 Sam Walton's rules for building a business. This guy made billions and billions of dollars. In fact, he could have been possibly the wealthiest man on earth if he hadn't have distributed his wealth amongst some of his family members. He created Walmart, which is the huge business in the United States of America. And he wrote this book on his death bed. And it's all his biography about growing up and building Walmart. But in the back of the book, he's got Sam's rules for building a business. And I'm gonna go through them right now. So rule one is commit to your business. Believe in it more than everybody 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're 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. So that's rule one. Rule number two, 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. So there you go. Rule two is share your profits. So if you've got a business, even if it's a small business, you know, maybe put some of your staff on a profit share. Rule three, from Sam Walton from the book Made in America. 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. All right, I like that. Rule three, motivate your partners. Rule number four, 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. So yeah, a lot of people, a lot of bosses, a lot of owners of businesses don't want to tell their staff or people who work with them, you know, the finances of the company or you know, keep things a secret. When you communicate, you make everyone feel part of the team. Rule five says Sam Walton. Sam Walton who created Walmart. The book is called Made in America. Rule five is 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. All right, let's keep going here. We're up to rule six and there are 10 rules. So we're halfway. Rule six, 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. What all else fails, put on a costume and sing a silly song. Then make everybody else 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. Yeah, so yeah, celebrate your success. Creates great company harmony. All right, rule seven, 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 to force good ideas to bubble up within it, you must listen to what your associates are trying to tell you here. Or what your associates are trying to tell you, I should say, I just threw in the here. All right, that's rule seven, which is listen to everyone in your company. Rule eight, let's go move on to rule eight here. 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. The two most important words I ever wrote were on that first Walmart sign, satisfaction guaranteed. They're still up there and they have made all the difference. I like that. I'm gonna put satisfaction guaranteed up on my Swannies blue light blocking glasses website, swanniesglasses.com. I don't think I have that there. I think I'm gonna put it there. Thank you, Sam Walton for Made in America. Rule nine, control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage. For 25 years running, long before Walmart was known as the nation's biggest 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. So yeah, we all gotta keep our costs low. Even if you're not running a business, keep your expenses down. Like get some of those monthly recurring things down or off or save a little bit of money here and there. Keep your expenses low. Rule 10 and the final one is 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 you 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. Which it did because Sam Walton created Walmart. So there you go. Those are some pretty ordinary rules. Some would say even simplistic, these are Sam Walton's words, 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. Now that's advice from probably the most successful businessman in human history, arguably. Google it. You can see how much money he made with Walmart. So even if they do appear or sound a little bit simplistic on the surface, hey, if it makes you billions of dollars, it must be all right, right? So there you go. Check that out. Sam Walton made in America. If you're watching on the YouTube channel, go down below and just click subscribe. If you're listening on the audio channel, please share this with someone, someone who works in business. And yeah, check out this book, Sam Walton Made in America. Should you travel while you are young? The answer is yes, obviously. I'm 41 as I'm recording this and I went traveling for the first time over.