Recipe for Success: Building Trust and Bringing Out the Best in People
John Gordon — Director of National Accounts, Home Depot
By Carole VanSickle Ellis
In 1980, a newly married John Gordon and his wife were heading toward Lansing, Michigan, where they expected Gordon to join computing powerhouse IBM in the company’s marketing department while his wife earned her master’s degree at Michigan State. They were loading the truck to head for Michigan when they got the call: IBM was in a hiring freeze and Gordon’s offer had been rescinded. The job was not available anymore.
“This was 1980, and the unemployment rate in Michigan was either 16% or 13%,” Gordon recalled. “I can’t remember whether unemployment or interest rates were higher.”
They arrived at their new apartment, unloaded the truck, and Gordon started looking for work.
“I had paid my room and board in college doing handyman jobs and had enjoyed doing those kinds of things. I had worked as a carpenter’s helper in high school,” he said. “When my wife told me she saw a “Now Hiring” sign at 84 Lumber, I applied and got a job as a counter salesman. I worked there for 12 years in positions from salesman to VP of Regional Purchasing before joining Home Depot.”
Gordon joined Home Depot early, starting out as an assistant manager in the Pineville, North Carolina, store. It was the company’s first store in the state. Ultimately, he took over as manager of that store before opening a store in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and eventually helping launch the company’s Pro Initiative in 1999.
“When we started the Pro Initiative, we did it because we believed we could be doing business with professional customers as well as our DIY customers, so my 84 Lumber background made me a good fit. Today, that initiative accounts for about half the revenue of a $150 billion company!”
“We Knew We Had Something Big”
Gordon laughed when asked how things were in the beginning before the team knew for sure that the Pro Initiative would be a success. “It was great, and it was terrible,” he said. “I was doing all the things I like doing — dealing with contractors that I knew could benefit from all the resources at Home Depot and that previously had only shopped in our stores to a small degree — but we were already a really big, $30-billion business that only could change the way things worked so quickly.”
Gordon described the process of integrating Home Depot Pro into the greater Home Depot body as “teaching a monster to dance.” He explained, “When your monster dances one way, it turns out you don’t have to teach the entire beast to dance differently. You just figure out which parts need to move and change those.”
Gordon said the joke in the early 2000s was that every Home Depot was different. “If you saw one Home Depot store, you saw one Home Depot store,” he laughed. “So at every store, we had to go in and figure out what things had to change.” That involved everything from Pro Desk placement to product inventory and how to serve the needs of customers who would order 50 or 100 of an item at a time instead of fewer than 10.
“It was an exciting time,” Gordon said. “It went screaming by, still feels like it was yesterday.”
Gordon emphasized that in those early days with Pro Desk, as today, the group of people he worked with made up an incredible team and support system. He noted that many of his former team members and customers have gone on to work in high-profile positions across the industry, and he is proud to see them sitting on speakers’ panels onstage and still figuring out solutions to problems that real estate investors encounter today.
“Working with all of these people, trusting them and having their trust as we figured things out in this industry, those are things of which I’m really most proud,” he said.
“It’s About Relationships”
One of the most constant themes in Gordon’s career in the industry has been his dedication to building and maintaining trust and solid relationships with peers and colleagues. At its foundation, Gordon said, this core behavior has its roots in a conversation he had with Dave Young, an executive and colleague from his earliest days at 84 Lumber.
“Dave was getting ready to retire, and I think he was trying to make sure I understood that just because now I was in a big position at a big company it did not give me permission to be anything but respectful and to build strong, strong relationships,” said Gordon. He continued, “He told me a story about a time he was trying to sell a certain type of siding that he simply could not make profitable in a particular market. No matter what he tried, he sold at a loss or very close to a loss. When he shared that with the leadership at the siding company, they told him they would send him a separate blank invoice for that market and he could fill in the cost he needed that would allow for both competitive and profitable sales.”
Gordon recalled being dumbstruck. “Who is going to give you a blank invoice?” he asked.
Young told him, “It’s about relationships,” and 42 years later, Gordon has never forgotten this.
“When I’m in a scenario to make decisions and be in the driver’s seat, I remember what Dave told me that day, and I make the decisions based on being the kind of person that people can trust.”
This dedication to being trustworthy and honest has made Gordon a perfect fit for the Home Depot culture, he said, adding, “If you go in a Home Depot store today, there are people who have been there 20, 30, even 40 years, and I get asked a lot, ‘Why do people stay at Home Depot so long?’ The truth is that it is because Home Depot makes it easy to be good people and build good relationships.
“Because the things that you learn at home, at school, that are banged into your head by your teachers or your parents about values and doing the right things — all of those things are congruent with how Home Depot runs their business.
“I can get up every morning and know that I’m going to run my business the same way I run my life and I don’t have to think about which hat I have on. They get treated the same way, and that is very valuable.”
Sidebar
Bringing Out the Best
When Gordon thinks about proud moments in his time at Home Depot and in real estate, he does not have to think very far back to identify a really important moment for him. A few years ago, he had the opportunity to work with a small team of female associates who did not have a “specific home” within the Home Depot system. They were all very bright and worked hard to do well in the company.
“It was my job to help them figure out where they would shine, but it was also my job to show them how good they were and how good they could be,” Gordon said. “It was really exciting.” The team worked hard and “dug in to try new things and to make a difference,” he added. In the process, they leveraged their drive and ingenuity to ascend to new positions of responsibility within the company.
The result was a win-win, with three of the four women in the group ultimately being promoted to what Gordon described as “positions of significant import” and the company benefiting from their positions in leadership. For Gordon, it was an experience to remember forever.
“They earned those positions, and they worked hard. I just had to help them see what they were working toward,” he explained. “If someone ever looks back and says, ‘I’m here because Gordon helped me see the value that I had and helped me bring out valuable skills,’ that is an incredibly important, moving moment for me.”
