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Sam Walton grew up poor
during the Great Depression, yet rose to start the biggest retail store
Wal-Mart.
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).
Read 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 pay check 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 well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They're
absolutely free - and worth a fortune.
Rule 6: Celebrate Your
Success. Find
some humor 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.
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