Walmart's Mantra, S. Walton Way

Running a successful company: Ten rules that worked for Samuel Moore Walton

Sam M. Walton founded Walmart Inc, Formerly Wal-Mart, Inc. (1969–70) / Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (1970–2018) in 1962 and incorporated on October 31, 1969. Today, Walmart is the Retail Industry’s mammoth with Headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, U.S. with total 11,348 stores worldwide (January 31, 2019) and a Revenue Increase US$514.415 billion (2019).

Sam Walton believed running a successful business boils down to 10 simple rules and they helped Walmart become the global leader it is today. We continue to apply them to every part of our business.

The Wal-Mart story is unique: nothing quite like it has been done before. So maybe by posting it the way it really happened, You can take these same principles and apply them to your dreams and make them come true.

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. It’s a story about believing in your idea even when maybe some other folks don’t, and about sticking to your guns. But I think more than anything it proves there is absolutely no limit to what plain, ordinary working people can accomplish if they are given opportunity and encouragement ant the incentive to do their best. Because that’s how walmart became Wal-mart: ordinary people joined together to accomplish extraordinary things. At first, They amazed themselves. And before too long, They amazed everyone else, especially folks who thought America was just too complicated and sophisticated a place for this sort of thing to work anymore. 

Most of the values and the rules and the techniques have stayed the same whole way. Some of them are such simple commonsense old favorites that hardly seem worth mentioning.

Sam Walton do seem to have a couple of dozen things that he has singled out at one time or the another as the “key” to the whole thing. One he don’t even have on his list is “work hard”. If you don’t know that already, or you are not willing to do it, you probably won’t be going far enough to need this list anyway. And another he did not include on his list is the idea of building a team. 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”.

For what they are worth very next to ten commandments of business, here they are. Sam’s Rules for Building a Business:

Rule 1: COMMIT to your business. Believe in it more than anybody else.I think I overcame every single one of my personal shortcomings by the sheer passion I brought to my work. I don’t know if you are born with this kind of passion, or if you can learn it. But I do know you need it. If you love your work, you’ll be out there every day trying to do it the best you possibly 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 them as partners. In turn, they will treat you as a partner, and together you will all perform beyond your wildest expectations. Remain a corporation and retain control if you like, but behave as a servant leader in a partnership. Encourage your associates to hold a stake in the company. Offer discounted stock, and grant them stock for their retirement. It’s the single best thing we ever did.

Rule 3: MOTIVATE your partners. Money and ownership alone aren’t enough. Constantly, 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. Make bets with outrageous payoffs. If things get stale, cross-pollinate; have managers switch jobs with one another to stay challenged. Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be. Don’t become too predictable.

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. If you don’t trust your associates to know what’s going on, they’ll know you don’t really consider them partners. 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 them. We like to hear it often, and especially when we have done something we’re really proud of. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.

Rule 6: 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. When all else fails, put on a costume and sing a silly song. Then make everyone sing with you. Don’t do a hula on Wall Street. It’s been done. Think up your own stunt. All of this is more important, and more fun, than you think, and it really fools the competition. “Why should we take those cornballs at Wal-Mart seriously?”

Rule 7: LISTEN to everyone in your company. And figure out ways to get them talking. The folks on the front lines-- the ones who actually talk to the customer-- are the only ones who really know what’s going on out there. You’d better find out what they know. This really is what total quality is all about. 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 customers’ 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. The two most important words I ever wrote were on that first Wal-Mart sign: “Satisfaction Guaranteed” They are still up there, and they have made all the difference.

Rule 9: CONTROL your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage. For twenty-five years running--long before Wal-Mart was known as the nation’s largest retailer-- we ranked number one in our industry for the lowest ratio of expenses to sales. 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’re too inefficient.

Rule 10 : SWIM upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the 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. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you’re headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.

Those ten rules are some pretty ordinary rules, some would say even simplistic. The hard part, the real challenge, is to constantly figure out ways to execute them. You can’t just keep doing what works one time, because everything around you is always changing. To succeed, you have to stay out in front of that change.

This post originally appeared on oneup.in

Shaik Waseem is Entrepreneurial Educator and start-up influencer. He is on a mission to promote academia to be ICE(Innovative Creative Entrepreneurial). He has been co-founder and managing partner for multiple companies that are run under investment group members listed by Forbes middle east as top 100 Indian leaders in U.A.E.