1Company. 3 Employees. 90 Years on the job.

Pioneer of sales reporting

At Western Sizzlin, Adina Schmidt was making pretty good money for a high school student. But she heard about a cashier position at a new company called Home Depot, and she took it.

“I wasn’t really planning on staying either,” she said. “It was a summer job. It was an opportunity to try something new. It was very exciting. So I took a gamble.”

It paid off.

Schmidt started out as a cashier, and after a promotion or two, she had a front row seat on the development of cash management at one of the fastest-growing retail chains in American history.

“They had cash registers, and you would get these little skinny tapes and you’d get bags and bags of register tape and you would have to take those and figure out all your registers so you knew how much money you had taken in and in which department,” she remembered. “Actually, we didn’t really have a whole lot of department break downs in the beginning. So, yes, it’s very different now.”

Then came the sales audit phase of her career, when Ron Brill called her one day when she was working at what was known as “the vault” (the back office where the money was counted).

Sales audit was the place where all the stores would send their daily sales reports. With just a handful of stores, it was pretty easy to handle. “We would call the stores every morning and say, ‘Hey, I need your daily sales.’”

But after a little more growth, a new technology was introduced to capture daily sales from each of the stores: an answering machine.

“Well, that worked for a little while, but then they seemed to lose interest in doing it,” she remembered. “So, in order for us to make them call, we were innovative with our messages. We would come up with little jingles. At Christmas, we would record the message: ‘Ho, ho, ho, you’ve reached the Home Depot, and we need your sales.’”

Did that work? “It motivated them. They were curious. We took turns coming up with things, and they wanted to hear what we put on there.”

Like any 30-year employee, there are memories of founders Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank—not so much as larger-than-life retail legends, but as entrepreneurs.

“Arthur was more of a behind-the-scenes man,” she said. “And of the two, I personally didn’t see him as much. Bernie was always sweet and personable. I mean, he was always out talking to everybody. He loved people, and he loved Home Depot and he didn’t hesitate to tell everybody that, but I just remember him as always being more of the front-man of Home Depot.”

Since her cashier job, she has moved on to what she calls five separate careers within Home Depot. She remembers those euphoric days when the company’s stock was $80 per share.

(“That was a high. We were all just pleased as we could be.”) And she remembers the early feeling of winging it with the founders.

“There was Charlie Barnes, Tom Bitner, Arthur and Bernie,” she said. “It was all of them and their families. It was just a big family operation trying to get everything done, and you know we just worked like crazy. It was nothing to work an 80-hour week constantly, and we just did that because we all believed in the dream. We were all trying to work together because there was nothing like it.”

Paying attention to details

There is a famous story about Home Depot’s early days that has become a kind of retail legend. As the story goes, Bernie Marcus wasn’t happy with the nice, clean tile floors in his warehouse home centers. So, he intentionally scuffed them up to give the impression of action, industry and low prices.

“That’s a fact. That’s not a legend,” said Calvin Moon. Today, Moon is a pro account associate in the company ’s Ken n e s aw, Ga., store. But in 1979, he was helping Marcus scuff up the floors.

“In those first buildings that we occupied, it was a grocery store or it was a clothing retail shop. They had tile floors. Well, we rode around, got in the building, and we’d go in there and it’s nice and bright and white with tile floors. Bernie said: ‘This is not going to work, so scuff it up.’”

“So we got on the forklift and started burning rubber and scuffing up the floors. The next thing you know, a lot of the floors were getting burned up right into the concrete. So then months later we’re in there scraping up all the tile. And then it just got down to the bare concrete.”

Marcus was a stickler for appearances and details, and he preferred the busy, heavily shopped look, as opposed to the neat and tidy look. Back then, the standard practice was to cut open a box and let the customer sort thought it.

“Today we put it on the shelf nice and pretty,” Moon said.

There were other legends in Moon’s orbit. Case in point: Pat Farrah, who over the years earned the reputation as a merchandising master. It was a well-deserved reputation, according to Moon.

“Pat Farrah took an interest in me,” he said. “He was one of the first founders. He was a gung-hoguy, and he was a great guy to work with. He would come in on Saturdays, and we would just start moving merchandise and helping customers.

“I can remember vividly that we had what we would call the ceiling fan cloud. I can remember going in on a Saturday and resetting the whole thing and just remerchandising it. Just by sight—no computers, no data, no paperwork. He would just say ‘Hey, big guy, let’s go over here and put these here, and let’s move that over there.” And we would just go back and forth and move everything around.”

“But would it work?” a reporter asked.

“And it would work,” Moon answered. “We had ceiling fans stacked up to the ceiling, and we were selling hundreds of them.

Among the many differences between the early Home Depot and today’s Home Depot is the percentage of DIYers in the aisles. It was much higher then. And even though CEO Frank Blake would like to see more pros in his customer mix, there are a lot more today than 30 years ago, Moon said.

Another difference is the stores carry a lot more SKUs today than they did in 1979, and they offer a more complex product offering.

Just before HCN interviewed the 30-year service veteran, a customer approach ed and asked for some replacement siding. Moon described some of the options available and talked a little more about exterior products.

Of course, the customer didn’t know that the associate in the orange smock in the Kennesaw, Ga., store is one of only a handful of employees to have stocked shelves with Bernie and Arthur. It didn’t matter. All he wanted was his siding to match.

“It’ll match,” said Moon.

It was a quick answer. But 30 years in the making.

Astore-opening specialist

Since his days at the opening of the Buford Highway store in Atlanta, Home Depot store No. 2, Mark Naugle has been a traveling man for the retailer. From Atlanta, where he went to high school, to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to Miami and Orlando, Naugle helped open stores for the chain. Then came the call to move to New Orleans.

“I packed my stuff and was there in about four days,” he said. Five months later, it was Phoenix, then the San Francisco Bay area.

In the chain-store retail industry, the story is relatively common—a store-opening specialist willing to travel for the good of the company. But Naugle was doing it with the company that went from $0 to $1 billion faster than any company in American history.

“I could tell right from my first week or two on the job that it was completely different from anything else that was out there from a corporate standpoint,” said Naugle, who is now a special services expediter in the company’s Concord, Calif., store.

One difference was the involvement of the founders.

One of the things that set Home Depot apart was the dress code and the willingness of the executives at the top to roll up their sleeves. “They didn’t ask us to do anything that they wouldn’t do themselves,” he said. “And that’s one of the principle rules of leadership. They were willing to do it with us, and they listened to us. We could tell right then that this company was going someplace.”

“They were always such a hands-on group. Bernie, Arthur, Farrah and, to some extent, Brill also were always involved in what was going on even on a store level,” Naugle said. “It wasn’t a day that went by that the department heads didn’t get a call from Bernie or Arthur or Pat or somebody else looking for input on what’s going on in the stores. There was no real chain of command because basically it was just us.”

Farrah was one of the underrated forces behind the juggernaut, said Naugle. And one of his memories (althought Naugle doesn’t remember in which store it occurred) is of Farrah carrying a fixture into a store from his trunk—a concrete culvert tube that was going to serve as a makeshift wallpaper display fixture.

“Well, we had 40-ft. and 8-ft. tall [sections] of these card board tubes bolted together and set at an angle. Pat Farrah, the VP merchandising at the time, was down on his hands and knees bolting these things together in the store to put up things to see how this would work.”

One thing he noticed is that the customers have gotten more sophisticated. “Back then, we’d see these big, wide eyes asking: ‘What do they have going on here?’” Naugle said. “They would come in, and we would show them how to do projects that they had no idea they had the skills to finish.”

These days, you see a lot more pros and experienced DIYers, and Home Depot has increased its sophistication along with them, he said.

Another big difference in the 30 years of the company is the information that’s available to the shopper.

“The Internet has made such a huge difference in the ability to find different products for homes, and our customers are asking for new products they ’re seeing on the Internet, and they’re able to purchase them from homedepot.com as well. It’s a completely different ball game than it was way back when.”

Over the years, Naugle has seen many big moments. With the company going public, it achieved new-store openings and new sales records. But one particularly memorable moment was the opening of a store in New Orleans.

“It was hot and humid and sticky and muggy, and there were people—it was just, it was a stampede,” said Naugle. “When we opened those doors, there were people running in to see what we had because at that point there had been the rumors of Home Depot because we had established ourselves in Florida and Georgia and people heard about us at that point. They didn’t know who we were, they didn’t know what we were about, but when they came rushing in, we knew that we turned a corner on what our company was going to be in the long term.”