Made in America by Sam Walton

A Story About the Founder of Wal-Mart, Sam Walton

“Friend, we just got after it and stayed after it.”

This story about the kinds of traditional principles that made America great in the first place.

It is a story about entrepreneurship, risk, hard work, and knowing where you want to go and being willing to do what it takes to get there.

It’s a story about believing in your idea even when maybe some other folks don’t, and about sticking to your guns.

There’s absolutely no limit to what plain, ordinary working people can accomplish if they’re given the opportunity and the encouragement and the incentive to do their best.

That’s how Wal-Mart became Wal-Mart: ordinary people joined together to accomplish extraordinary things.

Our finances are nobody’s business but our own.

An awfully hard worker got up early, put in long hours, and was honest. Remembered by most people for his integrity.

It was important for us kids to help provide for the home, to be contributors rather than just takers.

We learned how much hard work it took to get your hands on a dollar, and that when you did it was worth something.

Approach to money: they just didn’t spend it.

What little we had at the time, we put into a partnership with our kids, which was later incorporated into Walton Enterprises.

The best way to reduce paying estate taxes is to give your assets away before they appreciate.

If we had enough groceries, and a nice place to live, plenty of room to keep and feed my bird dogs, a place to hunt, a place to play tennis, and the means to get the kids good educations — that’s rich.

Folks work hard for their money and where we all know that everyone puts on their trousers one leg at a time.

A lot of what goes on these days with high-flying companies and these overpaid CEO’s, who’re really just looting from the top and aren’t watching out for anybody but themselves, really upsets me.

We believe in the value of the dollar. We exist to provide value to our customers, which means that in addition to quality and service, we have to save them money. Every time Wal-Mart spends one dollar foolishly, it comes right out of the customer’s pockets. Every time we save them a dollar, that puts us one more step ahead of the competition — which is where we always plan to be.

“He knew he was going to win.” — Bud Walton

Always try to be the best I could at whatever I took on. I have always pursued everything I was interested in with a true passion — some would say obsession — to win.

I’ve set extremely high personal goals.

Exercising your ego in public is definitely not the way to build an effective organization. One person seeking glory doesn’t accomplish much; at Wal-Mart, everything we’ve done has been the result of people pulling together to meet one common goal — teamwork.

Expect to win, to go into tough challenges always planning to come out victorious.

It never occurred to me that I might lose; to me, it was almost as if I had a right to win. Thinking like that often seems to turn into sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Speak to people coming down the sidewalk before they speak to you. I would always look ahead and speak to the person coming toward me. If I knew them, I would call them by name, but even if I didn’t I would still speak to them.

When he focused on something, that was it.

I knew who I wanted to marry, and I knew what I wanted to do for a living.

No partnerships; they were too risky.

The only way to go was to work for yourself.

I’ve always believed in goals, so I set one for myself.

I felt I had the talent to do it, that it could be done, and why not go for it? Set that as a goal and see if you can’t achieve it. If it doesn’t work, you’ve had fun trying.

You can learn from everybody.

Always looking for a way to do a better job.

It didn’t take me long to start experimenting.

Every now and then, though, I would find one who would cross over and do it my way.

I might make only half the profit per item, but because I was selling three times as many, the overall profit was much greater. By cutting your price, you can boost your sales to a point where you earn far more at the cheaper retail price than you would have by selling the item at the higher price. You can lower your markup but earn more because of the increased volume.

I think my constant fiddling and meddling with the status quo may have been one of my biggest contributions to the later success of Wal-Mart.

Our money was made by controlling expenses.

I’ve never been one to dwell on reverses. You can make a positive out of most any negative if you work at it hard enough. I’ve always thought of problems as challenges.

I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.

He would just yell at everybody he saw, and that’s the reason so many liked him and did business in the store. It was like he brought in business by his being so friendly.

We were innovating, experimenting, and expanding. Somehow over the years, folks have gotten the impression that Wal-Mart was something I dreamed up out of the blue as a middle-aged man, and that it was just this great idea that turned into an overnight success. The store was totally an outgrowth of everything we’d been doing since Newport — another case of me being unable to leave well enough alone, another experiment. And like most other overnight successes, it was twenty years in the making.

Most everything I’ve done I’ve copied from somebody else.

First, he gets up every day bound and determined to improve something. Second, he is less afraid of being wrong than anyone I’ve ever known. And once he sees he’s wrong, he just shakes it off and heads in another direction.

“Buy it low, stack it high, sell it cheap.”

I wasn’t about to sit there and become a target.

We were always borrowed to the hilt.

“We Sell for Less”’

“Satisfaction Guaranteed”

“We advertise that we sell for less, and we mean it!”

It was really what we’d been doing all along; experimenting, trying to do something different, educating ourselves as to what was going on in the retail industry and trying to stay ahead of those trends.

A lifetime of swimming upstream.

Many of our best opportunities were created out of necessity. The things that we were forced to learn and do.

Customer service and satisfaction guaranteed.

So much of what we did, in the beginning, was really poorly done.

Consistently improving our sales in these smaller markets by building up our relationship with the customers. When customers thought of Wal-Mart, they should think of low prices and satisfaction guaranteed.

If we get a great deal, pass it on to the customer.

Too busy concentrating on day-to-day operations.

Each of them had lots of freedom to try all kinds of crazy things themselves.

There was never any question that he was the boss, and when he wanted something done, believe me, it got done.

Let’s be out front. Let’s do it right. Let’s get it done now and get on with it.

Selecting people he thought he could go forward with. He knew that he needed something, and he was looking for it, and he was getting it every step of the way.

Action-oriented, do-it-now, go type of folks.

If a fellow could manage his own finances, he would be more successful managing one of our stores.

Go ahead and try it.

Your stores are full of items that can explode into big volume and big profits if you are just smart enough to identify them and take the trouble to promote them.

We wanted everybody to know what was going on and everybody to be aware of the mistakes we made. When somebody made a bad mistake we talked about it, admitted it, tried to figure out how to correct it, and then moved on to the next day’s work.

Spend as much time as we could checking out the competition.

Look for the good.

We’re concerned with what they’re doing right, and everyone is doing something right.

Very little capacity for embarrassment. We paid absolutely no attention whatsoever to the way things were supposed to be done.

We started out swimming upstream. and it’s made us strong and lean and alert, and we’ve enjoyed the trip. We sure don’t see any reason now to turn around and join the rest of the pack headed down current.

A belief in the importance of hard work, honesty, neighborliness, and thrift.

We just taught them the value of work.

You’ve got to stay flexible.

Dad thrived on change, and no decision was ever sacred.

It was just something he had to do, and we understood it.

One thing I never did was to push any of my kids too hard.

Do anything you’re big enough to do.

I hope they’ll feel compelled to do something productive and useful and challenging with their lives.

Become the very best operators — the most professional managers.

Soul of an operator, somebody who wants to make things work well, then better, then the best they possibly can.

Fly under everybody’s radar until we were too far along to catch.

I was never in anything for the short haul; I always wanted to build as fine an organizationo as I could.

It all boils down to not taking care of their customers, not minding their stores, and that was because they never really even tried to take care of their own people. If you want the people in the stores to take care of the customers, you have to make sure you’re taking care of the people in the stores.

They expanded quickly without building the organizations and the support need to expand those companies.

I felt like we couldn’t compete. Of course, that didn’t stop us from trying.

When he meets you, he looks at you and he proceeds to extract every piece of information in your possession. And he pushes on and on.

If he wanted to grow he had to learn to control it.

He couldn’t expand beyond that horizon unless he had the ability to capture this information on paper so that he could control his operations, no matter where they might be.

He was preparing himself. Without the computer, Sam Walton could not have done what he’s done.

They try just a little harder and check into things a little bit closer if they think they might have a chance to prove me wrong.

I was never really comfortable with debt. But I recognized it as a necessity of doing business.

But I enjoyed doing what I was doing so much and seeing the thing grow and develop, and seeing our associates and partners do so well, that I never could quit.

It must be human nature that when somebody homegrown gets on to something, the folks around them sometimes are the last to recognize it.

We were serious operators who were in it for the long haul, that we had a disciplined financial philosophy, and that we had growth on our minds.

As long as we’re managing our company well, as long as we take care of our people and our customers, keep our eye on those fundamentals, we are going to be successful.

You get what you’re worth.

If we demonstrate in our sales and our earnings every day, every week, every quarter, that we’re doing our job in a sound way, we will get the growth we are entitled to, and the market will respect us in a way that we deserve.

If we fail to live up to somebody’s hypothetical projection for what we should be doing, I don’t care. We’re in it for the long run.

Maybe it was an accident, but that strategy wouldn’t have worked at all if we hadn’t come up with a method for implementing it.

But I think our main effort should be directed at getting out in front of expansion and letting the population build out to us.

I love the independence of being able to go where I want to, when I want to — in a hurry.

Pick good people and give them the maximum authority and responsibility.

I think really I’m more of a manager by walking and flying around, and in the process, I stick my fingers into everything I can to see how it’s coming along. I’ve let our executives make their decisions — and their mistakes — but I’ve critiqued and advised them.

I’ve played to my strengths and relied on others to make up for my weaknesses.

Being organized would really slow me down. I try to keep track of what I’m supposed to do, and where I’m supposed to be, but it’s true that I don’t keep much of a schedule.

“When Sam feels a certain way, he is relentless. He will just wear you out.”

That early morning time is tremendously valuable: it’s uninterrupted time when I think and plan and sort things out.

If you take someone who lacks the experience and the know-how but has the real desire and the willingness to work his tail off to get the job done, he’ll make up for what he lacks.

“‘Enlightened consumerism,’ where everybody works together as a team and the customer is finally king again” — Paul Harvey

What has carried this company so far so fast is the relationship that we, the managers, have been able to enjoy with our associates.

Payroll is one of the most important parts of overhead, and overhead is one of the most crucial things you have to fight to maintain your profit margin.

The more you share profits with your associates the more profit will accrue to the company. The way management treats the associates is exactly how the associates will then treat the customers. And if the associates treat the customers well, the customers will return again and again, and that is where the real profit in this business lies.

You’ve got to give folks responsibility, you’ve got to trust them, and then you’ve got to check on them.

If you’re good to people, and fair with them, and demanding of them, they will eventually decide you’re on their side.

Sharing information and responsibility is a key to any partnership. It makes people feel responsible and involved.

Appreciation. All of us like praise. Look for things to praise. Look for things that are going right. We want to let our folks know when they are doing something outstanding, and let them know they are important to us.

Owe it to them to at least hear them out when they’re upset about something.

Partnership involves money — which is crucial to any business relationship — but it also involves basic human considerations, such as respect.

Just because we work so hard, we don’t have to go around with long faces all the time, taking ourselves seriously, pretending we’re lost in thought over weighty problems.

“Whistle while you work” philosophy.

No one is too important or too puffed up to lead a cheer or be the butt of a joke.

We’ve certainly borrowed every good idea we’ve come across.

I like to hear what our weaknesses are, where we aren’t doing as well as we should and why.

Constant change is a vital part of the Wal-Mart culture.

“No business can exist without customers. Make the customer the centerpiece of all his efforts.” — Roberto Goizueta

The secret of successful retailing is to give your customers what they want.

You have to focus on something the customer wants, and then deliver it.

There are always niches that we can’t reach.

Business conditions change, and that survivors have to adapt to those changing conditions. Business is a competitive endeavor, and job security lasts only as long as the customer is satisfied. Nobody owes anybody else a living.

There’s a difference between being tough and being obnoxious. But every buyer has to be tough. You’re not negotiating for Wal-Mart, you’re negotiating for your customer. And your customer deserves the best price you can get.

“I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity an obligation; every possession a duty.” — John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

Work hard.

If you want to build an enterprise of any size at all, it almost goes without saying that you absolutely must create a team of people who work together and give real meaning to that overused word “teamwork.” That’s more the goal of the whole thing, rather than some way to get there.

Commit to your business. Believe in it more than anybody else.

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. Once they care, there’s no stopping them.

Don’t take yourself so seriously. Loosen up, and everybody around you will loosen up. Have fun.

To succeed, you have to stay out in front of that change.

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