A True Team Player
Home Depot’s Frank Blake Will Never Stop Building
by Carole VanSickle Ellis
Frank Blake will be the first to tell you he’s extremely grateful for his team. In fact, that is the mantra you will hear over and over in conversation if you speak with him for any length of time. “You are only as good as your team,” the Bronze Star recipient and current Home Depot general manager for Outside Sales and Service, is fond of saying. Invariably, he follows that up with something even more telling: “I want to thank everybody who has ever been on my team.”
Blake credits his time in Iraq, where he was deployed in the Sunni Triangle, with demonstrating to him, firsthand, the role of an effective leader in turning a group into a high-performing team. “It’s your job to make one plus one equal three, or four, or even five,” he explained. Blake was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army in 2000 after completing ROTC at Clemson University, where he attended on an ROTC scholarship. He earned his bachelor’s degree in political science, minored in Japanese and military science, then went on active duty in Fort Carson, Colorado. By 2003, he was in Iraq, where he earned the Bronze Star, a United States decoration awarded for heroic achievements, merit, or valor in a combat zone.
It was upon leaving the military and entering the civilian workforce he realized just how different teambuilding and leadership would look outside the military—or so he thought.
Why the Home Depot?
“When I started interviewing for civilian jobs, everyone essentially told me, ‘You’ll start out in a cubicle looking at spreadsheets, and when you get really good at that we will give you a bigger cubicle with more spreadsheets. It was really discouraging.” The creative and highly motivated Blake had difficulty mustering enthusiasm for this type of employment, and he began to feel discouraged and lose hope, as many veterans do when they begin seeking civilian work. Fortunately, he landed an interview with Home Depot.
“Home Depot is so leadership-focused and business focused,” Blake said. “It makes starting in a store mixing paint and working the cash register feel exciting and important because you know you are part of building and growing a team.”
The Home Depot culture was such a good fit that Blake knew he could trust the company to put him in a good position after he passed his store manager test, so he did not request a specific store or location. “I just told them, ‘I don’t care where I work, but I want to work for the best leader you have,’” he said. Upon completing the company’s Store Leadership Program in 2006, Blake was assigned a position in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he worked under formal naval officer Jeff Tompkins and Haydn Chilcott, who is now president of the Western Division of Home Depot and responsible for leading sales and operations throughout 13 western states.
After working as a store manager for three years, Blake took on the challenge of serving as a district manager for Home Depot until 2015. During that time, he worked in the Richmond, Virginia, area and in Atlanta, Georgia. In Atlanta, he took on the challenging role of general manager of renovation services for the Greater Atlanta area, a position he held until 2018.
Although he was swiftly climbing the professional ladder at the company, Blake remained humble. In fact, he still maintains being a store manager was probably one of the most stressful things he has ever done—including serving in the military—due to the sheer number of people for whom he was responsible. “You work every day for the customer, but you also have to build and maintain respect for and among all your employees and store associates,” he explained.
That type of challenge was exactly what Blake needed. He credits Home Depot with saving his life. After leaving the military and combat behind him, Home Depot gave him a place to put his energy and provided focus to his life. “I love every day at this company. Every day brings a challenge and a new goal to help the customer, compete with the competition, be the best I can be, and support my team so they can be the best they can be as well,” he explained. “I’ve been with Home Depot 16 years so far and hope to stay here as long as I’m alive.”
Leadership and Mentors
Today, Blake still works in Atlanta as a general manager for Outside Sales and Services. Doing so has placed him in a position to meet and learn from Home Depot’s vice president of stores, Ann-Marie Campbell. “She is a great inspiration,” Blake said of Campbell, who is twice-listed on the Forbes “Most Powerful Women” list. Campbell, like Blake, is a team player, serving as an active Team Depot volunteer to give back to the local community and as a board chair for the Homer Fund, a Home Depot charity that supports associates facing unexpected financial crises or hardships.
Like any good leader, Blake values others who demonstrate and exemplify strong leadership qualities. In addition to Campbell, he counts among his mentors J.T. Rieves, who he describes as “a great leader” who taught Blake the importance of customer service, Chuyu Xi, Home Depot’s vice president of merchandising and a Home Depot Foundation board member, Lieutenant Colonel (RET) Nate Sassaman, and West Pointer Shane O’Kelly, who Blake says may be the “greatest world-class leader” he has ever worked for. O’Kelly taught Blake the value of building strong relationships and always doing the right thing, while Xi modeled effective leadership and what Blake refers to as “entrepreneurial spirit”. Sassaman, he says, demonstrated for him just how important it is not just to care about the people who work with and for you but to make sure they know how much you care.
“Caring for the team is vital,” Blake explained. “Your people need to know how much you care about them. That’s why I will always say, first and last, I’m only as good as my team. Every time something good happens for me, I have to thank everybody who has ever been on my team.”
Sidebar:
Frank Blake: Personal Profile
When Frank Blake isn’t dedicating himself to his professional role and team at Home Depot, he is happily building up an impressive personal profile. Blake, who has been married to his college sweetheart for 19 years, is a proud father of three children (one boy and two girls) and loves foosball and fishing.
“I like to think of myself as a Renaissance Man,” he laughed. “That’s why I also write poetry!” Blake is an author at Finishing Line Press where he was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, serves as a limited partner in a super angel fund focused on funding and advising high-growth startups, and completed the Columbia Business School executive education program in private equity in 2020. He is also a mentor with the nonprofit Kids Making It and for American Corporate Partners (ACP), an advisory board member for the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta, and a trustee on multiple educational and charitable boards.
He published his first book, Terminal Leave, in December 2018. The poems in this collection give the reader a view of military service firsthand and, according to one reviewer, “attempt to bridge the civil-military divide” through verse.
