Sam Walton: Made In America (My Story) - by Sam Walton and John Huey

Date read: 2020-02-09
How strongly I recommend it: 6/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)

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The story of Sam Walton, former CEO and founder of Wal-Mart. Whether you love his stores or hate him, this book does provide key lessons for retailing and servicing the customer.

My Notes

You can learn from everybody, especially your competition.

The secret to Wal-Mart's success is our ability to swim upstream. Many of our best opportunities were created out of necessity. The things that we were forced to learn and do, because we started out underfinanced and undercaptialized in these remote, small communities, contributed mightily to the way we've grown as a company.

The idea was simple: when customers thought of Wal-Mart, they should think of low prices and satisfaction guaranteed. They could be pretty sure they wouldn't find it cheaper anywhere else, and if they didn't like it, they could bring it back.

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. You have to be merchandise driven.

Check everyone who is your 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 you must try to incorporate it into your company.

It all boils down to not taking care of their customers, not minding their stores, not having folks in their stores with good attitudes, and that was because they never really even tried to 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.

The perceived strategy of Wal-Mart: "They went into small towns when nobody else would." That strategy wouldn't have worked at all if we hadn't come up with a method for implementing it. That method was to saturate the market area by spreading out, then filling in.

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

I have always cross-pollinated folks and let them assume different roles in the company, and that has bruised some egos from time to time. But I think everyone needs as much exposure to as many areas of the company as they can get, and I think the best executives are those who have touched all the bases and have the best overall concept of the corporation.

I've made it my own personal mission to esure that constant change is a vital part of the Wal-Mart culture itself. I've forced change-sometime for change's sake alone-at every turn in our company's development. In fact, I think one of the greatest strengths of Wal-Mart's ingrained culture is its ability to drop everything and turn on a dime.

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

If you simply think like a customer, you will do a better job of merchandise presentation and selection than any other way. It's not always easy. To think like a customer, you have to think about details.

I like to keep everybody guessing. I don't want our competitors getting too comfortable with feeling like they can predict what we're going to do. And I don't want our own executives feeling that way either.

The bigger Wal-Mart gets, the more essential it is that we think small.

Communicating and communicating effectively is one of the keys to Wal-Mart's success. That includes sharing the numbers with store associates and department managers so they can be better informed on how their store and the company is doing.

Sam's Rules for Building a Business:

1. COMMIT to your business and believe in it more than anybody else.


2. SHARE your profits wih all your associates, and treat them as partners.


3. MOTIVATE your partners. Money and ownership alone aren't enough. Set high goals, encourage competition, and then keep score.


4. COMMUNICATE everything your possibly can to your partners. The more they know, the more they'll understand.


5. APPRECIATE everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They're absolutely free-and worth a fortune.


6. CELEBRATE your successes. Find some humor in your failures.


7. LISTEN to everyone in your company. And figure out ways to get them talking.


8. EXCEED your customer's expectations. If you do, they'll come back over and over.


9. CONTROL your expenses better than your competition.


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