Anthony Fuller
Anthony Fuller (Tony) is a highly skilled senior executive who recently completed a 30 year career with Walmart. He began his career as a store associate and retired as Senior Vice President. Tony has been privileged to work with, and provide counsel to the last five CEO’s of the Walmart, and to provide leadership in many areas. Tony has a good understanding of the challenges faced by growing companies, and the governance needed to insure future growth. He is experienced at leading global efforts. He is deeply committed to the development of strong organizations. Among his many projects he successfully led the creation of a multiple, in-house REIT structure for a portfolio in excess of 500 million square feet, resulting in significant savings. He chaired the REIT governance committee for over 15 years, dealing with compliance and governance issues along the way. Ultimately, he was responsible for leading the dissolution of the REIT’s and conversion to a system of business trusts.
In addition, he led the restructure of Walmart’s indirect procurement efforts. His team was responsible for dispersing more than $2 billion per year for items as diverse as supplies and structural steel. Under Tony’s leadership the team developed and implemented strategies to achieve global leverage and move the point of procurement upstream for certain commodities. During this period the team also revamped the supply chain and warehouse network, enabling stores to open more quickly, at a greatly reduced cost.
In the past, Tony served as Chairman of the Board of Texas Retail Energy, which was initially responsible for the procurement of energy in Texas for Walmart’s retail operations. They subsequently expanded this operation to all deregulated markets in the United States, as well as the United Kingdom.
On an international scale, Tony was one of twelve who served on Walmart’s Global Sustainability Steering Committee, providing direction for all sustainability efforts. Renewable energy projects utilizing solar, wind and fuel cells were developed and implemented by our team. Walmart is still recognized as a global leader on this front. For over 20 years Tony led the teams which provided both Property Management and Maintenance for Walmart’s global portfolio. During this time the portfolio grew from under 1000 stores in 20 states in the United States, to almost 10,000 stores in all fifty states, and 23 countries around the world. The team led by Tony developed and implemented systems to support and leverage this growth. Analysis was constantly done to determine which activities should be done in-house and which should be outsourced.
In the area of real estate, Tony had the responsibility of developing a strategy for the redevelopment of stores and sale of land and buildings. As Walmart converted from a discount store operator to a Supercenter-based company, hundreds of properties became excess and were in need of redevelopment. The organization we developed was a full service real estate development company and was successful in redeveloping and selling over 200 million square feet of retail space, enabling the rapid development of the Supercenter format. Throughout his service in this area he served as the chairman of the transaction committee as well as real estate finance committee. In addition, he was involved in the development of over 100 distribution centers ranging in size from 250,000 to 4 million square feet. His involvement began with the long term planning process where the future need and geographic areas were determined. Tony then led the team responsible for site selection, design and construction of the facilities, insuring that the infrastructure and incentives necessary to support the projects were in place.
Another one of Tony’s teams was tasked with selling to other users the land adjacent to the retail operations, in an effort to create an even stronger retail destination. Well over $1.5 billion of adjacent land was developed in this fashion. Significant local market research was required. Web-based marketing efforts were developed, with significant focus on building strong win-win relationships. Within the retail operations space was leased to a variety of local and national users. While this was originally developed as a complement to Walmart’s retail operation, it grew to an operation with an income stream approaching $1 billion per year.
The responsibility for opening new stores and completing remodels of existing stores in all markets around the world was carried out by his organization. They devised new strategies for restructuring those functions, allowing the organization to lower costs during a period of explosive growth. Governance was installed as our capital investment grew to the level of $2 billion per year. Staffing and training of new store associates was done under the direction of this team, which was also charged with installing and preserving the corporate culture.