JOHN TAMNY: Bernie Marcus Built A Legacy Through Home Depot’s Success

“Get out of the car! Get the f**k out of my car.” That’s a paraphrase of the words of the recently passed, and incomparably GREAT Bernie Marcus. Marcus, along with Arthur Blank and Ken Langone, co-founded The Home Depot.

The individual Marcus ordered out of his car was a venture capitalist, and more crucially for Marcus and his colleagues, a venture capitalist who had agreed to invest $3 million in The Home Depot. As Marcus recalled in Built From Scratch, the 1999 business memoir he co-authored with Blank, “we needed that $3 million the way somebody dying of stab wounds needs blood in his veins.”

Yet the principled Marcus still wouldn’t take a cent from the investor precisely because the investor insulted Marcus and the team he’d put together with all sorts of demands. They would have to give up health insurance, and accept even less pay than the low pay they’d already accepted in return for risky employment at a business that was more a concept than a business.

Marcus’s actions from long ago raise an obvious question: With money extraordinarily tight for a concept that had attracted no interest from blue-chip investment banks (they went with the wonderful Ken Langone and his “no-name investment bank”), why didn’t Marcus accept the terms (any terms) necessary to keep things afloat?

The answer is that entrepreneurialism isn’t a choice, it’s a state of mind. It’s a powerful belief in a different way of not just meeting, but leading the needs of customers that’s so deeply ingrained that it’s near impossible to compromise one’s vision. Marcus’s vision wouldn’t be insulted by this nit-picking investor, only for Marcus and colleagues to have the last laugh. By the late 1990s, the $3 million would have been worth $12 billion.

About the gains the VC missed out on, they’re a happy story, but also realistically a distraction. The much bigger story is just how profoundly the market’s view of The Home Depot had changed. In the staggering return that the unnamed VC missed out on, it’s easier to see just how at odds the vision of Marcus, Blank and Langone was relative to conventional wisdom. As Marcus himself explained it, “no one believed we could do it.” The latter is regularly said by people from all walks of life and is often said in self-serving fashion.