DEL.ICIO.USSPOTLIGHT: HOME DEPOT'S MARVIN ELLISON
New VP looks to improve customer’s shopping experience
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Marvin Ellison, at age 43, has been working retail for more than half his life.
Now as Atlanta-based Home Depot’s executive vice president of U.S. stores, a post he’s held since August, Ellison has the task of improving the store experience for customers — and staff.
BOB ANDRES / bandres@ajc.com
Marvin Ellison (right), the executive vice president of Home Depot’s U.S. stores, walks the Cumberland Parkway store with District Manager Chris Wilson (left) and store manager Billy Mallon (center). Ellison wants to make the company’s founders ‘proud of the current Home Depot.’
MARVIN ELLISON'S CHECKLIST WHEN WALKING A STORE
• "When I pull up, I'm looking at the front apron."
• "Is there an inviting presence at the front of the store?"
• "Are customers being helped with loading in the parking lot?"
• "Can I look down the aisle and see associates helping customers?"
• "Is the store clean, shop-able?"
• "Is nothing blocking the aisles?"
• "I've been doing this more than half my life. I can tell in the first 60 seconds" what a store is like.
THE MARVIN ELLISON FILE
• Title: Executive vice president of U.S. stores
• Age: 43
• Career: Spent 15 years with Target; hired at Home Depot in 2002, where jobs have included senior vice president of logistics and president of northern division U.S. stores
• Family: Married with two children
• Residence: Marietta
• Hobbies: Presidential history and bass guitar
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“I can tell in the first 60 seconds” what a store is like, he said on a recent walk of the store on Cumberland Parkway in Vinings, across from headquarters. It was his first press interview, and he laid out his vision of what makes a good store.
He’s looking for about a half-dozen elements that show him the store is on its game.
“When I pull up, I’m looking at the front apron,” he said. “Is there an inviting presence at the front of the store? Are customers being helped with loading in the parking lot?”
Then he looks down the front aisle, near the cash registers.
“Can I look down the aisle and see associates helping customers?”
Finally, he said, he asks, “Is the store clean, shop-able? Is nothing blocking the aisles?”
Ellison also checks on competitors’ stores. On a recent trip to New York, he stopped in at a Lowe’s, the Mooresville, N.C.-based rival of Home Depot.
“I do a compare and contrast,” he said. “I look at customer service. How in-stock are they? The shop-ability of the store. And pricing, to make sure nothing they’re doing is that special. And I look at what their customers are buying. What’s in their shopping carts?”
For Ellison, it has become second nature. He’s always worked in retail. He started at Target, where he made $4.35 an hour in college.
After 15 years there, he joined Home Depot. He’s already been senior vice president of logistics and president of northern division U.S. stores. He’s become the head of nearly 2,000 U.S. stores at a pivotal time.
Customers for years have bemoaned the chain’s fall from an iconic customer service brand to just another big box store.
The $77.3 billion chain’s financial results, in part, have reflected the change. Profits have declined the last eight quarters, when compared to the same time period the year before.
Ellison admits the chain “lost its way,” but he’s there to try to get it back on track.
His formula, he said, is to simplify store tasks. One concrete measure he’s taken is to ask staff to focus solely on customers from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., instead of restocking the shelves. Home Depot calls it the “power hours.”
So far, it’s gotten mixed review by employees on The Orange Blood Bank, a Web forum where employees anonymously post ideas, complaints and praise for the chain. The site is not managed or owned by Home Depot. One issue brought up on the site is when will employees have time to stock, if not during those hours.
One employee complained, “The problem is that there is a tremendous amount of work to be done and who will get yelled at when it’s not completed? I am all for great customer service, but I think they need to give us more help instead of tying our hands.”
Another employee praised the move. “It’s actually pretty liberating not to have to worry about anything but customers between 10 to 2. That’s the funnest [sic] part of my day.”
Ellison wants to focus on a few simple things. He described an “inverted pyramid” in which the customers and associates are at the top, managers are at the bottom.
“I tell my people to use that as a decision making filter. If they’re serving these two groups —customers and associates — ethically and legally, then 99 percent of the time they’re certain of being correct,” Ellison said.
Joe Magyer, a senior analyst for Alexandria, Va.-based The Motley Fool, shops at Home Depot and owns stock in the company.
He said he goes to stores and tries to “engage” as many employees as possible.
“Like any big box retailer, it’s kind of a mixed bag,” he said, of his experiences.
But one thing did encourage him. For the second quarter, Home Depot reported that its “net promoter scores” had increased. This is the number of customers who felt they had a very positive shopping experience, minus the number of customers who had a negative one. Home Depot gets this number through customer surveys. In the second quarter, that number was up by nearly 5 percentage points.
“The score was up by a meaningful amount. Nothing huge, but it reflects the steps they’ve taken, which I think are serious, to improve the customer experience. They’re not just pushing paper around,” said Magyer.
Ellison wants to bring back the iconic brand that Home Depot once was.
“I had dinner with [co-founder] Bernie Marcus recently,” said Ellison. “It’s still very early. But we want to make sure we make Bernie and Arthur [Blank, another co-founder] proud of the current Home Depot.”
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