More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
If I had to single out one element in my life that has made a difference for me, it would be a passion to compete.
It is a story about entrepreneurship, and risk, and hard work, and knowing where you want to go and being willing to do what it takes to get there.
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
I learned from a very early age that it was important for us kids to help provide for the home, to be contributors rather than just takers. In the process, of course, we learned how much hard work it took to get your hands on a dollar, and that when you did it was worth something.
the best way to reduce paying estate taxes is to give your assets away before they appreciate.
money is, in some respects, almost immaterial to him. What motivates the man is the desire to absolutely be on top of the heap. It is not money. Money drives him crazy now. His question to me at 6 A.M. not long ago was ‘How do you inspire a grandchild to go to work if they know they’ll never have a poor day in their life?
sometimes I’m asked why today, when Wal-Mart has been so successful, when we’re a $50 billion-plus company, should we stay so cheap? That’s simple: because 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 our customers’ 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.
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—something I also picked up at an early age.
Bill Walsh: it's not the QB or the receiver that scores the touchdown, but the team
But I think that record had an important effect on me. It taught me to expect to win, to go into tough challenges always planning to come out victorious.
I learned early on that one of the secrets to campus leadership was the simplest thing of all: speak to people coming down the sidewalk before they speak to you.
It was a real blessing for me to be so green and ignorant, because it was from that experience that I learned a lesson which has stuck with me all through the years: you can learn from everybody. I didn’t just learn from reading every retail publication I could get my hands on, I probably learned the most from studying what John Dunham was doing across the street.
of course, what really drove Sam was that competition across the street—John Dunham over at the Sterling Store. Sam was always over there checking on John. Always. Looking at his prices, looking at his displays, looking at what was going on. He was always looking for a way to do a better job.
I learned a tremendous amount from running a store in the Ben Franklin franchise program. They had an excellent operating program for their independent stores, sort of a canned course in how to run a store. It was an education in itself. They had their own accounting system, with manuals telling you what to do, when and how. They had merchandise statements, they had accounts-payable sheets, they had profit-and-loss sheets, they had little ledger books called Beat Yesterday books, in which you could compare this year’s sales with last year’s on a day-by-day basis. They had all the tools that an
...more
Great processised, templatised business
Here’s the simple lesson we learned—which others were learning at the same time and which eventually changed the way retailers sell and customers buy all across America: say I bought an item for 80 cents. I found that by pricing it at $1.00 I could sell three times more of it than by pricing it at $1.20. I might make only half the profit per item, but because I was selling three times as many, the overall profit was much greater. Simple enough. But this is really the essence of discounting: by cutting your price, you can boost your sales to a point where you earn far more at the cheaper retail
...more
Our money was made by controlling expenses. That, and Sam always being ingenious. He never stopped trying to do something different.
Every crazy thing we tried hadn’t turned out as well as the ice cream machine, of course, but we hadn’t made any mistakes we couldn’t correct quickly, none so big that they threatened the business.
“He was always thinking up new things to try in the store. I remember one time he made a trip to New York, and he came back a few days later and said, ‘Come here, I want to show you something. This is going to be the item of the year.’ I went over and looked at a bin full of—I think they called them zori sandals—they call them thongs now. And I just laughed and said, ‘No way will those things sell. They’ll just blister your toes.’ Well, he took them and tied them together in pairs and dumped them all on a table at the end of an aisle for nineteen cents a pair. And they just sold like you
...more
“The first time I ever saw Sam Walton was when he and his brother-in-law, Nick Robson, dropped into a TG&Y dime store I was managing in Tulsa. He visited with me for about an hour, asking a lot of questions, and left, and I never thought anything about it.
I remember those days mostly as a time of always looking around for ideas and items that would make our stores stand
everything I’ve done I’ve copied from somebody else
I kept at it. I probably spent two years going around trying to sell people on the idea of shopping centers in Arkansas in the middle fifties—which was about ten years too early. I finally got an option on one piece of property and talked Kroger and Woolworth into signing leases, based on us getting this one street paved.
“Two things about Sam Walton distinguish him from almost everyone else I know. 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.”
JOHN WALTON, SECOND SON OF SAM AND HELEN: “This is hard to believe, but between my paper route money and the money I made in the Army—both of which I invested in those stores—that investment is worth about $40 million today.”
I mean, after fifteen years—in 1960—we were only doing $1.4 million in fifteen stores. By now, you know me. I began looking around hard for whatever new idea would break us over into something with a little better payoff for all our efforts.
closer to home, Herb Gibson—a barber from over at Berryville—started his stores with a simple philosophy: “Buy it low, stack it high, sell it cheap.”
Nobody wanted to gamble on that first Wal-Mart. I think Bud put in 3 percent, and Don Whitaker—whom I had hired to manage the store from a TG&Y store out in Abilene, Texas—put in 2 percent, and I had to put up 95 percent of the dollars. Helen had to sign all the notes along with me, and her statement allowed us to borrow more than I could have alone. We pledged houses and property, everything we had. But in those days we were always borrowed to the hilt.
After the meeting he came back to see me and moved right on to the subject of computers. He wanted to know all about how we were using them, and how we were planning to use them. And he took everything I said down on this yellow legal pad. “The next day was Saturday, and I went shopping—dressed in a pair of mangy cutoff jeans—at the Kmart near my house. I walked over into the apparel section and saw this guy talking to one of the clerks. I thought, ‘Jeez, that looks like that guy I met yesterday. What the heck is he doing way out here?’ I strolled up behind him, and I could hear him asking
...more
when I look at it today, I realize that so much of what we did in the beginning was really poorly done. But we managed to sell our merchandise as low as we possibly could, and that kept us right-side-up for the first ten years—that and consistently improving our sales in these smaller markets by building up our relationship with the customers. The idea was simple: when customers thought of Wal-Mart, they should think of low prices and satisfaction guaranteed.
When somebody made a bad mistake—whether it was myself or anybody else—we talked about it, admitted it, tried to figure out how to correct it, and then moved on to the next days work.
“I remember him saying over and over again: go in and check our competition. Check everyone who is our competition. And don’t look for the bad. Look for the good. If you get one good idea, that’s one more than you went into the store with, and we must try to incorporate it into our company. We’re really not concerned with what they’re doing wrong, we’re concerned with what they’re doing right, and everyone is doing something right.”
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 downcurrent.
We heard a lot about the debt it took to open new stores, and I worried about it. I remember confiding to my girlfriend one time—crying—and saying, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do. My daddy owes so much money, and he won’t quit opening stores.’ ” —ALICE WALTON
Later, we all snickered at some writers who viewed Dad as a grand strategist who intuitively developed complex plans and implemented them with precision. Dad thrived on change, and no decision was ever sacred.”
we were really trying from the beginning to become the very best operators—the most professional managers—that we could.
As I told you, I ran the country studying the discounting concept, visiting every store and company headquarters I could find.
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. That’s the most important single ingredient of Wal-Mart’s success.
There are a lot of ways to build strong companies. They don’t have to be done the Wal-Mart way, or my way, or anybody else’s way. But you do have to work at it. And somewhere along the line, these folks stopped short of setting the goals and paying the price that needed to be paid.
in comes this short, wiry man with a deep tan and a tennis racket under his arm. He introduced himself as Sam Walton from Arkansas. I didn’t know what to think. When he meets you, he looks at you—head cocked to one side, forehead slightly creased—and he proceeds to extract every piece of information in your possession. He always makes little notes. And he pushes on and on. After two and a half hours, he left, and I was totally drained. I wasn’t sure what I had just met, but I was sure we would hear more from him.”
this was at a time when quite a few people were beginning to go into computerization. I had read a lot about that, and I was curious. I made up my mind I was going to learn something about IBM computers. So I enrolled in an IBM school for retailers in Poughkeepsie, New York.
He has just been a master of taking the best out of everything and adapting it to his own needs.
“Anyway, the man’s a genius. He realized—even at the rudimentary level he was on in 1966, operating those few stores that he had—that 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 became, really, the best utilizer of information to control absentee ownerships that there’s ever been. Which gave him the ability to open as many stores as he opens, and run them as well as he runs them, and to be as profitable as he makes them.
We had a good thing going before Ron arrived, but he, and some of the people he brought on board, like Royce Chambers, our first data processing manager, gave the company its first sophisticated systems.
From Ron Mayer’s arrival on, we as a company have been ahead of most other retailers in investing in sophisticated equipment and technology. The funny thing is, everybody at Wal-Mart knows that I’ve fought all these technology expenditures as hard as I could. All these guys love to talk about how I never wanted any of this technology, and how they had to lay down their life to get it. The truth is, I did want it, I knew we needed it, but I just couldn’t bring myself to say, “Okay, sure, spend what you need.” I always questioned everything. It was important to me to make them think that maybe
...more
I don’t think any amount of public relations experts or speeches in New York or Boston means a darn thing to the value of the stock over the long haul. I think you get what you’re worth.
my role has been to pick good people and give them the maximum authority and responsibility.
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.
One way I’ve managed to keep up with everything on my plate is by coming in to the office really early almost every day, even when I don’t have those Saturday numbers to look over. Four-thirty wouldn’t be all that unusual a time for me to get started down at the office.
We were always looking at Gibson’s and any other regionals that might decide to come our way, and we knew what to do when they did: keep our prices as low as possible by keeping our costs as low as possible.
Sam would take people with hardly any retail experience, give them six months with us, and if he thought they showed any real potential to merchandise a store and manage people, he’d give them a chance. He’d make them an assistant manager. They were the ones who would go around and open all the new stores, and they would be next in line to manage their own store. In my opinion, most of them weren’t anywhere near ready to run stores, but Sam proved me wrong there. He finally convinced me. If you take someone who lacks the experience and the know-how but has the real desire and the willingness
...more
By now, I was really surrounding myself with guys who were good at all the things I tended to just sluff off, like organizing the company to handle the growth explosion we had started. If I hadn’t gone after those folks, and kept on doing it, we would have come apart somewhere there in the seventies, or we certainly wouldn’t have been able to pull off our really incredible expansion in the eighties.
