How a Memphis Kid Became AutoZone’s Chairman and CEO

On this episode of Our American Stories, William C. Rhodes started as a kid tagging along with his dad on Saturdays in Memphis. Years later, he was guiding AutoZone across the Americas as Chairman, President, and CEO. Along the way, he learned what leadership looks like on the floor, in the field, and in the boardroom, and how corporate governance turns good instincts into durable results. Here's Rhodes with his story of success.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
And by the way, we'd love to hear your story.
Send them to our American Stories dot com. There's some
of our favorites. Bill Rhodes, a Memphis, Tennessee native, has
been the president and CEO of AutoZone since two thousand

(00:31):
and five. Today Bill joins us to tell his life
story and the journey that led him to AutoZone.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
So, my father in the early years was with ORC
and pest control, and my mother and father moved nine
times in ten years, and one of the stops was Greenville,
which is where I was born. After I was six
weeks old, we moved to Meridian, mississipp And after about
another year we moved to Dallas, Texas. In nineteen sixty nine.

(01:09):
April of nineteen sixty nine, our family moved from Dallas,
Texas to Memphis, Tennessee. The reason we moved to Memphis,
Tennessee was my mother and father didn't want to keep
moving every year. He was a branch manager with her working,
and so they kept moving year after year after year.
There was a new startup company in Memphis, Tennessee called

(01:31):
termin X. At the time, termin X had just a
handful of branches, and they hired my father to be
the first ever multi store manager. So he came to
Memphis in April nineteen sixty nine as the regional manager
for termin X, the only one that they had, and
I lost him a couple of years ago, so I
can't hardly talk about him without getting a little joked up.

(01:54):
But the vast majority of the lessons I learned about
leadership came from my mother and my father. People want
to talk about leadership and how sophisticated it is, and
which books do you read. I think leadership starts with caring,
truly caring about people, and living your values out every day.

(02:16):
My father used to go to work every Saturday, and
many of those Saturdays, he'd allow me to come along
with him, and i'd sit in his office and I'd
listen to the conversations that he'd have, and i'd watch
him roll off these reports off these antiquated printers, and
he'd sit there and study those reports, and then he'd
pull me around on the side of his desk and

(02:37):
he says, so, here's where we're doing well, and here's
what we're not doing well, and here's what I need
to do to help incentivize or encourage this person. And
my dad is my hero. My father loved sports. I
in junior high and so played basketball and football, and
I wasn't good enough to progress to the high school level.

(03:00):
Pivoted and turned my attention to golf. So I ended
up going to the University of Tennessee at Martin, and
it's about two and a half hours two hours and
fifteen minutes northeast of Memphis, Tennessee. It's about eight miles
from the Kentucky border. In Martin, Tennessee, at the time
a very small town, and certainly for a kid coming

(03:23):
from Memphis, Tennessee, it was a town of five thousand
people that at the time had about fifty five hundred students.
I got to Martin because I played golf. I wanted
to play collegiate golf, and I had the opportunity to
be recruited by quite a few schools in the Mid South,
and ultimately the golf coach at University of Tennessee Martin,

(03:44):
Grover Page, offered me a compelling scholarship to come and
play golf at UT Martin. So I went to UT Martin.
My fraternity my first year was the golf team, and
I loved the golf team. We had a very good
golf team and we played Division two golf and we're

(04:05):
always on the verge of being able to go to
the NCAA Championships or not. My first three years we
got to go. Unfortunately, I wasn't good enough to make
those trips the first three years. But golf was a
big part of my existence in school. I studied accounting

(04:25):
while I was at the University of Tennessee at Martin,
and I can remember talking to my mom and dad.
People these days wouldn't remember these phone calls. But back then,
we didn't carry a phone with us. We didn't have
a phone in our dorm room. We had to go
downstairs and wait in line for one of the two
or three phone booths that were in the blobby level

(04:47):
of the dormitory. And I would call home two or
three times a week, and my mother and father, this
is something people wouldn't realize today either. They would both
jump on a landline at home and we would have
a three way conversation without having to merge a call.

(05:07):
And I can remember one particular phone call my freshman
year and my father, as I mentioned, was big into management,
and I knew I wanted to go into business because
I wanted to be my father. And I can remember
this phone call. He said, son, of you decided on
a major And I said, yes, sir, Dad, I have

(05:29):
And he said, okay, what is it? And I said,
I'm going to be an accounting major. He said, what
You're going to be an accounting major? You know those people,
they kind of sit in the corner. They wear a
green ice shade and a green armband and all they
do is count the numbers. He said, son, why do
you want to be an accountant? And I said, that

(05:52):
is my understanding that accounting is the most difficult business
degree that they have here at U T. Martin, And
so that's why I chose it. That's good enough for me.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
That's good enough for me. It would have been good
enough for my dad too. Had a very similar philosophy
about life, and his father finally moved to Memphis for
one reason, to not move anymore. He doesn't want to
move his kids around from place to place to place.
The majority of the lessons about leadership I learn from
my mom and dad, and it all starts, Bill Rhodes says,

(06:26):
from truly caring about people and watching his father and
mother do that and have that be the anchor of
their life.

Speaker 3 (06:33):
My dad was my hero, Bill said.

Speaker 1 (06:36):
And then of course that line about accounting, I understand
it's the hardest major at the University of Tennessee at
Martin And of course that was it for his dad
and his mom. When we come back, more of this
storytelling Bill Rhoades's story. By the way, we're looking for
your stories too. I mention it the beginning of every show.

(06:56):
But father and mother's stories. We love them for we
love them for Mother's Day, we love them all year long.

Speaker 3 (07:04):
Then your mother and.

Speaker 1 (07:05):
Father's stories to our American Stories dot Com. When we
return more of Bill Rhoades's story here on Our American Stories.

(07:30):
Lie Hibibe here the host of our American Stories. Every
day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across
this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns.
But we truly can't do the show without you. Our
stories are free to listen to, but they're not free
to make. If you love what you hear, go to
our American Stories dot com and click the donate button.

(07:53):
Give a little, Give a lot. Go to our American
Stories dot com and give and we're back with our
American stories and Bill Rhoades's story. Bill has been the

(08:13):
president and CEO of Autowe since two thousand and five.
We just heard how much his father meant to him.
In fact, Bill chose to study accounting at the University
of Tennessee at Martin because it was the most challenging
business degree they offered, and he figured it would train
him to be at least half the professional that his
father was.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
Back to Bill, as I was pursuing my accounting degree,
I learned two things. One I didn't particularly like accounting.
More importantly, it didn't like me. And so in my
senior year I was progressing. I was a pretty good student,

(08:54):
and I'd made pretty good grades, but I really had
to work at it. And I was taking this one
class auditing and doctor REALDA. Baron, the head of the
accounting department of the University of Tennessee, was the professor,
and she's very talented. And we kept going through this
class and I was really working hard. I was close

(09:15):
to graduating, really excited about graduating. I decided I was
not going to be an accountant, and I was therefore
going to go straight to the University of Memphis to
pursue an NBA. But this auditing class, really I was
struggling in and I was going to see doctor Baron
on a regular basis. And I say, doctor Baron, you
know I'm trying this. I just don't get the concepts.

(09:37):
And I worked it, and she coached me and tutored me,
and ultimately came down to the end and I said,
after the final exam, I said, doctor Baron, I'm sorry,
I did not do well in this class. And I
know that I'm on the verge of an F or
a D. And I plead with you to give me
and I know it would be a gift to give

(09:59):
me my first ever D in any class at UT Martin,
because if you don't, you're gonna have to deal with
me again next fall. And I don't think it's gonna
go any better. And I promise you, I promise you,
I will never be in audity. So I go on

(10:19):
to the University of Memphis and I'm going to grad school.
I'm living with my parents, and I come home one
day my senior year at UT Martin. I had a
good golf season, so I made academic All American despite
my d and I made Honorable Mention All American. I

(10:40):
got a chance to Our team didn't make it to
the NCAAs that year, but I was invited as an
individual to play in the Division two national Championships down
in Columbus, Georgians. You know, the kind of the pinnacle
of my career in golf. But there was a right
up in the commercial appeal about me. And after write
up in the commercial appeal, a little article, I came

(11:03):
home one day from school and back then I used
to write notes on the refrigerators, and there was a
note from my mom said, Mike Copper called from Ernston Winnie.
He'd like for you to call him. So I picked
up the phone and I called him and said, Hi,
this is Bill Roads. Said, Hi, billis Mike Copper. I'm
in charge of the audit practice at Ernstin Winnie. Ernstin

(11:26):
Winnie was at the time one of eight large public
accounting firms, and this was in this portion was in Memphis, Tennessee,
my hometown, and Mike said, I'd I read about you
in the commercial appeal I'd like to talk to you.
And so, back then public accounting, you wore dark suits,

(11:47):
you wore white shirts, you wore a tie. There was
nobody in public accounting that had facial hair. So I've
gone to this interview with Mike Copper, the head of
the audit practice of ernstin Winny and Memphis. Tent to
see and I put on my best I put on
my duckhead khakis, my navy blazer. I borrowed a tie

(12:08):
from my dad. My dad's three inches taller than I am, say,
has extra long ties that hung down too long. Put
on my penny loafers, and I had a full beard.
Then I went to ernstin Whinnie to interview with Mike Copper.
I looked way out of place. I sat in his
corner office and Mike started interviewing me. Where'd you go?

(12:29):
How'd you do in school? That we're about three minutes in?
He said, stop, let me tell you why you're here.
Ernstin Winning in Memphis, Tennessee has three different departments organizations.
Got a consulting division in the bond consulting business. We
got a tax division, we got an audit division. Mike said,
I believe I've been At the time, he'd been there

(12:51):
twenty some odd years. He was in the audit practice
and charged the audit practice. And he said, every summer
we have a golf competition between tax, audit and consulting.
He said, Bill, every year I've been here, not only
has audit never won. We've finished last. Every time I

(13:13):
want to hire you. I wan to hire you as
an intern. It's May of nineteen eighty eight. The Golf
Challenge is in July. You can work one hour a week,
you can work sixty hours a week. I don't care.
You can work through July and after the Golf Challenge
you can quit, or you can work through December when

(13:37):
you graduate. But we won't hire you full time because
you just you know, you don't have the grades from
your college to be a full time person here. And
he said, what do you think. I said, so I
can write that I can work for ernstin Winnie on
my resume. Why in the world would I not do that?

(13:58):
And so I did. And it was right when personal
computers were becoming somewhat mobile, we called them beluggables. Ernstin
Winnie National come out with us new scheduling software. So
they put me in charge of figuring out how to
use this new scheduling software, and I was pretty effective
at it. It went well. July came along and we

(14:22):
won by longshot the Golf Challenge and it was the
last year they ever had the Golf Challenge, never had
it again. So fast forward to December of nineteen eighty eight.
I'm graduating from University of Memphis with an MBA. I've
gone through a year of testing with termin X, my

(14:43):
father's company, and I'm going to be a manager in
training for my father's company. And they had told me
all along. My father was a regional manager from Saint
Louis to Knoxville to Jackson, Mississippi, and they said, you know,
you can do your manager and training program for a
year year and a half in Memphis, but beyond that,

(15:04):
you're going to have to move outside of your father's
territory to become a branch manager. So we've decided you're
going to have to move to Philadelphia. And it was
not Philadelphia, Mississippi. It was Philadelphia, Pennsylvania within two or
three weeks. So it was a shock for a Southern
boy from Memphis, Tennessee that never really been that far away,

(15:25):
except when I went to ut Martin two hours and
fifteen minutes away. And remember ernstin Young had told me
that I would not be able to go to work
there full time. The same day that I was told
I had to move to Philadelphia, I got a letter
in the mail from ernstin Winning saying that they wanted
me to come on the audit practice as an auditor.

(15:47):
They were paying me about four thousand dollars more than
I was going to make living in Philadelphia working for
termin X, and so much against what I promised doctor Baron,
and much against what my dad really didn't want. I
became an accountant and I joined ernstin Winny at the
time full time in January nineteen eighty nine. There's no

(16:10):
question my time in Ernst and Young was incredibly beneficial
for me in my career. I talked to kids all
the time. In fact, I talked to one of my
nephews yesterday who's considering going to work for Ernst and Young,
And I think it's an incredible place to go get
an education. How many other kids twenty three, twenty four,

(16:34):
twenty five young adults have the opportunity to go in
and see seven, eight, nine, ten businesses over the course
of a year, and see which businesses and business models work,
which ones don't work and why. See which leaders are
very successful and what kind of traits do they have

(16:54):
that lead to that success. See which kind of leaders
fail and where they lose their support from their teams.
Probably in my case as much as anything. See which
cultures work and which cultures don't work. So I call
it one of the greatest MBA programs in the world.

Speaker 1 (17:15):
And you've been listening to Bill Rhodes tell one heck
of an unlikely story. Accounting didn't like me, and I
didn't like accounting, and it turned out, well.

Speaker 3 (17:25):
Not so much to be true.

Speaker 1 (17:26):
He gets that gig because of his golfing expertise.

Speaker 3 (17:30):
I love what that hiring partner said.

Speaker 1 (17:32):
You can work an hour a week, you can work
sixty hours a week. I don't care, but we won't
hire you full time. And of course that turned out
to not quite be true. When we come back, more
of this remarkable story, the unlikely story of Bill Rhodes's
journey to chairman, CEO and president of AutoZone.

Speaker 3 (17:52):
Here on our American.

Speaker 1 (17:54):
Stories, and we're back with our American stories in the
final portion of Bill Rhodes's story. When we last left off,
Bill had secured a job in Ernst and Young formerly

(18:16):
ernstin Winnie. Despite being told that after his internship there
would be no job for him, he returned to Bill.

Speaker 2 (18:28):
I was offered a job to come to AutoZone from
Ernst and Young. I was doing really well at ian
Why and enjoying what I was doing. But here was
this chance to go to work for AutoZone. What a
fortuitous decision for me. I'm not sure it's worked out
very well for AutoZone, but it's worked out extremely well
for me. So I joined AutoZone on December fifth, nineteen

(18:51):
ninety four, and I was the manager of inventory Accounting.
Quickly I moved into some other parts of the organization,
and the most fortunate thing for me was the leadership
team at AutoZone moved me into a lot of different
parts of the company over time. So I started in

(19:11):
inventory accounting. They asked me to start an internal audit program,
the first ever for AutoZone. Then I was moved into
our store operations team as the store operations support person,
helping support our divisional vice presidents. I was then moved
back to finance. I guess I got promoted to vice
president while I was in store operations support. Got moved

(19:35):
back to finance in my early thirties because they wanted
our CFO was considering retiring and I was moved back
because they wanted me to be the potential successor to
the CFO. Four months into that, I was promoted to
senior vice president and controller at a very very young age,
and was really excited and doing great things, I thought,

(19:58):
and the company was doing well. Came in one day
and the president of the company, another one of my mentors,
Tim Vargo, called me into his office and said, hey, Bill,
we've decided you're not going to be This is four
months after I got promoted to senior vice president. Tim
Vargo calls me in and says, Bill, we've decided you're

(20:20):
not going to be the next CFO. In fact, we've
hired him and he's starting on Monday. He's going to
take your job. You're going to be demoted back to
a vice president and we don't know what you're going
to do, but we like you. And I said, wait
a minute, I was tracking with everything until you said,

(20:41):
but we like you, and so when a week we're
without a job. The following thursday, Tim Vargo called me
back in his office and he said, we decided what
you're going to do. We're going to make you a
divisional vice president. So I went from being the controller
of the organization with about two hundred people in organization,

(21:01):
most of which sat on the same floor I did
in the building downtown Memphis. So all of a sudden,
I was responsible for five hundred and twenty five stores
in eleven states and eight thousand people. And I said,
and you call that a demotion, And it was one
of those. It's probably the luckiest demotion that's ever happened.

(21:23):
And I had a wonderful opportunity to go and spend
time with the people that are the most important in
our business, the people that are on the front lines,
that are dealing with our customers and providing wild customer
service every day. I was only in that role for
about eleven months. We had a new CEO that came in,

(21:44):
and when that happens, many times, leadership teams get shaken
up a little bit, and IRIS did as well. A
few people left, and our new CEO, Steve Idland, promoted
me back to a senior vice president, but this time
in charge of our supply chain. Now here's this accountant
from Ernst and Young that tried to be an operator

(22:06):
for eleven months that's now trying to be a supply
chain expert. It was a lot of fun. I really
enjoyed the time in both store operations in supply chain.
I was in the supply chain role for about six
months and our CFO transition actually happened. Our CEO at
the time he asked me to be responsible for information

(22:29):
technology and the supply chain and just really learned in
both my operations and supply chain years empathy for what
we asked people to do every day and the commitment
that they have for the success of this organization and
frankly the success of their families. People work awfully hard,
and I get to see that firsthand. Our CEO called

(22:55):
a board meeting on a Friday afternoon and announced that
he was leaving and he was going to take on
the chairman and CEO role of Office Depot. It was
the week of spring break is when he called the meeting.
I was in Colorado with my family and I had
a skiing accident on Wednesday and had a severe concussion
and was not clear to drive an automobile for a week.

(23:16):
That was on Wednesday, and I got a call on
Sunday afternoon. I knew something was up because I'd had
some conversations with our general counsel, but I didn't know
that our CEO was leaving or anything. And I got
a phone call at four o'clock on Sunday afternoon from
our founder and he said, Bill, I want to let
you know Steve resigned on Friday. The board's met all

(23:38):
weekend and we've made you the president and CEO. I'm
coming back on Tuesday. We have a board meeting on
Tuesday at noon. I'll see you in your office at
eleven o'clock. And I said, Pet, did anybody tell you
that I had a skiing accident? And he said, yeah,
get to work. So I went to work. So today

(24:02):
AutoZone is about a sixteen billion dollar sales organization. We
have nearly seven thousand stores in the United States, Mexico,
and Brazil. We have one hundred five thousand people. One
hundred five thousand people that we don't call employees, we
call autos owners. They have a passion, they have a
dedication to drive customer service. You think about a significant

(24:25):
part of our organization is in the retail business. Well,
most of the times when you go see a retailer,
you're excited about what you can buy. You're buying some
new glasses or a new shirt or whatever. You're really excited. Right,
That's not the case when you come to AutoZone. You
woke up, you're trying to go to work, car didn't start.
You got to go to AutoZone and find out that

(24:46):
maybe I've got to spend one hundred and fifty dollars
on a new battery. You know what, That one hundred
and fifty dollars wasn't in my budget. But I've got
to do it anyway because I got to get to work.
Our people are our secret sauce. Autos owners are a
space I shall breed. They have to be problem solvers.
So another one of my quotes that I often say

(25:06):
is AutoZone isn't for everybody, and everybody isn't for AutoZone.
And that's okay because we have to have somebody with
a servant heart. When somebody walks into that store and
they're having a bad day, their car won't start, we
have to have somebody that is empathetic for the customer's

(25:29):
situation and it's willing to help that customer solve that problem.
We have lots of different practices. One of them is
called gotcha go out to the customer's automobile. So if
a customer walks in and says my car is doing X,
Y or Z, our people stop what they're doing. They
go out to the car and they look, listen, smell

(25:53):
what's going on with cars to help try to diagnose
the problem. Our people are problem solvers and they do
it every single day. Many times. Our people go out
and solve a problem for free, and we love that.
So if you go out and the car won't start, well,
all of a sudden, the autosowner sees it's a corroded
battery cable. They clean it up, get rid of the corrosion,

(26:16):
tighten down the clamp, and guess what the car starts
And the customer says, oh, well, what I owe you nothing? Well, okay,
well here's ten dollars of tip. No, ma'am, I can't
take that. We're here to serve you. That's what service
is about. That's what our team excels at.

Speaker 1 (26:40):
And a great job on the production by Robbie Davis,
and a special thanks to Bill Rhodes for sharing his story.
Seven thousand stories, one hundred and five thousand autosonners. And
they do have a serving heart. If you've ever gone,
you know what gotcha means is they come out to
that car and they try to solve problems.

Speaker 3 (26:58):
And it's the.

Speaker 1 (26:59):
Heart of their business, is their serving hearts. And by
the way, there are two hundred and seventy million cars
on the road. Most of them are used. The average
age twelve years old, so we all know what it's
like to wake up and that battery doesn't work. Bill
Rhoades's story AutoZone story here on our American Stories