Chief executives do not say this out loud.
In 2017, in a room full of his own managers in Galveston, the man running McCoy’s said it anyway.
“We went from over 100 locations to 83. And there were plenty of those in the industry predicting our demise.”
No momentum. No exciting new chapter. He told his own staff the company had shrunk by roughly a fifth and the industry had expected it to die.
Then he explained why it did not, in one more sentence from the same speech.
“We couldn’t beat them in the retail game only. We looked like a lumberyard, and we needed to act like one.”
That is the entire story.
A family company survived Home Depot by deciding to stop competing with it.