Lowe’s Companies Inc. Chairman and CEO Marvin Ellison’s career has been marked by an incredible amount of change. On Monday at NRF 2023: Retail’s Big Show, Ellison sat down with NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay to discuss the journey that led to Ellison receiving The Visionary 2023 award from NRF.
The Visionary award is given to retail executives that have demonstrated outstanding industry leadership; past recipients include Target Board Chairman and CEO Brian Cornell and Levi’s President and CEO Chip Bergh.
Ellison began his retail career as a part-time store security officer at Target and grew by taking on the tough assignments no one wanted. In 2018 he joined Lowe’s, which has more than 2,200 stores and more than 300,000 associates, as its CEO. His vision includes the Lowe’s total home strategy of creating a seamless omnichannel retail experience to build loyalty with its do-it-yourself customers as well as professionals.
Shay began the conversation by asking Ellison to talk about the journey his career has taken, and what it means to be honored as The Visionary.
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“If you look at my career on paper, it looks pretty impressive,” Ellison said. “I started out as a $4.35-an-hour part-time associate in Memphis, Tennessee. Over the course of 30 years, I came to be the CEO of two Fortune 500 companies.”
But, he continued, within those 30 years there were at least 12 instances of him missing an opportunity to be promoted. “And every one of them put me in a position of, ‘What do I do next?’” he said.
“I thought about, how do I achieve the level of success that I would like to have without having a deep education from a prestigious educational institution? I got a master’s degree a little later that at least made things look a bit better on paper, but I was still without any executive support from those heavy institutions. So, I decided the key for me was, just take tough assignments.
“And so, for the last 25 years, every job I’ve been in, including the one I’m in today, when I accepted it, I replaced somebody who was fired or pushed out.”
"The jobs I took were ones that other people had evaluated and decided that the risk was not worth the potential reward. But I would raise my hand, because it’s my way of making a contribution to the company."
Why, then, did he decide to take on those kinds of challenges? “The jobs I took were ones that other people had evaluated and decided that the risk was not worth the potential reward. But I would raise my hand, because it’s my way of making a contribution to the company,” he said.
“It’s my way to demonstrate my ability to lead and my way to build teams, and hopefully to be an essential leader within the organization. And I’ve been very fortunate, through God’s grace and his blessings, that I’ve been successful in the assignments I took over that 25-year period. But it’s been because I had a really good core group of people around me, both personally and professionally.”
“Last night you mentioned the turtle,” Shay said, referring to the previous evening’s NRF Foundation Honors event where Ellison received The Visionary award. “If you see a turtle on top of a fencepost, you know one thing, and that’s the turtle didn’t get there by itself.”
“That is a Southern philosophy that everyone should take with them,” Ellison said. “A turtle on a fencepost is differentiated. You’re not going to see that too often. You know he didn’t get there alone. In seeing someone like me and the roles that I’m in, you know that it took an incredible team effort, and that’s exactly what I have at Lowe’s and have had for the better part of my professional career.”
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