Samuel Moore Walton was an American businessman and entrepreneur best known for founding the retailers Walmart and Sam’s Club. He was a pioneering businessman who broke convention and showed that large discount stores could thrive in small, rural areas. Inspirational Sam Walton quotes on customers, success, and leadership will help you find entrepreneurial spirit.
If you’re searching for encouraging quotes by famous CEOs that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of Dhirubhai Ambani quotes, P. T. Barnum quotes, and inspiring Milton Hershey quotes.
Most Famous Sam Walton Quotes
One person seeking glory doesn’t accomplish very much.
Lose your smile and lose your customers.
Everybody likes praise, and we look for every chance we can to heap it on somebody.
I had to pick myself up and get on with it.
Plus, as I’ve said, if you don’t want to work weekends, you shouldn’t be in retail.
Information is power, and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than offsets the risk of informing your competitor.
And like most other overnight successes, it was about twenty years in the making.
All that hullabaloo about somebody’s net worth is just stupid, and it’s made my life a lot more complex and difficult.
The way management treats associates is exactly how the associates will treat the customers.
A computer can tell you down to the dime what you’ve sold. But it can never tell you how much you could have sold.
I’d hate to see any descendants of mine fall into the category of what I’d call ‘idle rich’ – a group I’ve never had much use for.
If you don’t listen to your customers, someone else will.
Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.
The key to success is to get out into the store and listen to what the associates have to say.
Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be. Don’t become too predictable.
Why do I drive a pickup truck? What am I supposed to haul my dogs around in, a Rolls-Royce?
To succeed, you have to change.
I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.
Amazing Sam Walton Quotes
We’re all working together; that’s the secret.
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.
A town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.
I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they’ve been.
There’s absolutely no limit to what plain, ordinary, working people can accomplish if they’re given the opportunity and encouragement to do their best.
You can’t just keep doing what works one time, everything around you is changing. To succeed, stay out in front of change.
Most of us don’t invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone else.
Do it. Try it. Fix it.
We take the best ideas from someone else.
High expectations are the key to everything.
Give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same things as rich people.
There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.
I learned a long time ago that exercising your ego in public is definitely not the way to build an effective organization.
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.
I am just trying to get ideas, any kind of ideas that will help our company.
Sam Walton Quotes About Associates & Leadership
It was almost as if I had a right to win. Thinking like that often seems to turn into sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Appreciate everything your associates do for the business.
Inspirational Sam Walton Quotes
I learned this early on in the variety business: You’ve got to give folks responsibility, you’ve got to trust them, and then you’ve got to check on them.
Communicate everything you can to your associates. The more they know, the more they care. Once they care, there is no stopping them.
Inspiring Sam Walton Quotes
Don’t get so stuck in your ways that you can’t change.
If I knew them I would call them by name, but even if I didn’t I would still speak to them.
Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.
Exceed your customer’s expectations. If you do, they’ll come back over and over. Give them what they want – and a little more.
The best way to reduce paying estate taxes is to give your assets away before they appreciate.
I had confidence that as long as we did our work well and were good to our customers, there would be no limit to us.
To succeed in this world, you have to change all the time.
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.
Each Walmart store should reflect the values of its customers and support the vision they hold for their community.
I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they’ve been.
Leaders must always put their people before themselves. If you do that, your business will take care of itself.
My role has been to pick good people, and give them the maximum authority and responsibility.
You can make a positive out of the most negative if you work at it hard enough.
If one of our customers comes into the store without a smile, I’ll give them one of mine.
The key to success is to get out into the store and listen to what the associates have to say. It’s terribly important for everyone to get involved. Our best ideas come from clerks and stock boys.
All of us profit from being corrected.
Take the best out of everything and adapt it to your needs.
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.
There are only four things in life that matter. The first is happiness and I’ll sell you the other three for a dollar.
Control your expenses better than your competition.
If I had to single out one element in my life that has made a difference for me, it would be a passion to compete.
There’s a lot more business out there in small-town America than I ever dreamed of.
Most everything I have done, I have copied from others.
We let folks know we’re interested in them and that they’re vital to us. Cause they are.
Capital isn’t scarce. Vision is.
Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise.
Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.
You can make a lot of 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.
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.
Higher expectations are the key to higher profit; Wal-Mart believes that there’s only one boss: the customer.
Loosen up, and everybody around you will loosen up.
The two most important words I ever wrote were on that first Walmart sign, ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed.’
The goal of a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary.
Commit to your business. Believe in it more than anybody else.
They’re still up there, and they have made all the difference.
And this is a very important point: without the computer, Sam Walton could not have done what he’s done.
Individuals don’t win in business, teams do.
If you want a successful business, your people must feel that you are working for them – not that they are working for you.
Below mentioned are some inspirational Sam Walton quotes about leadership, retail and vision, including some Sam Walton customer service quotes.
We let folks know that we are interested in them and they are vital to us cause they are.
You can learn from anybody and everybody.
Curiosity doesn’t kill the cat; it kills the competition.
The secret of successful retailing is to give your customers what they want.
Celebrate your success and find humor in your failures.
