{"id":284,"date":"2009-04-09T11:07:20","date_gmt":"2009-04-09T16:07:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/?p=284"},"modified":"2009-04-09T11:08:00","modified_gmt":"2009-04-09T16:08:00","slug":"bernie-marcus-%e2%80%9cmy-life-began-when-i-was-fired-at-49%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/09\/bernie-marcus-%e2%80%9cmy-life-began-when-i-was-fired-at-49%e2%80%9d\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernie Marcus: \u201cMy Life Began When I Was Fired at 49\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Bernie Marcus<\/strong> is, without question, one of the greatest American self-made success stories of all time.\u00a0 The company he founded, <strong>Home Depot<\/strong>, has immeasurably changed the landscape of virtually every town in America. Marcus\u2019s Home Depot added its trademark orange to the red, white, and blue American Dream of owning your own home and finding pleasure in fixing it up.\u00a0 Today Home Depot has more than 2,200 stores across North America.<\/p>\n<p>This success story began for Marcus at a point when most people would be thinking about hanging up their spurs and heading to sunny retirement villages. Not so for him and his co-founders, <strong>Arthur Blank, Ken Langone,<\/strong> and <strong>Pat Farrah.<\/strong> Marcus and Blank were both fired from <strong>Handy Dan<\/strong>, a home-improvement chain that their new company ultimately put out of business. While you may be thinking that revenge is sweet, revenge was not the motivation for these then middle-aged middle managers\u2014being fired was the best thing that ever happened to both of them.\u00a0 In fact, Bernie Marcus said to me when I was interviewing him for my book, \u201cMy life began when I was fired at 49 years of age.\u201d\u00a0 Closing one door led to opening thousands more\u2014more than 2,200, to be exact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Bernie Marcus<\/strong> is, without question, one of the greatest American self-made success stories of all time.  The company he founded, <strong>Home Depot<\/strong>, has immeasurably changed the landscape of virtually every town America. Marcus\u2019s Home Depot added its trademark orange to the red, white, and blue American Dream of owning your own home and finding pleasure in fixing it up.  Today Home Depot has more than 2,200 stores across North America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[79,77,82,78,80,81],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":338,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions\/338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}