Home Depot's Blake Keeping Low Profile
Blake, in an interview Friday with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, discussed a wide range of topics involving his nine months at Home Depot's helm and his vision for the future. Although much of his time has been consumed by the recent sale of the company's wholesale business, Blake said he has also spent a lot of time walking through stores, so he can see what customers are seeing.
Some excerpts from the interview:
Q: How do you see your role as the public face of Home Depot?
A: I certainly don't see myself as the personification of Home Depot, and I haven't set out to be high-profile. In my first meeting with our store support managers, I said, "This is not about me." For our customers, Home Depot lives in our associates. We have 325,000 associates, and each associate is a lot more important to our customer than I am.
Q: People have been very vocal in recent years about their experiences in Home Depot stores. What are you hearing, and where do you see that experience heading?
A: Well, people have figured out my e-mail address, and I get a lot of messages. I read them. An easy way out is to say, look, we have more than a billion transactions a year. But if just 1% of them has a problem, that's an enormous amount of customers that are upset. Our priorities are directly related to what has frustrated our customers. Some of the big issues have been associate engagement, how the associates interact with customers, and the look and feel of our stores.
Q: You are the first at Home Depot to publicly characterize the company as "mature." At only 30 years old, isn't it early in the company's life span to move away from a growth-oriented focus?
A: We are no longer a double-digit revenue growth story, which is a psychological adjustment for us as a company. If you think about the 1980s and '90s, we spent a lot of money building new stores. Over the next 10 years, that's not what we're going to be about.
Q: What's your message to the Home Depot investor, who endured a languishing stock price even as the housing market boomed?
A: We're saying that the company is going to grow along with the market, which normally is about 5 to 6%. We've been growing slower than the market in recent years, so that will be an improvement.
Q: If the
A: International will be an important piece long-term, but we need to fix our core retail business first. Our current international operations are doing very well, but we're taking our time.
Q: You are only the second CEO to follow in the founders' footsteps. What will define your tenure?
A: We set the standard for customer service in home-improvement retail, if not in all of retail. That is the legacy of Home Depot and what I think will define my tenure. Also, we've got to be a place where our associates are proud to work. We won't return to the 1980s and 1990s, when the stock was splitting every other year, but we can make this a great financial opportunity for our associates.