START WITH WHY
during the Depression, he had a highly successful paper route that earned him a decent wage for the times. By the time Sam Walton died, he had taken Wal-Mart from a; single store in Bentonville, Arkansas, and turned it into a retail colossus with $44 billion in annual sales with 40 million people shopping in the stores per week. But it takes more than a competitive nature, a strong work ethic and a sense of optimism to build a company big enough to equal the twenty-third-largest economy in the world. Walton wasn't the first person with big dreams to start a small business. Many small business owners dream of making it big. I meet a lot of entrepreneurs and it is amazing how many of them tell me their goal is to build a billion-dollar company. The odds; however, are significantly stacked against them. There are 27.7 million registered businesses in the United States today and only a thousand of them get to be FORTUNE 1000 companies, which these days requires about $1.5 billion in annual revenues. That1 means that less than .004 percent of all companies make it to the illustrious list. To have such an impact, to build a company to a size where it can drive markets, requires something more. Sam Walton did not invent the low-cost shopping model. The five-and-dime variety store concept had existed for decades and Kmart and Target opened their doors the same year as Wal-Mart, in 1962. Discounting was already a $2 billion industry when Walton decided to build his first Wal-Mart. There was plenty of competition beyond Kmart and Target, some of it much better funded and with better locations and seemingly better opportunities for success than Wal-Mart. Sam Walton didn't even invent a better way of doing things than everyone else. He admitted to "borrowing" many, of his ideas about the business from Sol Price, the founder of Fed- Mart, a retail discounter founded in Southern California during the 1950s.
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