In part 2 of our interview with Bernie Marcus, Co-Founder of The Home Depot, shared how leaders of businesses of all sizes can benefit from generosity – not only personally, but also as a company. 

Bernie Marcus served as a Founding Ambassador for goBeyondProfit and issued both a challenge to fellow business leaders and offered a road map for leading with generosity across a lifetime.

What is the Business Value of Generosity?

First of all, it’s good for your company and it’s good for you. It’s also good for the associates and the employees that work for you. I can guarantee you that if your company does it on a consistent basis, that productivity in your company will increase. I’ve seen it. I know it. I know that every year we lose people in businesses. It cuts down dramatically on that. People stay with a company like this. They’re proud to be part of it. They’re proud when they go home and they talk to their families that you’re not going to believe what we did today. This is not the bottom line that they’re talking about. This is something extraordinary. So our policy was never to advertise it. We never did. And most people don’t know we did it. And yet I point to it as one of the most successful things that we did at The Home Depot.

There’s no question about it. If you have people who love working at your company, that attitude means that they’re going to treat customers better. They’re going to treat our inventories better. They’re going to be better and more productive. And so how does that not help the bottom line?

Many of the CEOs will say, well it’s too expensive. Generosity cuts down the amount of people that leave your business to go find better jobs. Every time somebody leaves you, it costs you X number of dollars to train those people. You keeping people saves you a lot of money. And this is part of the productivity I’m talking about. This is something that’ll be good for the business community. You’ll feel good about yourself.

Sometimes the bottom line and the quarterly profit numbers don’t quite give you the flush that you should have. But doing good in the community and watching the results of it, I think, are just as good as a great annual report.

How Do You Get the Word Out About Business Generosity?

CEOs are often depicted as inhuman human beings that do everything for profit, not doing anything for anybody else. I’ve known so many CEOs in my life, and I don’t know anybody that fits that mold. I think that the business community has to understand that we have to change it ourselves, within our companies.

There are millions of people working for companies all over the United States. If all these companies started doing the kind of things that they can do and show what the real nature of what business is all about we could have a major impact. Together, we can change the perception of people that work for you and people that just look at you as a paragon in their community.

Everybody that works for The Home Depot, they know it. We have over 400,000 people working for The Home Depot today. You think that the families of 400,000 people don’t recognize it, that their friends don’t know about it, all their acquaintances don’t know about it. So millions of people actually know about it without going out and having to pump our chest.

Why Did You Help Launch goBeyondProfit?

It’s important to look past your bottom line. There are other things in life besides making money. Maybe some of you are so busy with your business that you don’t have time for any of this, that you just are so focused. I have to tell you something, rounding out your personality may not be the worst thing in the world either.

Maybe it’s time for you to get your nose out of the books and start doing something that really is meaningful and can balance you as a human being, as a whole person. Somebody who is totally focused on their business ends up being a pretty miserable human being. They may be wealthy, but just not enjoying anything.

I think Rick Jackson’s idea of other companies doing this is a great idea. It’s hard to start, if you’re somebody who’s never done this before, it’s almost painful. But my God, you may change your personality, you may change your whole life. You may start to enjoy giving and you may start to see the benefits of it. And wouldn’t that be wonderful for you and your family?

I met a young kid recently, he was 27 years old, and he came up to me and he said, I want to thank you for my life. I said, what did I do? And he said, I had a stroke, and I was paralyzed. He said, look at me. Everything’s moving. He said, if I hadn’t gone to the Marcus Stroke Center at Grady Hospital, I probably would be bedridden in a wheelchair today, and I just want to hug you. Well, how does that make you feel? You tell me how I felt. It’s emotional. It goes into every fiber of your body.

I hear this story over and over again. Constantly, wherever I go, I run across people who say, thank you so much for what you’ve done. And I say to everybody, don’t thank me. Thank The Home Depot, the hardworking kids at The Home Depot, the 400,000 kids that continue to do this every day, allows me to do all the great things I do with my philanthropy today.

I’m telling you this is good for your business. This will help productivity. This will help turnover. This has a big effect on your bottom line. And those of you who don’t give, don’t get it yet. Try it and you’ll get it.

Bernie Marcus helped found goBeyondProfit, a network of more than 2,100+ CEOs of businesses across the state of Georgia who pledge to operate generously and improve lives. Every company in Georgia is invited to join at no-cost.