499: Ted Decker & Ian Cinnamon—Orbiting Home

**Mike Rowe** (0:04)
Hey, guys, I'm Mike Rowe. This is The Way I Heard It, and this episode is called Orbiting Home. Orbiting Home, because I have two guests. And the first guest, Ted Decker, the CEO of The Home Depot. And the other guy is Ian Cinnamon. You might not know that name, but he's the CEO of a company called Apex that's mass producing satellites. And both of these men are going to impact your life, if they haven't already. I met them at the Reagan Library. I was there a couple weeks ago for the Reagan Economic Forum. Regular listeners, we'll recall. I went there to listen to Scott Bessent and then interview him. And I'm so glad I did. His episode was very well received. I learned a lot, not just from him, but from lingering and crashing a few of those breakout sessions and listening to some other luminaries hold forth. As to what was vital and critical about the future of our economy and our workforce and some other issues that are interesting to me and relevant to my foundation. So since I had the cameras there, I invited them over for a chat. Chuck wasn't there, so I guess maybe that's the trade off, right? Two guests, no producer.
I'll do my best without him.
Ted Decker is up first, the CEO of The Home Depot. Why should you listen to this? Because Ted knows things you don't. He sees things coming, in fact, before a lot of economic prognosticators anywhere, because he's got a front row seat to massive amounts of consumer behavior. It's so interesting the way he looks at the world through the lens of this company, which by the way, is bigger than many cities. They employ close to half a million associates.
So, he's uniquely positioned. He has a great take on the economy, but more importantly to me anyway, he's doing something to help reinvigorate the skilled trades on a national level. Home Depot does a lot of great stuff in this way, and incidentally, the episode's not sponsored by them in any way, shape or form. In fact, Lowe's is doing a lot of great stuff as well in this space, and I only point it out because we need the government to close the skills gap. We can't do it without them, but the government alone is not enough to make it happen either. We need companies like Home Depot with programs like Path to Pro, which you'll learn about in just a couple of minutes, with a whole bunch of other stuff as well. So strap in. It's a normal length episode, but it's two conversations. Ted Decker's first from Home Depot, and then you're going to love Ian Cinnamon. Very spicy he is. In an episode called Orbiting Home, right after this.
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. Dump.
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I really appreciate you doing this. Absolutely. Great to be with you, Mike. Great to be with you, Ted. I feel like sometimes my schedule is so bad, no one could possibly understand it. And then I meet guys like you, and I can't even imagine on a day-to-day basis. How many employees now at Home Depot? About 475,000.
There's so many cities with so fewer people in them. Let's just start with, how do you manage you?
Well, I mean, we're all about the stores. I mean, it's not about me. Our whole leadership principle is... Well, for the next half hour, it's pretty much about you. No, no, no, no. The great thing about our company is we are truly all about the associates in the store. So, we don't have a headquarters. We have a store support center, and our leadership principle is literally the inverted pyramid. So, you think of most organizations, you have a pyramid with the ground troops, if you will, on the bottom, and work your way up to the executive staff. Is that what I've seen on the aprons? That's on the aprons. In our founders, Bernie and Arthur and Ken, they literally inverted that pyramid. And on top's the customer. Everything's for the customer. We're customer backed, and then the frontline associates are underneath the customer, then staff, and then at the very, very bottom is the executive staff. And we exist to support the associates so they can take care of the customers. So, I mean, it's not just lip service. As the guy who's running the entire operation, you see yourself at the very bottom of an upside down pyramid. That's truly how we operate. When you ask a question like, you know, how do you think about you? Or what do you do about you? I mean, that's not what we think about. We think about the Associates, and we think about the customer. Bernie Marcus always said, if you take care of the Associates, the Associates will take care of the customer and everything else will take care of itself. And that's what we focus on. We focus on our Associates so they can take care of the customer. Well, the reason I wanted to talk to you, honestly, is there's so many big brains here and there's so many people, nobody's got a crystal ball, but a lot of smart minds are taking a very long view and they're trying to make sense of the issues of our time. And it just strikes me that because of the company you run and because of the products that by and large you're known for, you probably learn more from the consumer and consumer behavior, I'm guessing, than most economists do in real time.