EPR Editorial Team3 min read
Edited on Jun 26, 2026.
In 2017, then-Home Depot CFO Carol Tomé received the Atlanta Business Chronicle's Lifetime Achievement Award at the publication's Women Who Mean Business event. The recognition capped a 22-year run at Home Depot during which she had become one of the most-recognized CFOs in U.S. retail and one of the few women holding a CFO seat at a Fortune 50 company at that point in the cycle.
Eight years on, the Tomé arc is now a fuller career study than the 2017 award captured.
Tomé joined Home Depot in 1995 as Vice President and Treasurer. She was promoted to Senior Vice President of Finance and Accounting in 2000 and to Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer in 2001. The CFO seat she held across 2001–2019 covered the Home Depot rebuild under Frank Blake, the integration of the e-commerce business, and the broader transformation of the retailer's operating model in the post-2008 housing market.
The Home Depot financial-discipline story across that period was substantially Tomé's. She closed underperforming subsidiaries (HD Supply was spun off in 2007). She built the case for share repurchases that returned capital to shareholders. She defended the company's margin discipline through multiple cycles. Home Depot's stock outperformed the broader retail category across her CFO tenure by a substantial margin.
In June 2020, Tomé became CEO of UPS — the first female CEO in the company's history and one of the few external CEO appointments UPS had made in modern times. The transition came after she had served on the UPS board since 2003, giving her 17 years of board-level operational familiarity before taking the executive seat.
The UPS CEO tenure ran across the post-COVID logistics environment, the structural shift in e-commerce parcel volumes, and significant labor negotiations with the Teamsters in 2023. The 2023 contract — the largest single private-sector labor agreement in U.S. history at the time — landed without the strike the market had feared.
Three durable lessons.
Long-tenure CFO authority compounds. Tomé's 18-year CFO run gave her institutional credibility that few finance leaders ever build. The credibility transferred to the UPS CEO role and gave her the latitude to manage the post-COVID and labor cycles without the credibility deficit a newer executive would have faced.
Board service as career bridge. The UPS board seat from 2003 onward gave Tomé operational familiarity with the company over 17 years before she took the CEO role. The dual-track executive-governance pattern — building a board portfolio alongside the operating role — is now an established career-building model for senior finance leaders.
Women in Fortune 50 finance leadership remains a small population. Tomé was one of fewer than ten women holding Fortune 50 CFO or CEO roles across most of her career. The structural lesson — that the pipeline of senior women into top corporate finance leadership has been built slowly and unevenly — is one of the durable themes the Atlanta Business Chronicle was implicitly recognizing in 2017.
Home Depot's Atlanta headquarters and Tomé's sustained presence in the Atlanta business community made her one of the most-recognized senior corporate leaders in the city. The Atlanta business community — anchored by Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, UPS, Home Depot, Truist, and a dense set of Fortune 500 corporate headquarters — has produced one of the strongest concentrations of senior corporate leadership in the U.S. South. Tomé's career operated inside that ecosystem.
The 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award captured a career that was already substantial. The decade since extended it into a CEO role and a labor-cycle test that few CFOs ever face. The Tomé arc is now one of the cleanest available case studies in how finance-leadership credibility compounds into operating authority — and what sustained board service does for an executive's eventual transition options.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
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