Sam Walton’s 10 Rules for Building a Successful Business

Many people have strong feelings about Wal-Mart stores. They range from “I will never walk in one” to “I love to shop there.” I don’t have strong feelings one-way or the other; I just wish I had bought stock in the company years ago. When Walton died in 1992, the family’s net worth approached $25 billion. Today, Wal-Mart is the world’s #1 retailer, with more than 4,150 stores, including discount stores, combination discount and grocery stores, and membership-only warehouse stores (Sam’s Club).

Perhaps the financial success of Wal-Mart can be traced back to the humble roots of Sam Walton himself and the foundation that he laid for his business. When I was visiting Bentonville, Arkansas this past January, I visited the original Wal-Mart and a company museum. They gave away a brochure entitled “Sam Walton’s Rules for Building a Business.” The rules have been translated into many languages and I believe they are powerful enough to repeat on my humble blog.

Sam Walton’s 10 Rules for Building a Successful Business:

Rule 1: Commit to your business. Believe in it more than anybody else. If you love your work, you’ll be out there every day trying to do the best you can, and pretty soon everybody around will catch the passion from you – like a fever.

Rule 2: Share your profits with all your associates, and treat then as partners. In turn, they will treat you as a partner, and together you will all perform beyond your wildest expectations.

Rule 3: Motivate your partners. Money and ownership aren’t enough. Set high goals, encourage competition and then keep score. Make bets with outrageous pay offs.

Rule 4: 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. Information is power, and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than offsets the risk of informing your competitors.

Rule 5: Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. A paycheck and a stock option will buy one kind of loyalty. But all of us like to be told how much somebody appreciates what we do for him or her. We like to hear it often and especially when we have done something we’re really proud of. Nothing else can quite substitute for well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free – and worth a fortune.

Rule 6: Celebrate your success. Find some honor in your failures. Don’t take yourself so seriously. Loosen up and everyone around you will loosen up. Have fun and always show enthusiasm. When all else fails, put on a costume and sing a silly song. Then make everybody else sing with you.

Rule 7: Listen to everyone in your company and figure out ways to get them talking. The folks on the front line – the ones who actually talk to the customer – are the ones who really know what’s going on out there. You’d better find out what they know. To be able to push responsibility down in your organization, and force good ideas to bubble up within it, you must listen to what your associates are trying to tell you.

Rule 8: Exceed your customer’s expectations. If you do they’ll come back over and over. Give them what they want – and a little more. Let them know you appreciate them. Make good on all your mistakes – and don’t make excuses – apologize. Stand behind everything you do. “Satisfaction Guaranteed” will make all the difference.

Rule 9: Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage. You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you are too inefficient.

Rule 10: Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.

Thank you Sam for the wisdom. May we all do as well as you?

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5 Responses
  1. Lots of great rules to build a business by. I wonder what Sam would think of today’s Walmart? Seems like they have moved away from Rule 2 & 8.

  2. This is very worth to read! I agree that one of the important rules to have a successful business is to have full commitment to the business itself. I agree also that it is very necessary to have good communication with the people you are doing business with. We have to put these rules in our mind if we want to have a successful business as well. Thanks for all these rules!

  3. Yes, I think that it’s better to do different things in order to shine out from others. I think that by doing this, we can have high opportunity to succeed. Thanks for sharing this article. This is a very useful post.

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