Sam Walton and Church Growth

SAM WALTON’S PRINCIPLES AND OUR CHURCH’S GROWTH:

Sam Walton died in April/92, after becoming one of the richest men in the States. He had extraordinary success in creating and building the Wal-Mart discount chain. The following are “Sam’s Rules for Building a Business”, in his own words:

RULE #1: Commit to your business. I think I overcame every single one of my personal shortcomings by the sheer passion I brought to my work.

RULE #2: Share your profits with all associates, and treat them as partners. In turn, they will treat you as a partner, and together you will all perform beyond your widlest expectations.

RULE #3: Motivate your partners. Money and ownership aren’t enough. ...Set high goals, encourage competition and then keep score.

RULE #4: Communicate everything you possibly can to your partners. The more they know, they more they’ll understand... Information is power and the gain you get from empowering your associates more that offsets the risk of informing your competitors.

RULE #5: Appreciate everything your associates do for the business... Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise.

RULE #6: Celebrate your successes. Find some humor in your failures. Don’t take yourself so seriously.

RULE #7: 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 customers - are the only ones who really know what’s going on out there.

RULE #8: Exceed your customers’ expectations. If you do, they’ll come back over and over.

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.

RULE #10: Swim upstrean... 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 guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 cannot support a discount store for very long.

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