“There are only four things in life that matter. The first is happiness and I’ll sell you the other three for a dollar."

<ul><li>Frugality</li><li>Continuous improvement</li><li>Start & fix along the way</li><li>Prioritize</li><li>Try new things</li><li>Think long term</li><li>Life is unfair</li><li>Money is not the prime motivator</li><li>Lower your prices to sell more</li><li>Learning to value a dollar</li><li>You can learn from everybody</li></ul>

Sam Walton Personality

“High expectations are the key to everything.”

"Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be. Don’t become too predictable."

"Celebrate your success and find humor in your failures."

“We take the best ideas from someone else."

<ul><li>Commit to your business</li><li>Share your profits with all your associates, and treat them as partners</li><li>Motivate your partners</li><li>Communicate everything you possibly can to your partners</li><li>Appreciate everything your associates do for the business</li><li>Celebrate your success</li><li>Listen to everyone in your company</li><li>Exceed your customers’ expectations</li><li>Control your expenses better than your competition</li><li>Swim upstream</li></ul>

10 Rules To Build A Successful Business

Walton was a lifelong learner who applied everything he learned to his advantage. He was also an experimenter unafraid to try new ideas and discard them if they didn’t work. Ultimately, he had a single driving goal for all his stores: to make every single customer as happy as possible.

A Lifelong Learner

<ul><li>In 1945 Sam Walton opened his first discount shop.</li><li>And he took ideas from all over the places. Especially from his competitors.</li><li>In a way, Walmart was another experiment for Sam. Would shoppers shop strictly because of the lower prices?</li><li>It turned out, they would.</li></ul>

Walmart

“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."

Walton always wondered what he could do to make the shopping better and easier for the customers.<ol><li>Costumers would need to go to different stores that were specialized for one product.</li><li>They’d need to find parking each time, and all stores would close early.</li></ol>He answered with bigger, one-stop stores, long opening hours, free and abundant parking and lower prices.

Put Customers First

<ul><li>But initially, he didn’t put employees first.</li><li>In England, he saw a store that would list its employees as “associates”.</li><li>He treated his employees well, they’d treat his customers well.</li><li>He decided then to call his employees associates and he started a cash and stock sharing so that all employees could take part in Walmart’s success.</li></ul>

Employees’ (Mis)Treatment

The Walmart 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. And it's a story about believing in your idea even when maybe some other folks don't….

In an account of his rise to the top of the American retail business, the reminiscences of the billionaire retailer are combined with interviews with Walton's family and friends

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Entrepreneurship

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Meet a genuine American folk hero cut from the homespun cloth of America's heartland: Sam Walton, who parlayed a single dime store in a hardscrabble cotton town into Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the world.  The undisputed merchant king of the late twentieth century, Sam never lost the common touch.  Here, finally, inimitable words.  Genuinely modest, but always sure if his ambitions and achievements.  Sam shares his thinking in a candid, straight-from-the-shoulder style. In a story rich with anecdotes and the "rules of the road" of both Main Street and Wall Street, Sam Walton chronicles the inspiration, heart, and optimism that propelled him to lasso the American Dream.