Billionaire Arthur Blank was fired from his first job. When he launched The Home Depot at 36, customers said 'these guys are nuts'

"It was never about money to me," Blank said. "It was always about building values. Becoming a billionaire was only a byproduct of that."

'I came from nothing'

Blank was born on Sept. 27, 1942, in Flushing, Queens, to Max and Molly Blank. His father was a pharmacist who died when Arthur was still a teenager, according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia (3). His mother raised him and his older brother, Michael, on her own. "I came from nothing," Blank told The School of Hard Knocks.

When asked how that upbringing shaped his relationship with money and risk, Blank pointed to his mother's influence. "Upbringing was based on a set of values that my mother had," he said. "You do the right things for the right reasons, and live with the consequences."

Blank went on to attend Babson College in Massachusetts, graduating in 1963. He started his career as a senior accountant at Arthur Young and Company, and later joined the Daylin Corporation, a retail conglomerate. Within Daylin, he rose through the ranks and eventually landed at Handy Dan Home Improvement Centers, where he served as vice president of finance. (Handy Dan would later go out of business in 1989.)

Fired at 36

In April 1978, Blank and Handy Dan's CEO, Bernie Marcus, were both fired from the company during an internal power struggle, as Blank recounted in a 2017 episode of NPR's "How I Built This" podcast (4). Blank was 35 at the time.

Blank and Marcus decided to continue working together and, over coffee, hatched a plan for massive, warehouse-style stores that could stock everything a do-it-yourself homeowner or professional contractor could need — all under one roof, at rock-bottom prices, with staff who actually knew what they were talking about. They enlisted investment banker Ken Langone to secure the capital and brought on merchandising expert Pat Farrah to help execute the vision. On June 22, 1979, the first two Home Depot stores opened in the Atlanta suburbs of Doraville and Decatur, according to The Home Depot's corporate history (5).

The early reception was not exactly warm. "First couple of years, people coming to our stores, you know they say, 'these guys are nuts, they're crazy,'" Blank recalled to The School of Hard Knocks. "'Just ignore these guys, they're gonna go broke.'"

They did not go broke

Instead, word of mouth spread. By the end of 1979, a third store had opened and average weekly sales hit $81,700, according to a company timeline published by TheStreet (6). The company filed for an IPO in September 1981, raising more than $4 million. By 1982, annual sales had surpassed $100 million.

When asked what drove that early momentum, Blank told The School of Hard Knocks it was all about listening to customers. "The volumes that we were doing were unbelievable," he said. "And that was all as a response of listening to what customers wanted. The customer always comes first."