What Are Sam Walton's Rules? (#113)
As part of my research for my book, Grow Your Grit: Overcome Obstacles, Thrive, and Accomplish Your Goals (available for pre-order here and available everywhere on July 12th) I researched Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. Sam Walton had grit. After developing a chain of Ben Franklin stores, he used his grit and experience in the retail market to open his first Walmart when he was 44 years old. 30 years later, in 1992, Walmart had grown to be the largest retailer in America with 1,960 stores, sales of $43B ($81.3B in today’s dollars), and a income of $1.68B ($3.17B in today’s dollars). What were Sam Walton’s Rules for Building a Business?
In Sam’s autobiography, Sam Walton: Made in America, he shares his Rules for Building a Business (I have edited it for brevity). I found them fascinating and applicable to the work I have done growing my small business as well as working with larger companies. I hope you do too.
Commit to your business and believe in it more than anyone else.
Share your profits with all your associates and treat them as partners (Walmart calls all employees partners.)
Motivate your partners. Day by day, think of new and more interesting ways to motivate and challenge your partners. Set high goals, encourage competition, and then keep score.
Communicate everything you possibly can to your partners. The more they know the more they’ll understand. The more they understand the more they’ll care.
Appreciate everything your associates do for your business
Celebrate your successes. Find some humor in your failures. Don’t take yourself so seriously. Loosen up, and everybody around you will loosen up. Have fun. Show enthusiasm — always.
Listen to everyone in your company. And figure out ways to get them talking.
Exceed your customers expectations. If you do, they’ll come back over and over. Give them what they want — and a little more.
Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage. For twenty-five years running — long before Walmart was known as the nation’s largest retailer — we ranked number one in our industry for the lowest ratio of expenses to sales.
Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everyone is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.
Go on the offense, use your grit and the Rules to start building your business like Sam Walton built Walmart.