Welcome to a collection of most inspiring and motivational Sam Walton Quotes. Sam Walton was an American entrepreneur who founded Walmart and Sam’s Club, two of the world’s largest retail stores. His business acumen, drive, and ambition made him one of the most successful businessmen of all time. His words of wisdom are sure to motivate and inspire any business leader looking for a little extra motivation.
Sam Walton quotes for bosses, managers, and leaders
🟣 “All of us profit from being corrected – if we’re corrected in a positive way.” ― Sam Walton
🟣 “Capital isn’t scarce; vision is.” ― Sam Walton
🟣 “Great ideas come from everywhere if you just listen and look for them. You never know who’s going to have a great idea.” ― Sam Walton
🟣 “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.” ― Sam Walton
🟣 “Nothing else can quite substitute for a few, well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.” ― Sam Walton
🟣 “One person seeking glory doesn’t accomplish very much.” ― Sam Walton
🟣 “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.” ― Sam Walton
🟣 “The way management treats associates is exactly how the associates will treat the customers.” ― Sam Walton
🟣 “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.” ― Sam Walton
Sam Walton quotes about expectations and taking care of people
🟣 “Business is a competitive endeavor, and job security lasts only as long as the customer is satisfied. Nobody owes anybody else a living.” ― Sam Walton
“Each Wal-Mart store should reflect the values of its customers and support the vision they hold for their community.” ― Sam Walton
🟣 “Exceed your customer’s expectations. If you do, they’ll come back over and over. Give them what they want – and a little more.” ― Sam Walton
🟣 “Give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same things as rich people.” ― Sam Walton
🟣 “High expectations are the key to everything.” ― Sam Walton
🟣 “We let folks know we’re interested in them and that they’re vital to us. Cause they are.” ― Sam Walton
🟣 “What’s really worried me over the years is not our stock price, but that we might someday fail to take care of our customers, or that our managers might fail to motivate and take care of our associates. I also was worried that we might lose the team concept, or fail to keep the family concept viable and realistic, and meaningful to our folks as we grow. Those challenges are more real than somebody’s theory that we’re headed down the wrong path.” ― Sam Walton
Sam Walton quotes about having a rebellious and resilient spirit
🟣 “I always favored the mavericks who challenged my rules. I may have fought them all the way, but I respected them, and, in the end, I listened to them a lot more closely than I did the pack who always agreed with everything I said.” ― Sam Walton
🟣 “I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.” ― Sam Walton
🟣 “I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they’ve been.” ― Sam Walton
🟣 “If everybody is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going exactly in the opposite direction.” ― Sam Walton
🟣 “Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.” ― Sam Walton
🟣 “Two things about Sam Walton distinguish him from almost everyone else I know. First, he gets up every day bound and determined to improve something. Second, he is less afraid of being wrong than anyone I’ve ever known. And once he sees he’s wrong, he just shakes it off and heads in another direction.” ― Sam Walton
Sam Walton Quotes On Teamwork & Business
🟣 “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.”
🟣 “A town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.”
🟣 “Commit to your business. Believe in it more than anybody else.”
🟣 “Control your expenses better than your competition.”
🟣 “Give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same things as rich people.”
🟣 “High expectations are the key to everything.”
🟣 “I am just trying to get ideas, any kind of ideas that will help our company.”
🟣 “I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they’ve been.”
“I learned a long time ago that exercising your ego in public is definitely not the way to build an effective organization.”
🟣 “If I knew them I would call them by name, but even if I didn’t I would still speak to them.”
🟣 “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.”
🟣 “Individuals don’t win in business, teams do.”
🟣 “Leaders must always put their people before themselves. If you do that, your business will take care of itself.”
🟣 “Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.”
🟣 “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 two most important words I ever wrote were on that first Walmart sign, ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed.'”
🟣 “There’s a lot more business out there in small-town America than I ever dreamed of.”
🟣 “We let folks know we’re interested in them and that they’re vital to us. Cause they are.”
🟣 “We take the best ideas from someone else.”
🟣 “You can learn from anybody and everybody.”
Sam Walton Quotes About Associates & Leadership
🟣 “Communicate everything you can to your associates. The more they know, the more they care. Once they care, there is no stopping them.”
🟣 “Exceed your customer’s expectations. If you do, they’ll come back over and over. Give them what they want – and a little more.”
🟣 “I had to pick myself up and get on with it.”
🟣 “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.”
🟣 “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.”
🟣 “If you want a successful business, your people must feel that you are working for them – not that they are working for you.”
Information is power, and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than offsets the risk of informing your competitor.”
🟣 “Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be. Don’t become too predictable.”
🟣 “Most of us don’t invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone else.”
🟣 “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.”
🟣 “Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.”
🟣 “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.”
🟣 “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.”
🟣 “The secret of successful retailing is to give your customers what they want.”
🟣 “To succeed in this world, you have to change all the time.”
🟣 “We’re all working together; that’s the secret.”
🟣 “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.”
🟣 “You can’t just keep doing what works one time, everything around you is changing. To succeed, stay out in front of change.
Inspiring Sam Walton Quotes
🟣 “All of us profit from being corrected.”
🟣 “Curiosity doesn’t kill the cat; it kills the competition.”
🟣 “Do it. Try it. Fix it.”
🟣 “Don’t get so stuck in your ways that you can’t change.”
🟣 “Each Walmart store should reflect the values of its customers and support the vision they hold for their community.”
🟣 “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.”
🟣 “I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.”
🟣 “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.”
🟣 “If one of our customers comes into the store without a smile, I’ll give them one of mine.”
🟣 “If you don’t listen to your customers, someone else will.”
🟣 “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.”
🟣 “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.”
🟣 “Loosen up, and everybody around you will loosen up.”
🟣 “Lose your smile and lose your customers.”
🟣 “Most everything I have done, I have copied from others.”
🟣 “My role has been to pick good people, and give them the maximum authority and responsibility.”
🟣 “Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise.”
🟣 “Plus, as I’ve said, if you don’t want to work weekends, you shouldn’t be in retail
🟣 “Take the best out of everything and adapt it to your needs.”
🟣 “And this is a very important point: without the computer, Sam Walton could not have done what he’s done.”
🟣 “The goal of a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary.”
🟣 “There are only four things in life that matter. The first is happiness and I’ll sell you the other three for a dollar.”
“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.”
🟣 “They’re still up there, and they have made all the difference.”
🟣 “To succeed, you have to change.”
🟣 “We let folks know that we are interested in them and they are vital to us cause they are.”
🟣 “Why do I drive a pickup truck? What am I supposed to haul my dogs around in, a Rolls-Royce?”
🟣 “You can make a positive out of the most negative if you work at it hard enough.”
Highly Inspirational Sam Walton Quotes to Empower You
🟣 “Be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you 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.”
🟣 “Celebrate your success and find 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.”
🟣 “Every time Wal-Mart spends one dollar foolishly, it comes right out of our customers’ pockets. Every time we save them a dollar, that puts us one more step ahead of the competition—which is where we always plan to be.”
🟣 “For my whole career in retail, I have stuck by one guiding principle. It’s a simple one, and I have repeated it over and over and over in this book until I’m sure you’re sick to death of it. But I’m going to say it again anyway: the secret of successful retailing is to give your customers what they want.”
🟣 “I learned early on that one of the secrets of campus leadership was the simplest thing of all: speak to people coming down the sidewalk before they speak to you. I would always look ahead and speak to the person coming toward me. If I knew them I would call them by name, but even if I didn’t I would still speak to them.”
🟣 “If you take someone who lacks the experience and the know-how but has the real desire and the willingness to work his tail off to get the job done, he’ll make up for what he lacks. And that proved true nine times out of ten.”
🟣 “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. And it’s a story about believing in your idea even when maybe some other folks don’t, and about sticking to your guns.”
🟣 “All that hullabaloo about somebody’s net worth is just stupid, and it’s made my life a lot more complex and difficult.
🟣 “And like most other overnight successes, it was about twenty years in the making.
🟣 “Appreciate everything your associates do for the business.
🟣 “Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage.
🟣 “Everybody likes praise, and we look for every chance we can to heap it on somebody.
🟣 “Exceed your customer’s expectations. If you do, they’ll come back over and over. Give them what they want – and a little more.
🟣 “Great ideas come from everywhere if you just listen and look for them. You never know who’s going to have a great idea.
🟣 “I had to get up everyday with my mind set on improving something.
🟣 “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.
🟣 “I probably have traveled and walked into more variety stores than anybody in America.
🟣 “I remember one time I didn’t want to spend any money on motels so we all slept in sleeping bags on the floor of one of our guy’s house. His furniture hadn’t gotten there yet.
🟣 “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 everybody is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going exactly in the opposite direction.
🟣 “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.
🟣 “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.
🟣 “Individuals don’t win in business, teams do.
🟣 “It’s terribly important for everyone to get involved. Our best ideas come from clerks and stockboys.
🟣 “Many of our best opportunities were created out of necessity.
🟣 “Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.
🟣 “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.
🟣 “What we guard against around here is people saying, ‘Let’s think about it.’ We make a decision. Then we act on it.
🟣 “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.
Verdict
Sam Walton Quotes always embody the spirit of innovation, hard work, and dedication. His words have inspired countless entrepreneurs to achieve success. His legacy will live on for generations to come, reminding us all to never stop striving for greatness.