulate, but you just feel it,” said Decker, who credited the founders of the company. “This place is different. I mean, you’re literally walking amidst the greatness of the founders with their energy and the culture.”
